- Good evening!
My name's Paul Robbins, I'm the director of
the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
here at the UW-Madison,
and it is an enormous honor to have been invited
to introduce tonight's speaker.
Jed Purdy wrote very recently
that this country, the United States,
is "a country whose environmental politics
"has always been Anthropocene,
"though often not self-consciously so."
And that, but that's an interesting thing to say.
It's interesting to say for at least three reasons,
which I think captures some of what's special
about Jed Purdy.
First, it's extremely,
it's a counterintuitive notion that the Anthropocene,
that name that we would give to a geologic era
formed by human beings, which calls upon us
for all of its novelty and all of its difference
and how different everything is,
the idea that it would be driven back
into the violent beginnings of American history
is counterintuitive, and it says something
very complicated in an extremely accessible way.
This is an accessible writer.
Two, it would take a pretty formidable reading
and understanding of American history to prove it.
(audience laughs) It would.
That history would have to hinge on a lot of legal
and policy history.
You'd have to know a lot about the law,
not just about American history, to get that right.
It would have to be rigorous,
accessible and rigorous.
And it's also an observation, I think,
that opens doors for new politics
because the Anthropocene politics
actually aren't all that new,
like it actually gives us space of possibilities,
like there's something we can do instead of gnash our teeth,
which makes it poignant, accessible, rigorous,
poignant.
Jedediah Purdy is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law
at the Duke University School of Law.
He holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School
and a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard College.
He's author of six books,
the first of which was written in 1999,
which must've been like the first year of your J.D.
(audience laughs)
I haven't read them, except this one.
They got great titles, including a 2009 Knopf title
"A Tolerable Anarchy."
That title alone is sending me home for some reading.
His 2015 book is the one I hold here,
"After Nature: Environmental Law, Politics, and the Ethics
of the Anthropocene," and I recommend it to everyone.
He has countless chapters, reviews, and essays,
especially in rigorous law journals,
the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review.
He's taught countless courses
at Duke University and elsewhere,
and if I was only allowed to take three of them,
they would be Past and Future of Capitalist Democracy,
- That's two semesters. (audience laughs)
- Well, I'd fail the first semester and
then I'd have an excuse
to take The Conversation of Law and History
and then his class on The Occupy Movement in 2012.
There's a lot here that I don't have to tell you about.
I think, well, some of the other things
that stand out are his popular essays and reviews.
He has written for The New Yorker, The Daily Beast,
The Huffington Post, accessibly.
And finally, he's got a lot of media appearances,
Morning Edition and The Connection
and Talk of the Nation, you know, lefty radio,
but also a lot of other outlets that I think we'd understand
to be extremely mainstream
and an important voice
for these complicated issues to the broader public.
I'll close by reading from the conclusion
of this terrific book, "After Nature,"
to speak to this question of poignancy
because he suggests that writing this legal history,
of a legal American environmental history, he suggests that
"people are best able to change their ways
"when they find two things at once in nature,
"something to fear and also something to love."
Now, "Either impulse," he says, "can stay the human hand,
"but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken.
"The second keeps the hand poised,
"extended in greeting or in offer of peace.
"This gesture is the beginning of collaboration,
"among people but also beyond us,
"in building our new home."
And that home, I take it, is the Anthropocene,
and I can't really think of a better architect.
Thank you and welcome Jed Purdy.
(audience applauds) (faint speaking)
- Wow, thanks for that really, really generous introduction.
Thank you to the people who brought me here,
and thank you to all of you who are,
who can't hear me.
(audience laughs)
I think we need a little more vocals in the mic maybe.
So it's obviously a, can you hear me now?
- No. - No, all right.
Oh, wait!
There's a button.
(audience laughs)
There we are.
So I really appreciate the generous introduction.
I also really appreciate the work people have done
to bring me here and all of you coming out on what feels,
from the perspective of North Carolina,
like a cold winter evening. (audience laughs)
It's also really great to be asked
and exciting to be asked to speak at Wisconsin.
Although I come to you from a law school,
the kind of thinking that I try to do,
in this book and elsewhere, would be much harder even
to imagine without the work of Bill Cronon,
whom I've admired for years
and whom it's touching to see here.
