RESCUING LADY NATURE
17
believe we would be likely to buy. The less we know about rural life, for
instance, the more we desire it Ideas of ‘nature’, a blend of notions of exotic
‘wilderness’ and ‘country living’, form a repository for dreams of a desirable
quality of life. So many of us long wistfully for a life we have never lived but
hope to find someday on vacation at a Disneyfied ‘jungle safari’ or glittering
sweetly inside a bottle of Vermont Made maple syrup.
Murray Bookchin, creator of the theory of social ecology, said years ago
that the more the rural dissolves into poverty, development, and agribusiness,
the more we would see romantic images of the rural in the medial Sure
enough, in the 1990s, just as the family farm crisis peaked, commercials and
magazine ads were suddenly riddled with rural images: Grandfathers were
everywhere, rocking on rustic porches, uttering wise platitudes regarding the
goodness of oat-bran. Red-cheeked kids began running down dirt roads after a
day of hard wholesome play in the country, ready for Stove-Top Stuffing. And
just as the Vermont family dairy farm began to vanish in the early eighties,
“Ben and Jerry” bought the rights to the Woody Jackson cow graphic,
transforming the Holstein cow logo into the sacred calf of Vermont,
The tendency to idealize nature is often accompanied by the desire to
protect a ‘nature’ that is portrayed as weak and vulnerable. Each year on Earth
Day, an epidemic of tee-shirts hits the stores depicting sentimental images of
‘nature’. One shirt in particular presents an image of a white man’s hands
cradling a soft bluish ball of earth. Huddled around the protective hands,
stands a lovable crowd of characteristically wide-eyed, long-lashed, feminine
looking deer, seals, and birds. Under the picture, written in a child-like scrawl,
reads the caption, ‘love Your Mother.” The message is clear: nature is ideal,
chaste, and helpless- as a baby girl. We must save ‘her’ from the dragon of
‘every man’.
'
-
Ironically, this romantic posture toward nature often promotes an
uncompassionate portrayal of the causes of ‘nature’s woes’. The desire to
protect nature often conceals the underlying desire to control and denigrate
marginalized peoples. For example, during the late 1980s, members of several
radical ecology groups were called to task for attributing environmental
problems to over-population and immigration. The Earth First! journal has
consistently over the years advertised a sticker that reads ‘love Your Mother,
Don’t Become One.” Paradoxically, the same radical ecologists who express a
romantic desire for ‘Mother Earth’, also suggest that mothers themselves are to
blame for the denigration of nature. In the name of ‘protecting mother earth’,
Third World women are reduced to masses of faceless bodies devouring the
scarce resources of the world. Meanwhile Gaia, the idealized mother herself,
sits elevated on her galactic pedestal awaiting knightly protection from
women’s insatiable wombs.