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ABSTRACT
Environmental thought and action: pre-modern
and post-modern
DENIS COSGROVE
Reader in Geography, Department of Geography, University of technology, Loughborough
LE11 3TU
Revised MS received 8 February, 1990
The paper notes certain features of the post-modern debate within geography and in science generally: the crisis of
foundationalism and the revision of geographical historiography. It draws parallels between these and aspects of natural
philosophy at the opening of the modern period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A progressive
historiography of geographical science is challenged and the continued significance of analogical and metaphorical
understanding particularly in relation to visual images, is discussed. Specific attention is paid to the uses of mathematics
and geometry treated metaphorically, and to the relations between poesis and techne as morally distinct but related modes of
human interaction with the natural world. The revival in recent years of many features of late Renaissance scientific debates
is examined through the work of some feminist and neo-romantic authors.
KEY WORDS: History of geography, Environmentalism, Post-modernism, Feminism, Metaphor, Geometry, Synchronicity
INTRODUCTION
. . . Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern
Can words of music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end
And all is always now. (T. S. Eliot: Burnt Norton)
This paper is a commentary on two features of contem-
porary thought in science generally and in geography
in particular. These are the collapse of foundation-
alism now widely proclaimed in post-modem
writings, and revisions in the historiography of
Western science, revisions now affecting our writing
of the history of geography (Dear, 1988; Harvey,
1989; Livingstone, 1988). These two features are
closely related Failure of belief in the possibility of
constructing a meta-theory for both natural and social
science and of a corresponding scientific meta-
language allowing transparent representation of
reality inevitably puts into question the validity of
Modernist models of progressive historical change.
Radical doubt about the possibility of establishing
epistemological foundations to scientific enterprise is
equally challenging to positivist, Marxist and histor-
icist forms of explanation. By the same token it ques-
tions the accepted historiography of geography,
traditionally constructed on the same foundations as
the history of western science generally: as a pro-
gressive movement from ignorance to enlightenment
about the globe, its environments and peoples. Both of
these features of contemporary thought bear heavily
upon the post-modern debate in geography, but it is
the former that has received the greater attention,
while the implications of a revised history of
geography for present debate are only now being
explored.
By speaking of post-modernism we imply a closure,
an end point to the loosely-bounded historical and
geographical epoch we call the Modern era. This
originated in the European Renaissance and Scientific
Revolution and spread, with its characteristic
features of the capitalist world market, mechanical
and biological technology and individualism, across
the entire globe by the third quarter of the twentieth
century. Those who seek to give precision to the end
of Modernism vary in their choice of dates between
the early 1960s and the mid-1970s (Punters, 1988).
trans. Inst. Br. Geogr, N.S. 15: 34-.358 (1990) ISSN; 0020-2754 Printed in Great Britain
Environmental thought and action 345
Some would challenge the whole idea of epochal
change, preferring to see recent movements as merely
the latest chapter in a continuing Modernist epic
(Harvey, 1989). Here I point to evidence that we are
indeed describing anew the outlines of the world,
making a new world of meaning through altered
modes of representation but that the novelty of the
enterprise may be deceptive. Unlike Harvey (1989), I
regard such alterations in representational modes as
significant but, as I shall demonstrate, some aspects of
contemporary representation are very old indeed.
What I intend here is a commentary on the
Modem period, not so much by examining it directly,
as by drawing attention to some parallels between
the intellectual and representational modes of the
periods immediately preceding and following
Modernism. My argument is that both in the later
sixteenth century-immediately preceding the
Scientific Revolution, and in the closing decades of
the twentieth century-following the scientific and
intellectual contributions of relativity and psycho-
analysis, there have been serious attempts to collapse
Modernist distinctions between spirit and matter,
humans and nature, subject and object, poesis and
techne. In both cases understanding is constituted
neither in solely operational, nor entirely speculative
terms, but rather through the construction of meta-
phor and image by individuals actively embracing the
materiality of the world, recognizing the necessity of
mechanical intervention in transforming nature, but
refusing to be ruled by the materialist and mechanical
vision of Modernism. Metaphor and image are con-
ceived not as surface representations of a deeper truth
but as a creative intervention in making truth In each
case, the place of humans in nature and their manipu-
lation of the natural world, primary geographical
issues, are central to the debate.
Initially I make some comments on metaphor, fol-
lowed by an outline of the defining features of what I
shall call Renaissance environmentalism (environmen-
talism in the sense of a recognition that the whole
being of humans is integrally linked to the vital being
of environing nature). I indicate the place of math-
ematical, mechanical and theatrical metaphors in rep-
resenting this world view. These bear upon attitudes
to human intervention in the natural world. A brief
comment on the Modernist discomfort with such
metaphorical discourse allows us to remark upon its
recent revival in two strands of post-modern thinking
which adopt a universalist rather than a nihilist
position: green environmentalism and feminism. The
attention each gives to relations between humans and
the natural world has significant implications for
geography as an environmental science.
