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A Look at Another Way to Assess Our Relationship to the Environment by Li Yu |
One of my favorite books is Ursula K. LeGuin's The Farthest Shore, the last part of her Earthsea trilogy. I first read it a year ago, and have returned to it several times since. The series is supposedly for young adults, hardly prime reading material for a junior here like me. Yet I've found each re-reading worthwhile, for every time I do so I find myself captivated by the power of LeGuin's allegory.
The story is quite simple. Ged, the arch-mage of Earthsea and dragon-lord (one who has the power to face dragons as equals), sets out to determine the reason behind the disappearance of magic in the islands, accompanied by a young prince, Arren. After many an adventure, they learn that the loss of magic and other arts is the doing of another mage, Cob. Cob, in seeking to escape death and live on forever, has rent a hole in the shroud that separates the world of the living and the dead. The hole, as Ged and Arren learn, is bleeding the world dry of magic and the arts, and individuals hollow of their identities, as all seek to escape death by avoiding life. Whereupon, Ged and his companion seek out the mage and patch together the chasm.
Sounds familiar, perhaps like something out of Tolkein or a thousand other fantasy books, right? Here you are wrong. The difference lies in the most striking metaphor presented by LeGuin. It is we, the humanity at the present day and age (or perhaps a score years ago) that is represented by the antagonist. We-the beneficiaries of Prometheus-are those who seek to "have the sea grow still and the tides cease just to save one wave, to save ourselves." In our pursuit of comfort and safety, how often do we ponder upon what we have sacrificed? How much a resemblance, I wonder, do we bear to the evil mage, Cob, who forsook his name and identity to avoid death.
What, you may wonder, does all this have to do with the environment and the human conditions (or anything at all). To see the connection, we should first turn to how we define ourselves as human beings. Our freedom, to create and to change the world, defines us today (or anytime since the Enlightenment, speaking broadly). To paraphrase Marx, it is our ability to create ourselves in our constant recreating of the environment that distinguishes us from creatures in nature. In this sense, there is no intrinsic value to protecting the environment, as nature is important to us only insofar as we can change it to our ends. According to this vein of thought, all environmental debates should be of the practical nature, i.e. which use of natural resources will generate the most utility for us while incurring the least amount of waste for future generations.
Fair enough, but let's delve into the idea of freedom once more and ask LeGuin's question again (if you are willing to bear with me a moment more). Is our conception of freedom, as the ability to manipulate and transform nature, a product of our valor and judgment? Or is it rather a result of our fear, the fear of death and the uncertainties of life? We are part of nature. But nature is not part of us, as its grand course will remain unchanged, regardless of all our hopes. Therefore, we fear it. To mask this fear, however, we invent the current notion of freedom, setting nature and ourselves in dichotomy, thus forever alienating ourselves from the surroundings. In this scheme, we are only free when we can assert some control over nature.
This definition of freedom is a flawed one, however, for it is based upon both our fear of nature and our hopes of ultimate control over it. These two inter-linked premises make for ill support. Our fear of nature, as we have seen, springs from the recognition of our inability to control it. We all march down the path toward an inevitable end, after all, despite our dreams of immortality. True freedom lies in our recognition of the fact of our limited nature. It should, thereforem, be sought in situating us as part of nature, and conquering our fears of it. Only then can we truly embark upon a path blazed by valor and courage. As for the practical consequence of this conclusion, perhaps it is this: instead of seeing the environment as an object that we can manipulate at our will, let us instead see ourselves in our rightful place as a part of it and make our actions reflect this.