And behind him, people like Willard Hurst
and Charles Van Hise.
These names may not all be meaningful to all of you,
but they are people who've thought about the interplay
of landscape and law, humanity and the non-human world
in Wisconsin and at Wisconsin for a very long time.
So, I want to talk about
what we do when we look at a landscape,
though to speak of a part of the world as a landscape
is to consider it in a specific way,
as a terrain that's viewed,
that's seen and organized by the eye,
even, especially,
the mind's eye.
A landscape is a place
organized by the meanings it has for people,
and I'm going to talk about some of the ways
that our meanings form and organize landscapes.
The first,
we may understand
a landscape as an origin.
Famously,
nature,
nation,
native,
all have the same root,
birth, the place where life arises and renews itself.
And nature, in this sense, means the world,
viewed in light of its life-making powers,
the origin of each of us and every other living thing,
and, ultimately, of every thought
that we could have about it or about one another.
And by the same token,
nature is linked to nationalism,
to nativism,
and other doctrines that have been demanding our attention.
I want to start at this etymology,
this common root of words that name the very idea of roots,
because it's especially vexed and vexing.
The talking of origins is always partly fictional.
In a sense, because we're born of nature,
we come from the whole world.
In a sense, because we're born,
we're native to just one other person.
A nation,
with the same root,
is famously an imagined community,
a story about an us and a them,
a kind of story that's done a lot of harm
and is not finished doing harm.
So saying these things about how origins are fictional
and nations, like nature, are constructed
is easy in my generation of the academic humanities.
You might even say that it comes naturally,
that it's second nature to say it.
But I think there's something else also worth naming,
in the idea that a landscape of origin,
of your birth, where you're native,
is also your nature, who and how you are.
There's an image that people come to again and again
of being born from their terrain.
A few examples,
E.P. Thompson's great historical study,
"The Making of the English Working Class,"
is very nearly the antithesis
of picturesque landscape writing.
And nevertheless, the book has
a steady rhythm of place-names and terrain
that infuses, at least to me,
an earthborn quality into the human actions he details,
and once he comes out and says it.
Writing of Dan Taylor,
"a Yorkshire collier," a coal miner,
"who had worked in the pit from the age of five,
"who had been converted by the Methodists,"
who, still quoting Thompson, "built his own meeting-house,
"digging the stone out of the moors above Hebden Bridge
"and carrying on his own back"
and went on to walk
25,000 miles across England
to preach 20,000 sermons of low church radicalism.
And Thompson concludes,
"he came from neither the Particular
"nor the General Baptist Societies,
"spiritually, perhaps, he came from Bunyan's inheritance,"
that is Pilgrim's Progress,
but, still quoting, "but literally
"he just came out of the ground."
And here, is Wendell Berry, the Kentucky agrarian writer,
in an essay from the 1960s called "A Native Hill,"
that word again.
Berry writes of a place
"where his face is mirrored in the ground."
He imagines his own death and decay on his native hill
and concludes, "When I move to go,
"it is as if I rise up out of the world."
I could multiply examples,
but I think these will do enough
to get at the thought or feeling that I'm after here.
I'll come back to it.
Second, when they look at a landscape
as a record of wounds,
a landscape is also, is always partly
a place that is held in memory in a certain way.
The Polish-Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote,
"It's possible that there is no memory
but the memory of wounds."
And it's surely true that the way
a landscape memorializes us,
how it holds our memory,
is largely in the harm we do
in our use and habitation of it.
In the passage where Wendell Berry imagines rising
from the hill of his native land,
he also reflects that his path is several feet below
where he would once have walked and where he would walk
today if his ancestors had not cut the land in ways
that cost it all its topsoil.
The Appalachian hills where I grew up
are much steeper than his.
They're a beautiful place of wreckage.
Mature red oaks collapse with their roots out
because the soil is thin.
Gullies slash the hillsides
where people farmed sheep during World War One,
answering a lucrative demand for wool to make uniforms,
which was a very rare chance to turn that land into money.
The streams are sluggish and muddy
because all the topsoil has run through them
on the way to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
And that is nothing compared
with the condition of the coalfields,
just an hour's drive south,
and less if you know exactly where you're going.