Geography, science and the uses of metaphor
One expression of recent change in geographical
thinking is the shift from biological and cybernetic
models of environmental and spatial organization like
organism or system, to metaphors derived from the
arts like spectacle, theatre and text (Society and
Space, 1988; Cosgrove & Daniels, 1989). This
suggests more than simply a casual reselection of
spatial and environmental metaphors, and moves
beyond open acknowledgement of the inherently
perspectival nature of all scientific discourse. The shift
in metaphor threatens to depart from its Aristotelian
sense of the displaced use of a representation or word
which could otherwise truthfully capture an aspect of
reality. Such catachresis has always been necessary if
science was to deploy ordinary language to rep-
resent the findings furnished by its empirical perspec-
tive. In some respects post-modernism promotes the
evocative sense of metaphor as that which lies
between fact and idea. The metaphor may thus pic-
ture or represent an understanding which must other-
wise remain unarticulated: what metaphor names
may transcend human understanding so that our
language cannot capture it. In this sense discussions
of metaphor have rightly stressed its power to con-
nect, associate and gather together; metaphor would
thus seem to be a force tending towards unity(Harries,
1979, p. 72). Metaphor is closely aligned in this usage
to the visual image which gives appearance to some:
thing not in itself apparent, except that the referen-
tiality of language makes for greater theoretical
density in verbal images. Scientific discourse has
always been metaphorical in the Aristotelian sense,
but has proclaimed a privileged truth for its meta-
phors or models in representing reality. The rejection
of foundationalism in post-modern writings implies a
relativity in which the competing claims of different
representations cannot be evaluated (Harding 1986;
Harvey, 1989). Acceptance of pure perspectivism
opens the door, at least in thought, to transcendance
of its own limits, to metaphysics and thus to the
collapse of clear distinctions between science and
poetics (Harries, 1979).
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY
ENVIRONMENTALISM
The Cartesian distinction between spirit and matter
so central to Modernist epistemology has as its
346
DENIS COSGROVE
corollaries the principles of action by contact and the
denial of occult cause (sack, l980). It seeks to restrict
metaphor as a legitimate mode of scientific investi-
gation and expression, favouring measurement, cal-
culation and quantification as generators of certainty
in the scientific investigation of the material world.
The story of how the grounds for this epistemology
were laid in the studies of planetary motion from
Copernicus through Brahe, Galileo, Kepler and
Newton is familiar to us all, as is the resulting analogy
of the created universe as a great mechanical clock
whose parts move and coordinate with an incessant
regularity in the silence of an inanimate void Viewed
from the perspective of the progressive historiogra-
phy of Modernism, it is tempting to regard Cartesian
epistemology and Newtonian cosmology as the inevi-
table outcome of the age of European celestial and
terrestrial discovery. That it was not necessarily so
simple is indicated by what historians of science have
recently revealed of attachment to concepts of
universal sympathy, harmony and correspondence
on the part of thinkers like Copernicus, Kepler and
Newton (Vickers, 1984; Debus, 1978).
A debate continues over the extent to which an
older monist and often occult view of nature with
its characteristic combination of practical tech-
nology and alchemy, astrology and magic, helped
or hindered the emergence of Modernist science
and technology. Questions centre on whether such
thought merely faded before the compelling light
of Modern technology and causal explanation, or
was actively suppressed for ideological and political
reasons in favour of the new ways (Wright, 1975;
Thomas, 1983; Hill, 1983). Recent writing expresses
a baffled but increasingly resigned acknowledge-
ment that rather than a shift . . . from an illuminist,
fideistic, hermetic strain of the late Renaissance to
the empirical, rational, mechanical philosophy of
the Modern period, both strands persist through-
out the period-indeed both coexist in the same
writers and it is possible fur seventeenth-century
writers to hold at the same time two or more---to
us incompatible views (Vickers, 1984, p. 29). It is
this co-existence that I refer to as Renaissance
Environmentalism
The environmental picture of the late Renaissance
was neither scholastic nor mechanical To be sure, it
owed as much to an inheritance of Classical and
Medieval thought as it did to the capacity of its own
thinkers to penetrate the world afresh. Its most
characteristically novel feature was neoplatonism, to
which were accreted hermetic, cabbalistic and magical
insights as well as earlier Renaissance re-readings of
Classical authors like Vitruvius.
Common themes of a syncretic philosophy are to
be found in the work of such diverse Renaissance
writers as Pico della Mirandola, Henry Cornelius
Agrippa, Daniele Barbaro, John Dee and Robert
Fludd. An early exponent of this Renaissance natural
philosophy is the fifteenth-century Paduan doctor
and student of optics, Nicholas of Cusa, Cusanus
(Cassirer, 1963):
We know for a fact that all things stand in some sort of
relation to one another, that, in virtue of this inter-
relation, all individuals constitute one universe and that
in the one Absolute the multiplicity of beings is unity
itself. (Cusanus, quoted in Debus, 1968, p. 4)
Cusanus still accepted a medieval cosmography
derived from Aristotle and Ptolemy--of a stable uni-
verse composed of concentric spheres extending
from the elemental world of fire, earth, water and air
through the planetary spheres to the celestial orb,
and onwards through the unchanging and eternal
emperium of angelic choirs to the Mens and God
himself. But he, and the neoplatonists who followed,
argued for a pattern of correspondences and sym-
pathies which united this whole cosmos with the
single power of divine love, sensibly experienced in
Pythagorean musical harmonies. The cosmos was
thus imbued with spirit. It was a living soul, for in the
perfection of each part lay the unchanging perfection
of the whole, and vice versa-a corpus mysticum.
