INTRODUCTION
9
transcend those constraints by creating a more radical understanding of both
nature and desire. I have come to believe that it is crucial for society to
become aware of the ways in which ecological ideas are informed by
qualitative questions of desire and longing, a desire that must be approached
in a social rather than individualistic direction if true political transformation is
to occur.
To challenge previous ecological thinking is not merely a matter of
arguing that the approaches taken by radical ecologists have been politically
biased or socially constructed. What is necessary is not to criticize previous
thinking for being a product of history, but to understand the historical
processes which have produced such thinking in order to create new ways of
conceptualizing ecological change. A critical discussion of ‘ecological thinking’
is particularly crucial today because, as I have just mentioned, a major
tendency in the U.S. ecology movement has been to polarize questions of
reason and emotion so that ecological yearning for such ideas as ‘wilderness,’
‘community’, or animal liberation are often understood as lying outside the
domain of rational reflection and discourse. Too often, ecology has become a
thing to ‘feel’ rather than a thing to ‘think’ as well.
In this book, I have tried to transcend this binary between thinking and
feeling to create an understanding of ‘informed desire’. I believe that we do not
degrade the integrity of our desires, be they spiritual or aesthetic, by
understanding their origins and implications. I also believe that our thinking is
of little value if our thoughts do not move us to take compassionate and
political action to improve the lives of other people and of the planet.
Ultimately, I believe that a desire informed by an appreciation of history,
politics, and ethics can help us to look critically and passionately at how to
solve the social and ecological problems that we face today.
Of the many thinkers I have read, there are four who, for me, most
exemplify the ability to synthesize reason and passion. For each of these
thinkers, there is one work that inspired me to write this book: first,
Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin; second, an essay written by
Audre Lorde called “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”; third, the
chapter “The First Bond” in Jessica Benjamin’s book The Bonds of Love; and
fourth, a short poetic essay by James Baldwin entitled “The Creative Process.” 1
I point to these pieces as a way to illustrate the sources of a few of the
many threads I have knitted together in an attempt to develop a new
understanding of the ‘desire for nature’. I am teetering on the shoulders of
these great thinkers—one a natural and political philosopher, one a feminist
poet and theorist, another a feminist psychoanalytic theorist, and yet another, a
novelist and essayist—trying to perhaps bring together pieces of myself that I
can in turn, integrate toward a new understanding of the questions I pose in