You may know some of the basic facts
about mountaintop removal strip-mining,
which combines dynamite to blast mountains apart
with earth-moving equipment that can pick up 130 tons
of rubble at a bite.
You may know that the blasting lowers ridges
and mountaintops by as much as 600 feet
in a region where that is about the usual clearance
between valley and ridge.
You may have heard that 2,000
miles of headwater streams have been buried
under hundreds of feet of the resulting rubble
and that that 2,000 miles is a very conservative estimate,
that 500 individual mountains have been destroyed,
and that 1.4 million acres of native forest
have been cleared in the process.
Where mining has been,
the terrain is now something utterly different
from what it used to be.
A terrain dominated by steep hillsides has been replaced
by a mix of plateaus with remnant or reconstructed hillsides
that are shorter and blunter than before mining.
The most common pre-mining landform there
was a slope with a pitch of 28 degrees,
about as steep as the upper segments
of the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge
or similar bridges from the same period.
And today, the most common is a plain
with a slope of two degrees, that is, level but uneven.
Mining has filled a steep terrain
with pockets of nearly flat ground.
And what does this terrain show about us?
Henry Thoreau wrote about wild places,
that we go there, quote,
"to see our serenity reflected in them."
Continuing, "when we are not serene, we go not to them."
He was talking about the period when Boston was in turmoil
over the return of an enslaved man to the South
under the Fugitive Slave Act.
But what about when landscapes show back to us
a breaking of the land on a geological scale?
What we find there is ecological derangement.
And what can we say that it reflects of us?
It's partly because this question is unpleasant
that a third way of viewing landscapes has been so appealing
to many Americans.
This is a painterly view
of landscapes as instances of aesthetic ideals.
Viewed in this light,
we may catalog the qualities of landscapes
in the way that Frederick Law Olmsted did those
of Yosemite Valley, which, he wrote in the 1860s,
combined the following,
beauty,
the look of a welcoming, regular, gentle world
where you could feel at home,
and sublimity,
the wild, strange, even frightening extremity
of a world that was not made
for your comfort or safety at all,
that was vastly bigger than your powers
and maybe even bigger than your imagination.
These aesthetic principles were also psychological,
even spiritual principles.
They tuned your mind a certain way,
toward peace and calm
or toward inspiration and wonder.
If this is a painterly ideal, what's the brush?
Whoever made the world, whatever made the world,
of course, is one answer,
but another answer, also true,
is the law that picks out these places as special
and preserves and manages them according
to aesthetic principles.
In national parks, monuments, and wilderness areas,
the law has picked out hundreds of millions
of acres of land as the exemplary American nature,
the places where what's best in the world
reflects what's best in us, and the other way around.
In what may be the most widely read
of all his amazing and invaluable work,
Bill Cronon has taught now more than a generation
of scholars and students
that the ideal of the exemplary, nearly sacred place
is connected with the sacrifice of the fallen place.
In prizing what we prize, we also give ourselves license
to neglect or wreck what we do not
so that more than atmospheric carbon levels
connect Yosemite with the coalfields.
Parks and wilderness areas suggest a connection
between the more abstract and literary ideas
about the nature of nature
and why it matters to human beings,
and the most material facts about the world,
the landscapes that compose it.
The link between the two, which completes the circuit,
is often the law.
The circuit that law completes
is very clear when we're looking
at legislation as a kind of landscape architecture,
rather like the aristocratic gardens of England and France,
except that, as Frederick Law Olmsted emphasized,
Olmsted, again, in an 1864 report on Yosemite,
recommending its adoption as a state park in California,
here they should be thought of as parks for citizens,
not for aristocratic owners,
and for that reason they must be shaped
by a sovereign's power rather than a proprietor's.
But just as law can perform landscape architecture
when it has a very clear, painterly template,
in the same way it can shape other landscapes
in line with other ways of seeing.
So, for example, we might see a landscape in a fourth way,
as a stockpile of resources to use
for our utilitarian purposes.
And this is the way of seeing
that the U.S. Forest Service was created to implement
in the almost 200 million acres
of national forests that it manages,
an area almost the size of five Wisconsins.
This idea was very important to utilitarian reformers
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It was connected with ideas of the American nation
and the American state,
and the national forests dedicate terrain to the idea.