Humans, created in the image and likeness of the
Divine archetype, were microcosms of this greater
order. Our physiology is composed of the four
elements, and corresponds in its constitution to the
spheres of the cosmos:
It is the unanimous consent of all the Platonists, that as in
the archetypal World, all things are in all; so in this
corporeal world, all things are in all, albeit in different
ways, according to the receptive nature of each. Thus the
elements are not only in these inferior bodies, but also in
the Heavens, in Stars, in Divels, in Angels, and lastly in
God, the maker and archetype of all things. (Agrippa,
1524; quoted in Jung, 1973, p. 76)
Environmentalism and human intervention
In principle therefore, any part or element of creation
may be transformed into any other- And Man (sic),
the perfect microcosm, was the creature called upon
to perform such acts of intervention in nature, and in
doing so to perfect and realize himself. As Pico put it
in his Oration on the Dignity of Man:
Environmental thought and action
Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immor-
tal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for
being honourable, art the molder and maker of thyself;
thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou
dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower
natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward
from thy souls reason into the higher natures which are
divine. (Pico della Mirandola, 1492, p. 5)
347
In the various forms of magic: 'natural'-operating
at the elemental level, celestial-astrology, and
ceremonial-operating at the supercelestial level
through numerology and cabbala, humans sought to
know and manipulate via images the occult forces
which inspired this cosmos. In making machines
humans applied fundamental creative principles to
the practical transformation of the earth: draining and
irrigating, mining and building. Above all, in
alchemy, which united the speculative or magical and
the practical, they sought a key to the transmutation
of nature. This key, in European, as in all other
alchemies-Chinese, Arab and Indian-was the
philosophers stone, born of the cosmic egg, an image
of rebirth (Eliade, 1978).
We now recognize that the philosophers stone was
not a purely material object but equally an interior,
divine illumination which could be achieved only by
the combination of empirical study and spiritual puri-
fication on the part of the alchemist and the materials
of alchemical craft: furnace, retorts, sulphur and quick-
silver. The self is both the prima materia, the subject
matter, and also the means, the secret stone, of
alchemy. Its intended result is the mystical marriage,
the coniunctio, which unites and transcends
oppositions: male and female, light and darkness,
spirit and matter, sun and moon, Mars and Venus-
ultimately God and creature. Matter and idea dis-
solve in metaphor and alchemy is an act of continuous
creation of meaning lying outside time and space and
evading expression in language. It yields only images,
like Michael Maiers Atalanta Fugens (1618) or John
Dees Hieroglyphic Monad (1591), akin to the mandala
symbol. Rather than analysis and distinction, sought
by the natural scientist of the Modern period, the
alchemist and neo-platonic scientists and technol-
ogists generally sought synthesis and unity. Thus,
while the teleology of medieval scholasticism saw the
future controlling the present, and the mechanical
philosophy of the Modem period saw the past con-
trolling the present, Renaissance Environmentalism
allowed fur a present that simply is, as it has always
been. In this, both history and progress are chal-
lenged in a vision of enduring meaningful unity, but a
unity which has to be discovered afresh by each
human creature. There is a strong homology between
this alchemical vision and the Taoist philosophy of
sympathy between principles of Yin and Yang whose
unity produces meaning and whose opposition
produces difference, separation and analysis (Jung,
1973, p. 69-74).
Metaphor and agency in Renaissance Environmentalism
Mathematics and metaphor. Mathematics acted as the
representational language of this science. But it was a
mathematics of correspondance and harmony rather
than of calculation, measurement and quantification.
True to its Pythagorean and Platonic ancestry,
Renaissance Environmentalism declared empirical
measurement to be theoretically uncertain and imper-
fect because it dealt with the temporal and mutable.
Number and geometry did not derive from empirical
observation, they were pure creations of mind. Their
statements and findings were invariate, universally
true. Thus we find the English Renaissance thinker
Robert Fludd attacking mathematicians like Descartes
for their insistence on addition, subtraction, multipli-
cation and division, on roots and fractions. Fludd
insisted rather on the study of ratio and proportion and
the symbolic manipulation of number: a genuinely
Phythagorean science (Debus, 1978, p. 18).
This treatment of mathematics is a striking differ-
ence between the methods of Renaissance Environ-
mentalism and modern science. Yet it does not imply
a purely speculative science on the part of the former,
a mathematical poetics unconnected to mechanical
technology and the transforming role of human inter-
vention in the natural world. Humans actively trans-
form nature as well as contemplating it. John Dees
Mathematical Preface to the English translation of
Euclids Elements (1570) outlines the ways that math-
ematics gives access to knowledge of both worlds,
temporal and spiritual, and also directs us to the trans-
forming power of the machine. Dees aim was to
popularize the insights of Renaissance science for the
mechanics of London-the engineers, surveyors
and instrument markers-rather than for scholars,
and to show that making machines and touching
eternal truths were not incompatible activities. He
opens with a threefold distinction of all creation into
things supernatural, natural or of a third being. That
third being is Thyngs Mathematicall:
For these, beying (in a manner) middle, betwene thynges
supernaturall an naturall; ate not so absoluble and excel-
lent, as thynges supernatural: Net yes so base and
grosse, as thing naturall: But are thynges immateriall:
348 DENIS COSGROVE
and neverthelesse, by material things hable somewhat to
be signified. And through their particular Images, by
Art, are aggregable and diuisible: yet the generall
Formes, notwythstandyng, are constant, vnchaungeable,
vntransformable, and incorruptible (Dee, 1570)
Mathematics can be divided into two principals:
number and geometry. Number is entirely imma-
terial, having a mystical quality-it is the reason of
God: All thinges (. . .) do appeare to be Formed by
reason of Numbers. For this was the principall
example or pattern in the minde of the Geator (Dee,
1570). The manipulation of number is a pure science-
the intellectual understanding of the whole cosmos,
and through that the speculative knowledge of
ourselves, our world and God:
By Numbers propertie therefore, of vs, by all possible
meanes (. . .) leamed, we may both winde and draw our-
selues into the inward and deepe search and vew, of all
creatures distinct uertues, natures, properties and Formes:
and also farder, arise, clime, ascend, and mount up (with
Speculative Winges) in spirit, to behold in the Glas of
Creation, the Form of Formes, the Exemplar Number of all
thinges Numerable: both visible and inuisible: mortall
and immortall, Corporall and Spirituall. (Dee, 1570)
This is not number used as quantification but
number as an internal discourse, as metaphor and a
form of meditation: the sidereal mathematics of
essences, generation and creation, which allows us to
comprehend Gods original alchemy. At its highest
form of application such numerical mathematics
becomes entirely mystical, the arcane cabbalistic art
of conjuring angels and identifying the number of
our own name, gloriously exemplified and registered
in the booke of the Trinitie most blessed and aeternal'
(Dee, 1570). Pure number did have its practical value,
especially in the calculation of proportions, to the
merchant, surveyor, cartographer and engineer. It
assisted representation and use of the earths surface
and resources.
