1 - Desert Desire

Summary

POINT ZERO: THE DESERT AND MODERNITY

Scholarship across a range of disciplines has shown just how indebted our notions of the natural environment are to art and aesthetics. Work in ecocriticism over the past three decades has shown how Romanticism in particular contributed to an aestheticisation of nature that has influenced modern environmentalism in a number of decisive ways. The Romantic period's conceptions of the ‘picturesque’ were crucial to the emergence of modern environmental consciousness. Thinking critically about the environment would be an empty notion without the kinds of affective power manifest in the poems of Wordsworth. Timothy Morton, in a more polemical mode, has gone as far as to claim that many environmentalist notions of nature at work today remain, often unwittingly and sometimes perniciously, entangled in their Romantic origins:

the ‘thing’ we call nature becomes, in the Romantic period and afterward, a way of healing what modern society has damaged. Nature is like that other Romantic-period invention, the aesthetic. The damage done, goes the argument, has sundered subjects from objects, so that human beings are forlornly alienated from their world. Contact with nature, and with the aesthetic, will mend the bridge between subject and object.

But if the environmental consciousness of the modern West has been shaped, even to a harmful extent, by an aestheticisation of nature as a unifying ideal in opposition to industrial modernity then it is also true that this same consciousness has envisioned a world bereft of life, or one in which life is reduced to bare survival, as a correlate of this same ideal. ‘Green’ or hospitable nature has been, in part at least, an ideologico-aesthetic construct of modernity, but this has frequently depended on other kinds of constructions in which nature appears inhospitable to life. This is particularly the case if we shift our perspective from the local to the global. A text such as Byron's poem ‘Darkness’, for example, provides us with a total view of earthly life as devastated and the world as void. In a similar way, as Kelly Oliver suggests, anxieties about nuclear war and environmental destruction in the twentieth century produced both pop cultural fantasies of global annihilation and philosophical investigations of notions of Earth and world from the likes of Heidegger and Arendt.