The Abstract Wild by Jack Turner

Author:Jack Turner [Turner, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780816547395
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

the blue sky

the blue sky

The Blue Sky

is the land of

OLD MAN MEDICINE BUDDHA

where the eagle

that flies out of sight,

flies.11

IV

Traveling to that conference last winter, I found the approach to Seattle from the east to be infinitely sad. Looking down at those once beautiful mountains and forests, so shaved and mowed down they look like sores, I didn’t care if the land below was public or private, if the desecration was efficient or inefficient, cost beneficial, or subsidized, whether the lumber products were sent to Japan or used to build homes in Seattle. I was no longer interested in that way of looking at the world. Increasingly, I am a barbarian in the original sense of the Greek word—one who has trouble with the language of civilization. So, slowly and reluctantly, I am burning bridges to the past, all the while noticing, as if in penance, that the ideas and abilities of a trained pedant follow close as shadows.

A passage from an obscure journal by the philosopher Nelson Goodman often occupies my mind. “For me, there is no way which is the way the world is; and so of course no description can capture it. But there are many ways the world is, and every true description captures one of them.”12

The universe we can know is a universe of descriptions. If we find we live in a moral vacuum, and if we believe this is due in part to economic language, then we are obligated to create alternatives to economic language. Old ways of seeing do not change because of evidence; they change because a new language captures the imagination. The progressive branches of environmentalism—defined by an implacable insistence on biodiversity, wilderness, and the replacement of our current social grid with bioregions—have been sloughing off old ideas and creating one of many possible new languages.

Emerson started the tradition by dumping his Unitarian vocabulary and writing “Nature” in language that restored nature’s sacredness. Thoreau altered that vocabulary further and captured our imagination. The process continues with the labor of poets, deep ecologists, and naturalists. It is not limited to radical environmentalism, however; it includes many who are only partially sympathetic to the radical cause. Michael Pollan, for example, tells us in Second Nature that science has proposed some new descriptions of trees as the lungs of the Earth. And radical economist Thomas Michael Power suggests in The Economic Pursuit of Quality that “economy” might be extended beyond commerce. The process is enforced when Charles F. Wilkinson, in The Eagle Bird, suggests changes in the language of law that would honor our surrender to the beauty of the world and of emotion.

Imagine extending the common in “common good” to what is common to all life—the air, the atmosphere, the water, the processes of evolution and diversity, the commonality of all organisms in their common heritage. Imagine extending “community” to include all the life forms of the place that is your home. Imagine “accounting” in its original sense: to be accountable. What does it

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