Geometry too can give us insight into things ever-
lasting particularly through the study of optics, of
the rays of divine light and love beaming incessantly
upon us through the agency of the stars. The higher
celestial science is astrolugy but the highest is pure
sacred geometry:
But well you may perceive by Euclid's Elementes, that
more ample is our Science, then to measure Plaines: and
nothyng lesse therein is taught (of purpose) then how to
measure Land. An other name, therefore, must nedes be
had, for our Mathematicall Sciencie of Magnitudes: which
regardeth not clod, nor turff: neither hill nor dale: neither
earth nor heaven: but is absolute Megethologia: not
creping on ground, and dasseling the eye, with pole,
perch, rod, or lyne: but liftyng the hart above the heavens,
by inuisible lines, and immortall beames meteth
with refexions, of the light incomprehensible: and so
procureth loye, and perfection vnspeakable. (Dee, 1570)
Beyond this speculative side, geometry yields
more practical applications. It first emerges as an
observational and experimental (that is, empirically
experienced) science, the science of magnitudes It
originated in the Egyptian need to locate and mark
boundaries obscured annually by the Nile flood.
Geometry yields a number of practical mechanical
arts derived, Dee claims, from the fields of Nature,
These allow us to intervene in the mundane processes
of the natural world. They include cosmography,
geography, chorography, music, ballistics (Gunnyng),
Statike (weights and pulleys), the study of water flows,
horology and architecture. Following Vitruvius, Dee
regards architecture as the Queen of the Arts because
it allows us to create lesser worlds on the earth in the
image of the macrocosm (Barbaro, 1567). Renaissance
architecture subsumed a range of environmental prac-
tices including civil and military engineering, the
design and planting of cities and the invention of
machines. Architecture was the summary science of
human agency in the natural environment. Dee himself
was intimately involved in many of these practical
arts: collecting and making globes, maps and navi-
gational instruments; instructing Gilbert, Frobisher
and possibly Drake in navigation; corresponding
with the great Flemish and Iberian cartographers of
the late sixteenth century like Gerard Mercator and
Gemma Frisius.
The meaning of machines. If mathematics was both
metaphor and practical skill, the machine also had a
complex meaning within the discourse of Renaissance
environmentalism. In it we encounter a significant and
indicative distinction between Renaissance science
and Modem mechanical philosophy. The arts Dee
describes are called mechanical and include the
manufacture of machines to alter nature. But the root
meaning of mechanical here lies in its counterposition
to liberal and speculative. The mechanical arts
were those which supposedly required no intellectual
input and thus might be performed by mere mechan-
icians. Dee attempts to show that such arts may indeed
be related to the higher liberal and speculative arts,
for both are equally inspired by an understanding of
nature--the machine of the world. It is precisely the
animation (inspiration) of the machine by the spirit of
Environmental thought and action 349
understanding that turns it from a passive model to an
active device, or, in the terms used by Italians to make
this same distinction, from macchina to fabbrica
(Brusatin, 1980). Dees practical works, his allegience
to the mechanics of London and his criticism of
university scholars, reveal his desire to raise the status
of the mechanical arts (Clulee, 1988). Robert Fludd,
the most sophisticated and arcane of the English
Renaissance Environmentalists, having criticized
mathematics for calculation and measurement, none-
theless praised Archimedes for his invention of
machines. Fludd referred to the Greek as a perfect
natural magician, implying that, as in alchemy, prac-
tical intervention depended on self-understanding
(i.e. the domain of the liberal arts). This suggests an
activity which unites pure speculation and mere
unthinking human action. A contemporary Italian
humanist, Daniele Barbaro, clarifies the distinction in
his commentary on Vitruvius Architecture. He opens
Chapter X, devoted to machines, with a celebration of
the perfect natural form. The circle both moves and is
stationary at the centre, ascends and descends, has a
circumference at once concave and convex, and a
diameter which moves quickly and slowly at the same
time (Barbaro, 1567). The circle and revolutionary
motion thus contain and resolve oppositions. Vulgar
people, Barbaro claims, do not understand this prin-
ciple and thus are caused to wonder at the effects
of rotational movement, regarding machines as
marvellous or magical.
But, as Dee also confirms, it is nature whose prin-
ciples guide us in the manufacture and animation of
machines:
the origin [of machines] is in necessity which moves men
to accomodate themselves to their needs; nature and
animals teach them and offer examples from which, it
appears, many artifices take their principles-above all
the continuous rotation of the world, which Vitruvius
refers to as a macchination: and thus it is called the
machine of the world. (Barbaro, 1567, p. 441)
To follow natures example in the manufacture of
machines we must apply reason and intellect, above
all mathematical knowledge, for the form and prin-
ciple of machines is circular motion. Barbaro illus-
trates his commentary at this point with reference to
hydraulic machines for lifting and moving water,
drawing his examples from direct observation along
Venetian rivers of locks, sluices and pumps to assist
navigation, control flooding and reclaim land Like
Dee, who promoted the art of navigation, explo-
ration for a north-east passage (Taylor, 1930), and the
planting of American colonies, Barbaro was directly
concerned with geographic change, in creating new
worlds through human agency in nature (Cosgrove,
198; 1989).