They make it real. They make it as real as dirt.
Or you might see a landscape
as ratifying a national mission and identity.
The idea was widespread in the early republic
that the world, by its nature,
belonged to the people who could make it bloom,
and blooming meant being economically productive,
according to the paradigm of the agriculture
and the commodity markets of northern Europe.
People who settled, timbered, and planted land
could become its owners.
Those who merely hunted or lived transient lands there
were not owners.
They passed over it like deer, the lawyers of the time said,
or like ships at sea.
All of this doctrine had the convenient effect of showing,
to the satisfaction of the demonstrators,
that Native Americans had never become,
legally or morally speaking, rooted in the place.
Only Europeans did that.
John Marshall,
the second chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court,
explained in one of the more candid treatments of this issue
that although the European claim to North America
offended one's sense of natural justice,
it had to prevail.
The alternative was to leave the continent a forest,
a wilderness, unowned, legally uninhabited.
The image of the continent
and the national mission it called forth
is, of course, intimately linked
with the expropriation and genocide of Native Americans.
And, contrary to certain historical images,
very little about the clearing and settlement
that it set in motion was spontaneous.
Much of American law in the first century of independence
was dedicated to converting frontier into private property.
Federal statutes offered a series of bargains.
You could become an owner, a proprietor,
by settling a place,
by cutting trees in forest land
or planting them in grassland,
by draining wetlands or irrigating drylands,
by mining valuable minerals
or, in some cases, simply gathering stone.
The key was to transform something
in a way that drew economic value from it
and brought it into the legal terms of ownership.
The landscapes we mostly know, personally,
the private land of the East and the Midwest,
began in these ways.
John Locke's famous parable,
that people made property by mixing their labor with nature,
happened again and again under the aegis of American law,
often enough via the labor of enslaved people.
In North Carolina, where I live now,
and in other Southern jurisdictions,
settlers could claim extra acres
for each body the law said they owned.
So a few points are emerging here.
One is that different kinds of landscapes are produced
by different kinds of legal landscape architecture.
Laws creating and managing parks
are only the most obvious example,
the way in, so to speak.
In fact, for every part of every landscape,
the soil, the trees and other plants,
the animals, the water,
the oil or gas or metals underground,
the law has said, in some respects,
what shall be done with it,
and, in every case, has said
who will make that decision.
The sum of these two questions,
what will be done and who decides what will be done,
is our collective,
often implicit landscape making,
whether it's the cathedrals
of Yosemite and Glacier that we make
or the geology of wreckage in the Appalachian coalfields,
which you can trace through property deeds,
the legislative compromises that produced
the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1978,
and the interpretation of the Clean Water Act
that allows the burial of streams
in disposing of mining rubble.
Not every way of seeing a landscape
corresponds to a legal regime
as neatly as the ones I've been discussing,
but when a way of seeing shapes a terrain,
when ideas and materiality rise and meet each other
in a changing landscape,
law is often the circuit that links them.
A second point is that,
although I have been naming a landscape
to instance each way of seeing,
every landscape in which people have taken an interest
is also a landscape of conflict.
They're cross-cut by competing visions and narratives.
In Appalachia, for instance, my way of telling the story
will run up against another
in which the survival of coal mining
against environmentalist intrusion is heroic self-defense.
And as recently as the 1970s,
there was a third narrative there,
advanced by the insurgent labor movement,
the Miners for Democracy,
which held that miners should work
in a way that preserved their own health
and the health of the land,
and should strike
when they were asked to dig coal in ways that either
threatened to give workers black lung
or trapped them in mine collapses,
or promised to destroy streams and mountains.
Now that version of the coalfields is gone,
along with most of the power of its union,
the United Mine Workers,
and the meaning of this land is split between two poles.
From one, the sacrifice of a region for a few decades
of marginally cheaper energy is one of the great pieces
of environmental injustice in our age.
From the other, the victims of environmental injustice
are the miners themselves, expelled from their work,
much as farmers were expelled from the land
that became the Shenandoah National Park nearby,
a few hours to the east of the coalfields.
I don't share the second view.
I think it's ill-founded,
but I don't find it mysterious.
By the way, I never use slides,
so my fingers are figuring out how to use them.
