[PEN-L:7373] Re: Donald Worster on William Cronon

[Peter Dorman <dormanp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Worster's comments are interesting.  I agree that the westward expansion
of capitalism is portrayed as inexorable in NATURE'S METROPOLIS, but
that may be historically accurate.  At the very least, one would have to
say that the forces impelling this movement were extremely powerful and
unlikely to have been overcome at the time.  Were there any branching
points during the mid-nineteenth century at which history could easily
have taken a very different turn?  I don't see the permanent part,
however.  Some chapter & verse would help.

As for "green capitalist", here I'm really in doubt.  There are hints of
this in the forest chapter, where Cronon suggests that timber
capitalists could and should have been aware of the impending exhaustion
of northern forests.  But his chapter on grain is extremely radical, I
think, in the way it demonstrates the backward and forward pressures for
standardization in grain as the capitalist agricultural system
establishes itself.  It doesn't take much ecological imagination to see
what this means for biodiversity, local adaptation, etc.  No, Cronon
doesn't spell this out, but I can live with that.  The big lesson is
that the "homogeneous goods" of micro theory do not appear in nature;
they have to be created, often at violence to the social and natural
environment.

By the way, insofar as there is a clear left-right split in
environmentalism, Cronon is on the left.  Here's how I see it:  On one
side are those who see environmental preservation as setting limits to
human exploitation of nature.  They think in terms of "how much
pollution is too much", and they favor strategies to set aside
wilderness areas as refuges from human interference.  Such people can be
found in all mainstream groups.  On the other side are those who want to
change the relationship of human beings to their natural environment, to
change the ways nature is "used" and not just the extent.  They propose
different settlement patterns, clean production (pollution prevention),
community-level environmental rights, and habitat preservation that
extends beyond formally defined wilderness (people can use these lands
but only in ways consistent with habitat maintenance).  I see this as
right-left because one side proposes only to put a fence around
capitalism, so to speak, where the other would transform or dismantle
it.

Cronon is on the left because of his "humanist" position.  He rejects
the idealization of nature as Other.  Like Leopold (who he venerates in
print), his land ethic is about how to live on the land, not how to
admire it on the weekends.  If the nature we get is the one we create
through our mode of production (CHANGES IN THE LAND), then the land
ethic is also a political-economic stance.  His rhetoric on this point
is vague and slippery, but it seems to me to be the logical consequence
of his analytical work.

Peter

Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> [These are some comments from him that I received a while back that I doubt
> he'd mind being made public]
>
> Dear Mr. Proyect,
>
> Thanks for you message and generous words about my book.  The book
> Cockburn apparently was citing is my *An Unsettled Country: Changing
> Landscapes of the American West*, published by the University of New
> Mexico Press in 1994.  See especially the essay, "Other Nations, Other
> Lives."
>
> I have not written a critique of Bill Cronon's *Nature's Metroplis* and if
> I did, would have to say there is a lot in it that I admire and find
> useful.  He does not strike me as dogmatic Marxist.  If anything, I think
> his position is closer to the "green capitalist" position than Marx.  He
> does present the sweep of capitalism as inexorable and permanent, and he
> does not suggest strongly enough (except in the Great Lakes forest
> chapter) the ecological problems that followed capitalistic agriculture.
> But he does criticize the capitalists for their dehumanizing or
> exploitative treatment of Chicago workers, etc.
>
> Well, I would be interested in hearing more of your critique of the book.
> Perhaps I have missed a few things.
>
> Don Worster
>
> ====
>
> Well, now if you are talking about Cronon's controversial stance on
> wilderness, I have written something relevant--not very substantial but
> still relevant.  See my essay "The Wilderness of History" in *Wild Earth*,
> vol. 7, no. 3, Fall 1997.
>
> Bill and I may disagree over whether "humanism" is an adequate moral basis
> for environmental ethics.  We've not had that discussion, but I suspect it
> is a divergence.
>
> And it probably makes me divergent from the CNS group, Jim O'Connor
> included.
>
> But in a country where everything comes to a halt over whether one
> particular politician screwed a 21 year old woman, after repeated
> rubbings (a temptation most of the Senate would fail to resist), I don't
> suppose it matters a whole lot whether "humanism" or "ecocentrism" is
> where we aim in our relations with the earth.
>
> These days, so long as somebody is at least taking notice of the natural
> world and its condition, I am their ally and friend.
>
> Don Worster
>
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)