Fur those lacking understanding the mechanical
arts appear magical. Indeed, within Renaissance
environmentalism the distinction between magic (the
production of effects for which the cause is mysteri-
ous) and machine is occluded. The transformations of
alchemy or the practice of natural magic are predi-
cated on the same understanding and the same ani-
mating spirit operating within a unified nature as are
the invention and practical application of machines- In
this sense there is a significant difference between the
idea of the machine in Renaissance science and in the
mechanical philosophy of the Modem period.
optics and the theatre as spatial metaphor. The animating
spirit which makes both machine and magic operative
is light, the first form whose diffusion generated
body or corporeity by drawing dimensionless first
matter into three dimensions. . . The essential func-
tion of light was to be the basis of spatial dimension
and physical extension, and to be the original physi-
cal cause of all natural movement and change (Clulee,
1988, p. 47, 54). Optics was the key to Gods rep-
resentation and construction of the machine of the
world, the globe. Geometric optics, perspective, also
underlay human discovery: geographic, microscopic
and telescopic (bringing new worlds to light) and
human picturing of the terrestrial orb (Edgerton,
1975; 19887'; Alpers, 1982), whether in mapping or
painting landscapes, or in constructing lesser worlds.
Theatre was the domain in which humans most
fully represented the cosmic principles of light and
persective. Renaissance architects made detailed geo-
metric studies of circular Classical theatre buildings
and developed complex perspective constructions for
stage scenes. Dee himself had been closely involved
in that aspect of theatre which brought the mechanical
arts into contact with the liberal art of drama: as a
Cambridge student he constructed mechanical devices
for 'magical' illusory effects on stage (Yates, 1966;
1979). Both the metaphor of theatre, and perspective
construction of theatres as representational spaces,
hold an important place in Renaissance Environmen-
talism The theatre was more than an entertainment,
its illusory world both mirrored and represented the
perfection of greater worlds and its meaning encom-
passed the idea of a conspectus, a totalizing represen-
tation. Thus Abraham Ortelius titled his great world
atlas of 1570 Teatrum Orbis Terrarum, Elias Ashmole
350 DENIS COSGROVE
his chemical work Teatrum Chemicum Britannicum.
Zoncas (1607) engravings of mechanical devices was
Novo Teatro di Machine ed Edificii, and the new public
anatomy theatres of Bologna and Padua revealed the
structure and operations of the lesser world of the
human body (Ferrari, 1987). For Shakespeare too the
world was a stage and in 1550s Venice, the greatest
urban spectacle in Europe, Giulio Camillo constructed
his great memory theatre encompassing all human
knowledge (Yates, 1966). During Carnevale, when the
public spectacles of state were parodied in St Marks
Square, floating teatri del mondo moored in the lagoon,
exhibited the entire cosmos (Architettura e Utopia,
1980) and the anatomy theatres were obliged to
present public disections. Theatrical metaphors in
Renaissance environmentalism signified a total world
of representation wherein the image is the pathway
to truth, to a reality known only through appear-
ances. In this sense theatre acted as a paradigm of the
entire mode of discourse we have been examining. In
its attention to the play of appearances and meanings
it anticipates certain features of representation in
post-modern worlds.
In semiotic terms, Renaissance Environmentalism
refuses to distinguish between signifier and signified
The sign (image or metaphor) is regarded as consti-
tutive of and operative in the world because the sign
constructs meaning: words are equated with things,
abstract ideas are given concrete attributes (Vickers,
1984). Empirical nature is both created and known
through light, it is a spectacle, a system of signs point-
ing to another system of mental categories. This reifi-
cation of images possesses an aesthetic unity in which
language, ritual, spectacle, image and metaphor
become active agents in human transformations of
nature and the invention of machines. The centrality
of theatre as a total world of signification makes sense
in this context.
In the famous debate between Robert Fludd and
Johannes Kepler in 1617-21, Fludds argument is car-
ried essentially by striking visual images rather than
empirical evidence or mathematical reasoning. Thus:
The true philosophy . . . will diligently investigate
heaven and earth and will sufficiently explore, examine
and depict man, who is unique, by means of pictures
(Fludd, quoted in Westman, 1984, p. 179). The struc-
tures and harmonies of the world and of the human
body cannot be seen directly but they can be appre-
hended through representation. Thus picturing
becomes an ontological act, whose techniques are
geometry (the study of form) and perspective (the
study of rays). The creation of the world itself Fludd
represents as an act of picturing, using images of light
being inscribed on the darkness as the primary partur-
ition. Kepler recognized the centrality of the pictured
image in Fludds argument and his response reveals
that this key debate between Renaissance and
Modem thinking turned on the meaning and reality
of visual imaginings (Westmann, 1984). Kepler calls
Fludds work playful picturing, lacking empirical
warranty but treating the eye as the point of projec-
tion for images generated in the soul. Objective pic-
turing, by contrast, Kepler regards as scientific. Here
the eye receives its images from beyond, from an
objective world separated from the conscious subject.
An external reality is imprinted on the retina as on the
lens of a telescope or microscope. Linear, single-point
perspective, the perspective of the painter or theatre
designer, gives way to distance-point perspective;
analogical reasoning is displaced by cause-effect
(Alpers, 1982; Kubovy, 1987). We find resonances of
Keplers distrust in David Harveys critique of post-
modernisms attention to the image. For Harvey, as
for Kepler, the image is depthless, implying that true
meaning lies below the surface of appearances rather
than constructed through images (Harvey, 1989,
p. 308ff).