(audience chuckles)
The lecture is about the words always,
but I felt, in this case, that some images would help.
In some landscapes,
the lines of conflict--
Actually, I'm not going to talk about those
because we need the time.
The conflict that I'm talking about here
is not just notional or metaphoric.
These overlapping, competing landscapes
have their constituencies,
people invested in certain ways
of relating to the natural world,
in the ways they make a living,
but also at the level of identity.
To take an extreme example, those militia types
who occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge
in Southeastern Oregon last spring
were carrying forward the view that land really belongs
to those who work it and make it productive.
Their beef was with the visions and laws
of each ensuing generation,
with federal land managers,
with romantic aficionados of undisturbed beauty,
and, of course, with ecologists who can explain
how cattle grazing harms the waterways
where migratory birds rest in the Malheur.
These landscapes are overburdened with conflicting uses,
conflicting laws, conflicting meanings,
and sometimes the lines of tension snap.
These landscapes of conflict, it seems to me,
are very concrete expressions
of something that is often said in grandly abstract terms,
that the world has entered a new geological era,
which some earth scientists and others call
the Anthropocene, the epoch of humanity.
I think the Anthropocene idea
is best broken down into two ideas,
which are distinct but entangled together.
First is the Anthropocene condition,
the intensity and pervasiveness of human influence
on the world's biological and chemical orders,
which means that, from here forward,
the world we inhabit will be the world we have made,
shared with the other life
that we've valued enough to preserve it,
on the landscapes that match our visions,
or, as with the coalfields and, in some respects,
with every climate-changed place,
our unspoken priorities,
even if not the ideas many of us would stand up to claim.
Second, is the Anthropocene insight,
the recognition that all these competing ideals of nature
and the human place in it are cultural creations,
ways that we've learned to see and to be,
and, usually, ways of arguing
about our political, economic and cultural lives
as much as about the non-human world.
Once we've peeled away the layers
of human activity that shape these landscapes
and appreciated the many angles of vision
from which they can make sense,
there's no avoiding that they are Anthropocene landscapes.
What else could they be, as long as we are in them?
And what, then, could be the value
of imagining that you rise from a piece of land,
continuous somehow with its spirit and meaning,
the idea of a landscape as an origin,
the place where I began this lecture?
I'd like to return to that idea now,
but along a different path,
by thinking of a landscape not as an origin exactly
but, in one sense, the opposite, as a sanctuary,
a place
of respite and reprieve,
not the place where you come from,
but the place you flee to.
"Without wilderness," said Senator Frank Church of Idaho,
debating the Wilderness Act of 1964,
"Without wilderness, this country would become a cage."
"We need a place," Thoreau had written
more than a century earlier,
"where we feel our limits transgressed,"
a place outside villages and subdivisions.
This was something,
this idea of the outside,
the outside of everything as a kind of sanctuary,
an alternative inside,
that enslaved people understood
when they escaped into the Great Dismal Swamp
at the border of North Carolina and Virginia,
and established long-lasting settlements there
with furtive ties to the solid ground
where they would have quickly been reclassified as property.
It was apparent to the peoples of highland Southeast Asia
who resisted domination by lowland empires
for many centuries,
a story Jim Scott tells in "The Art of Not Being Governed,"
a study in geographic imagination
that puts the upland margins of empire
at the center of a counter-imperial picture of history.
I have my own way of thinking about this question,
which, as it happens,
I developed while thinking about a series of dreams
that I began having a few years ago.
In these dreams, I start walking up a wooded slope,
and here the dreams depart
from the low terrain of the Carolina Piedmont where I live.
In the dreams, the slope rises and rises,
through the loblolly pine into steep pastures,
which level out into high meadows
and then rise again to crests of stone.
Sometimes there's no stone.
The meadows are the top.
They slope along a broad ridge line,
or they may be just a couple hundred
vertical feet of pasture
with a little mix of beech and oak tufting on top.
Only waking destroys my new geography.
And when I wake up, my sense that the dream
has identified something real is so strong
that I've more than once looked up topographic maps
just to see whether the hills I've dreamed
are actually there,
which, of course, they're not.
I think the wish these dreams express
is for a way to get above a terrain without leaving it,
to merge many small horizons
into one image.
