21
RESCUING LADY NATURE
‘country life’ are such parochial European rural disasters as the Spanish
Inquisition, European witch burning, Eastern European Pogroms, and U.S.
plantation slavery—atrocities that often took place within pastoral, ‘natural’
rural contexts.
In turn, while much contemporary ecological discussion portrays the city
as a center of industry, pollution, and social alienation, it has also represented a
haven of social freedom. Out of the broken ties to family and village, came as
well the opportunity to encounter new ideas and liberties. It is within cities that
many social movements have emerged over the centuries, providing a refuge
for those who were not always accepted within parochial rural villages such as
Jews,
Gypsies,
intellectuals,
secularists,
anarchists,
artists,
and
sexual
non-conformists. While rural life undeniably offers the potential for close
community ties and a closer tie to the land, it can also prove hospitable to
xenophobia, social conformity, and parochialism.
Despite the heterogeneity of categories of ‘city5 and ‘country’, there still
exists a strong rural bias within ecological discourse. For example, a generic
description of ‘ecotopia’ is primarily located within a rural environment. The
inhabitants of that imagined ecotopia are usually wholesome, able-bodied,
white, and heterosexual. These taken-for-granted associations latent within
popular consciousness are often shared particularly by European descendants
raised within industrialized capitalist societies that define ‘nature’ in opposition
to society and the evil town in opposition to the wholesome country. Rarely
would one imagine the ‘ecological subjecf to be a Puerto Rican lesbian in the
Lower East Side of Manhattan, a poor disabled man of color in Chicago, or a
Jew in Brooklyn, for ecology is* primarily defined in opposition to the urban
subject. The predominantly urban identity of such progressive movements such
as feminism, lesbian and gay liberation, civil rights, and labor movements,
renders feminists, queers, Jews, people of color, and urban workers as
incongruent with white middle-class Wholesome’ understandings of ‘ecology’.
Implicit within the rural bias which marks much ecological discussion, is
a reactionary nostalgia for the goodness of ‘the simple life’ of the past. Today,
the old guy on the Quaker’s Oatmeal commercial suggests that living simply is
“the right thing to do.” An Emersonian nature romanticism wafts through the
air, informing us that all we need is a simple house, a good book, and a
chestnut or two to roast on the fire. It is time, we are told, to end our years of
debauchery, time to budde down. The family is re-romanticized as in the
fifties, babies are ‘in’ and ‘family values’ must be restored.
This
romantic rurally biased
‘conservationism’
smacks
of political
conservatism. A recent ad put out by Geo says, “In the future, more people will
lead simpler lives, protect the environment, rediscover romance and...get to
know Geo.” The full-page ad presents a black-and-white photograph of a