In the play of images Renaissance Environmental-
ists believed they could disclose the world anew. But,
like Columbus who refused to accept America as a
new world, rather the old gained by a new route, their
was the world as it already existed and would always
exist-a world of being rather than becoming
(Pagden, 1986; Harvey, 1989, pp. 217-19). It might
be newly described and it could be subject to human
intervention and manipulation, but human action had
to follow principles prescribed in nature itself. It is
perhaps apt that Robert Fludds powerful images
should be engraved by the same Theodore de Bry
who engraved the first representations of the New
World as an arcadian image of harmony inherited
from the Old (Bucher, 1981).
LOSS AND RECOVERY OF THE
ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIVE IN
MODERNISM
The Modem period, heralded by Descartes, Kepler
and Gaileo, gradually suppressed this analogical way
of knowing, substituting for it a linear discourse of
cause and calculated, measurable effect. The new
science distrusted metaphor, or, more precisely,
regarded its metaphors and models as trans-
parent lenses to true meaning rather than themselves
Environmental thought and action 351
constitutive of it. That belief became the more firmly
held as science was allied to a belief in historical linear
progress through technology and materialism
Modernisms faith in measurement, calculation, the
establishment of empirical laws, material technologi-
cal progress through applied science, and historicism,
together with its distrust of the poetic, the meta-
phorical and the intuitive as valid forms of knowing,
all stand in opposition to Renaissance Environmenta-
lism. The pre-modem apprehension of the world was
of course never entirely expunged. It remained how-
ever an obscure and subordinate theme, especially in
the realm of scientific endeavour, only becoming of
exoteric interest again in post-modem thinking.
Nonetheless, as a subordinate theme in the Modem
period such attitudes did surface in some surprising
places,
In the work of Athanasius Kircher (Godwin, 1979),
Elias Ashmole (Yates, 1979), and even Isaac Newton
himself (Westfall, 1980), strong strains of the environ-
mentalist philosophy remained into the early Modem
period. As a separated and esoteric tradition it was
upheld by Rosicrucians, Theosophists and Masons,
but its significance is difficult to interpret precisely
because of the secrecy with which adherents sur-
rounded themselves. How far that secrecy was a
response to the suppression of ideas associated with
Renaissance philosophy during the triumphant
period of the mechanical philosophy (Hill, 1983), and
how far it was part of a more general irrationality and
desire for secrecy among adherents is debatable. Out-
side both formal science and secret societies it is poss-
ible to trace elements of views similar to those of
Renaissance Environmentalism in the representational
world of literature and the arts whose embrace of
metaphorical truth remained understandably strong.
Romantic writers particularly were attracted to a
unified poetic vision of human and cosmic life.
Goethe, von Humboldt and Ruskin come readily to
mind. Even Modernist writers of the early twentieth
century: Eliot and Yeates were committed to such a
vision. But art and science were defined as separate
realms and the world of poesis had little regard for,
indeed a deep distrust of, the world of the machine:
techne. More impressive in this respect are the ideas of
some of the engineers during the Modem period:
men like Ferdinand de Lesseps, engineer of the Suez
Canal and promoter of similar grand schemes of
environmental intervention like the Panama Canal
and the flooding of the Saharan chotts (Heffernan,
1989). Like a number of Third Republic French engin-
eers, at the height of Victorian scientific positivism,
de Lesseps adopted the utopian visions of St Simon.
de Lesseps saw his schemes in mystical terms: the Suez
Canal would provide more than merely a channel of
trade for imperial France, but would link the male
spirit of Europe with the female spirit of Asia, realiz-
ing harmony the world: ideas which echo John Dees
reasons for promoting navigation of the north-east
passage. Modernist planners like Patrick Abercromby
looked to Eastern concepts like Feng Shui to satisfy
their sense of an underlying order of being to be
recognized when humans intervened in nature.
Modernist historiography has tended to exclude such
features from accounts of the engineering heroes of
progress, or to treat them as embarrassing deviations
from a rationalist faith. When placed alongside the
environmental vision of sixteenth-century engineers
such ideas seem less isolated. We are able to re-
evaluate them today precisely because of our own
distrust in the Modem project.
Synchronicity
One reason for contemporary change in the way we
read the work and ideas of people in the past is the
influence of psychoanalysis on our understanding of
human motivation, as well as the subjectivist strain in
twentieth-century philosophy derived from phenom-
enology, and semiotics. And it is in the work of one of
the giants of psychoanalysis that we find the clearest
restatement of the Renaissance environmentalist
faith, although subtly reworked. Carl Jungs classic
essay Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle was
first presented in a lecture in 1951 and expanded in
1957, alongside a monograph by the professor of
theoretical physics W. Pauli (Jung, 1973). Its major
impact came in the late 1960s. Jungs essay may be
read as an early anticipation of some of the concerns
of post-modernism.
Jungs essay grew out of psychotherapeutic experi-
ence and his theory of archetypal symbols in the
collective unconscious. It drew together his interest
in the meanings of alchemy and, signficantly, his
understanding of the crisis of visualization or per-
spectivism in quantum physics in the light of relativ-
ity theory, the recognition of sub-atomic particles
and Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. For
Jung, these theoretical and observational advances
had finally laid to rest-at least in the arena of
advanced scientific thought--the unqualified belief in
scientific certainty through causal laws. Alternative
explanatory principles were demanded. Synchronicity
he proposed as one of them: a coincidence in time of
352 DENIS COSGROVE
two or more causally unconnected events which have
the same or similar meaning (Jung, 1973, p. 25).