These dreams sketch a geography of thinking,
a way of seeing a place whole without leaving it.
Of course, my dream landscape
is not the only geography of thinking.
It's the one that you might carry if you had grown up
where I did, in a very specific Appalachian landscape.
From any place that people lived there,
you could escape on foot to a higher spot.
Every settled place contained its own upward exits.
It was really not one landscape but two,
a pattern of valleys called hollows
with its counterpart in a second pattern of ridges.
The pair of terrains were joined
by steep, mainly wooded hillsides,
and knowing the valleys did not mean you knew the ridges.
A slight misstep setting off from a high place
could land you in an unintended valley
with unexpected people and miles by the valley roads
from where you meant to be.
The two landscapes had complementary logic,
and moving between them took caution and attention.
That's a landscape that gives its dissidents
an upward path to escape on foot, at least for a while,
and that lends its critics a commanding view of its shape.
It's not a safe or certain landscape,
and moving across it can always exact
the price of confusion,
the likelihood of still walking the wrong way
when night comes.
So with this image in mind, let's return for a minute
to those opening images of a landscape as a point of origin.
Take E.P. Thompson, whose radical coal miner
literally came from the ground as Thompson says.
Actually, everything in Thompson's story
feels as if it came from the ground
and had some sense of it clinging to the defining acts
of the radicals whose stories he tells.
Without saying so, not more than once anyway,
Thompson manages to conjure up that most un-Marxist
and un-academic thought,
that the land itself was somehow aligned
with the populist and radical ancestors of English socialism
and that its defining chemistry, color, and scent
were present in the moments of their decisive acts,
that the land was a friend to its own dissenters.
Berry, too, wants the land to be with him in his dissent,
dissent from what he called
in the title of his most famous book,
"The Unsettling of America,"
the separation of identity from place,
pleasure from work, eating from knowledge.
These claims of nativity
are really bids for sanctuary,
for a piece of ground where the higher,
not the higher, let's say the larger,
the larger logic of the world does not entirely rule,
a seedbed for your dissent.
What else are people getting at when they say,
"They tried to bury us,
"they didn't know we were seeds"?
Imagine a terrain where that's true.
Thoreau wrote in his journal,
around the same time that he was engaging Massachusetts's
dispute over the Fugitive Slave Act's enforcement,
that it was a "maimed and imperfect nature"
that he was "conversant with."
For someone who went into the landscape
to see himself reflected,
that's a strong piece of self-knowledge.
Walking to the ponds, as he put it,
was never a return to something pristine.
It was, like politics,
a way of joining in with a record of damage
and of conceits and fantasies
that have turned to material facts,
which then have to be inhabited.
The violence of nationalism and of nativism,
to return to those words,
is partly in their denial of these realities,
the realities of imperfection,
of conflict, of multiplicity, of inherited damage,
their torrid fantasy of a terrain
that is theirs and no one else's,
that's home to their meaning and no other.
The violence gets more concrete, of course,
in detention centers and airports and the building of walls,
but some of it belongs to the very idea
that any place in the world could belong to and ratify
just one way of being in it.
A landscape that sides with its dissenters,
like a historical narrative or a constitutional culture
that prizes its dissidents and outsiders,
may be a resource for a certain productive
ethical ecology and political ecology
between self-restraint and self-assertion,
at least for people like me
whose minds are already and always
bent toward terrain.
In landscapes whose meaning is as crowded
and conflictual as ours,
there's room, at least, for strange kinds of dissent
and for unexpected kinds of consciousness.
When I finish a reflection like this one,
I feel, like Berry or like E.P. Thompson's miner,
that I'm recollecting myself,
rising up from the ground
and reborn into my usual consciousness.
We might ask this question about any little
ecological trip like this one, any sojourn
into the question of nature, nativity and place.
The question is does it make the question,
does it make the issue of how to live among other people
seem simpler or seem more complicated?
If it makes it seem simpler,
maybe we should mistrust where we've been.
If it makes the question feel more complicated,
then we might, for the moment, be doing something right,
no matter how difficult making sense of it may be.
Thank you very much for joining me,
and I'm delighted to discuss
the themes of this lecture or anything else with you.
(audience applauds)