The emphasis in Jungs essay is on meaning. Rather
than attacking the causal explanation of natural
events inherited from the Modem scientific view,
which he accepts as valid for explaining much of what
occurs in nature and experience, Jung argues that it is
insufficient to explain all. There exist phenomena
which cannot be explained causally unless one per-
mits oneself the most fantastic ad hoc hypotheses
(Jung 1973, p. 26). Jungs position would find some
agreement from scientific realists and critics like Paul
Feyerabend. Relativity theory indicates that space
and time may be reduced to zero under certain con-
ditions where, logically, linear causality becomes
impossible. It collapses distinctions between being
and becoming. Only an enduring unity, or an inex-
plicable discontinuity make sense under these con-
ditions, description becomes purely contextual. To
accept this unity may render us silent. But character-
istically humans seek to create meaning and do so
through metaphor. The metaphors of synchronicity
are those of harmony and correspondance which we
find in Agrippa,.Dee and FIudd. Jung points to their
parallels with the Chinese philosophical concept of
Tao, which he translates simply as meaning:
There is something formless yet complete
That existed before heaven and earth
How still How empty!
Dependent on nothing, unchanging,
all pervading unfailing.
One may think of it as the mother of all things under
heaven
I do not know its name,
But I call it meaning.
If I had to give it a name, I should call it The Great
(quoted in Jung, 1973, p. 10)
This principle of meaning cannot be grasped
through empirical observation or measurement, but
rather is apprehended phenomenologically, below
the intellectual level of formal science, We are
reminded of John Ruskins comments on the scientific
understanding of nature:
And I was quite sure that if I examined the mountain
anatomy scientifically, I should go wrong in like manner,
touching the external aspects. Therefore, . . . I dosed all
geology books, and set myself, as far as I could, to see the
Alps in a simple, thoughtless and untheorising manner;
but to see them, if it might be, thoroughly. (Ruskin,
1903-13, p. 475)
The principle of wholeness or unity to which both
Jung and Ruskin allude is often grasped most fully by
the unthinking mind, the unconscious, and becomes
represented symbolically, most commonly in dreams,
exceptional psychic conditions or near-death experi-
ences. We know too that there are techniques which
humans can develop in order to increase the frequency
of such unitary experience of self and world.
Unlike causality, which reigns despotically over the
whole picture of the macrophysical world and whose
universal law is shattered only in certain lower orders of
magnitude, synchronicity is a phenomenon that seems
primarily connected with psychic conditions, that is to
say with processes of the unconscious. Synduonic
phenomena are found to occur-experimentally-with
some degree of regularity and frequency in the intuitive,
magical procedures where they are subjectively con-
vincing but are extremely difficult to verify objectively
and cannot be statistically evaluated. (Jung, 1973, p. 95)
The key problem with synchronicity, as Jung
suggests, lies in the difficulty of representing its find-
ings within the metaphorical limitations of Modem
science. But, as Goethe or Ruskin or the Renaissance
Environmentalists discovered, they do yield to rep-
resentation in verbal metaphor or graphic image. The
equivalences of synchronicity are contingent, and, in
Jungs words, the contingent is a formless substance
in the realm of pure intellect. In psychic introspection
they appear as archetypal images, classically the man-
dala as a symbol of unity, or the monad which Dee
attempted to represent in his obscure alchemical work
(Dee, 1564). Jungs own emphasis on symbolic rep-
resentation, the significance of images, pictures and
metaphors calls to mind Fludds position in the pol-
emic with Kepler, as Jungs colleague Pauli was keenly
aware (westmann, 1984, pp. 207-12).
In the closing pages of his essay Jung argues that
synchronicity is merely a special instance of general
acausal orderliness, a broader principle which includes
acts of creation (productions of the imagination-
poesis), properties of natural number (as we see in
Dees preface), and the discontinuities of theoretical
physics. Such orderliness is not esoteric (although its
representations often make it appear so to the
Modem mind). It is intuitively known to us all:
... only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of
casuality . . . creates intellectual difficulties and makes it
appear unthinkable that causeless events exists or even
occur. But if they do then we must regard them as
creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that
exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is
Environmental Thought and action 353
Today we live in a world so saturated in reproduced
transform them and through them, their referents.
images
. . . that nature itsself threatens to become what it was for.
the Middle Ages: an encyclopaedic, illuminated book
overlaid withomamentation and marginal glosses, every
object converted into an image with its proper label or
signature . . . The quintessential modem experience of
this new 'book of nature is the stroll through the scenic
wonders of a national park with a plastic earphone that
responds to triggers embedded along the path, (Mitchell,
not derivable from any known antecedents. (Jung; 1973,
p. 102)
It is this which accounts for the cross-cultural and
trans-historical stability of certain symbols, images
and magical practices in&ding alchemy (Zimmerman
1984) and for belief in a world animated by creative
spirit, a consciousness that depends upon represen-
tation in images for its expression and indeed its very
apprehension
POST-MODERN CONCEPTIONS AND
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Jungs argument brings us close to some of the ideas
being advanced in contemporary post-modernism.
The underlying contentions are that the foundation-
alist philosophical position derived from Descartes,
Locke and Kant is exhausted, the Enlightenment
belief in reason no longer philosophically tenable.
The key distinctions of object and subject, appearance
and reality, being and becoming, upon which Modern
philosophy was erected have collapsed in the face of
insights from Neitzche, Husserl, Heidegger and
others, and we have witnessed the limitations of
linear discourse. In social organization the era of
'Fordist' production and of organized capitalism with
its specific historical contributions and contradictions
as theorized by Marx and Modernisation writers is
passed (Harvey, 1989). It has ceded place to a new
order, or rather a new dis-order-to an era of self-
generating consumption, of hyper-realy, a society
of the spectacle, a culture of euphoric surfaces+
Discourse of the Modernist, rationalist type grounded
in meta-theory fails to capture consistent meaning in
these circumstances partly because of the impossibility
of generating empirical chains of causality for co-
existant events. Today meaning may be constructed,
if at all, only in a discourse of images whose con-
tingency is actively embraced. This is reflected in the
fact that the Modernist programme in the arts and
culture, for example that projected by Futurism,
Cubism or the International Style, which aligned the
arts to the construction of a new, rationalist social
order, is bankrupt. Art and literature seem doomed (or
released) to the play of those images and apparently
arbitrary meanings that Modernism regards as super-
ficial. In post-modernism however, images no longer
illustrate, reflect or disguise a reality existing below
themselves rather they present themselves as simu-
lacra, constitutive of their own realities. Their mean-
ing is unstable, subject to our voluntary capacity to
1980, p. 395)
Meaning is thus increasingly constructed through
images, calling to mind Dees reference to thinges
immateriall: and neverthelsse, by material things
hable somewhat to be signifed.
For French former Marxists like Baudrillard the
post-modern cultural condition appears nihilistic and
wholly negative, a chaos of fragmented and meaning-
less images. For David Harvey (1987; 1989) it is
merely a cultural vehicle for the most recent stage of
capitalist evolution: fiexible accumulation and
Modernist space-time compression, an interpret-
ation which leaves Marxist meta-theory inviolate as a
mode of criticism. Far others, however, the post-
modern experience heralds the possibility of a new
world, or rather, once again the possibility of pene-
trating an old one, largely submerged by the excesses
of Modernism; the world of synchronicity, the
monad, of Renaissance Environmentalism. As a dis-
course of human life in the context of nature geogra-
phy has a contribution to describing this world, but to
do so will place new demands on its languages of
description and modes of representation.
The main proponents of such a view are associated
with the most environmentally-sensitive of the
many ideological strands identifiable within post-
modernism. These are the green ideology or new
romanticism and certain feminist positions. In rather
diverse ways these suggest that the holistic perspec-
tive is recoverable precisely because we are newly
opened to non-linear logic, once again freed from the
tyranny of subject and object, appearance and reality,
surface and depth. We are thus able to understand and
accept the contingent truth of metaphorical discourse
and the creative construction of meaning through
images. The explosive and fragmentary aspects of the
post-modern experience outlined by writers like
Jameson (1984), Berman (1984) and Mitchell (l980)
offer the conditions for realizing an implosive
experience of meaningful rhythms beyond- the
354
DENIS COSGROVE
fragments, an experience realizable itself only in
images. I will comment briefly on some of these ideas.
Significantly both the new romanticism and femin-
ism turn to a vision of the natural world and our place
within it directly apprehended through creative acts
of image and metaphor construction, thus to the con-
cerns of Ruskin, Humboldt, Goethe and further back
to Agrippa, Dee and Fludd. These more recent writ-
ings however, often fail sufficiently to address the
issue of technical intervention by humans into nature,
an issue which I shall deal with in conclusion.
New romanticism
The emergence and growing socio-political impact of
contemporary environmentalism parallels the period
most commentators define as post-modern. Its power-
ful and often populist strains of holism, unitary, or
whoIe earth, vision, of a new age seem and often
are, naive. But the philosophical and ideological range
of the Green movement extends further than its
more simplistic expressions. Here, I approach its con-
tentions by way of two serious writers who have
addressed this strand of post-modem sensibility: the
English art critic Peter Fuller and the Czech-American
philosopher, Erazim Kohak.
Fuller, in an essay titled Neo-Romanticism (1985,
pp. 83-91) notes a significant shift in artistic
predelictions over the past decade in England and
elsewhere:
the return to landscape has become something of a stam-
pede. Ten years ago, no self-respecting art student (. . .)
would have touched a box of watercolours or have gone
near lakes, valleys, rolling fields and small Gothic
churches. Today the hills are alive with the sight of plein
air painters once again. (Fuller, 1985, p. 83)
Modernism in art, he argues, drove a wedge between
the pursuit of art and the study of the natural world. If,
as the Modernist philosophy argued, nature lacked
mind, and even the divinity that Romantics like
John Ruskin sought to read in nature did not exist,
then nature was unworthy of artistic attention or
consideration---it was quite literally anaesthetic. Such
a philosophy finds its expression within modem
geographys representation of the natural world.
Fuller points to the ecologist Gregory Batesons claim
that this belief, coupled with the practical implications
of apparently unlimited technological progress, have
increasingly obvious consequences not merely for
the external environment, but for our personal lives,
our bodily ecology and our spiritual welfare. These,
despite our pretence to the contrary, are still ulti-
mately sustained by the natural world. The death of
the higher landscape in art, that is the failure of a
belief in a moral value within nature and in our
capacity to realize that value in images and represen-
tations, articulates a more fundamental loss of faith.
Art becomes either pure aesthesis-a response to
sensuous pleasure-or it is aligned, as Modeernists
believed, to a technological utopia, poesis divorced
from techne. Under such a dispensation Ruskins con-
cept of theoria, the response to beauty of ones whole
moral being, simply makes no sense as a programme
for art. But, Fuller argues, in recent art, for example
the paintings of Australian landscapists Sidney Nolan
and Fred Williams, we may detect a break with
Modernism, a serious attempt to realize a new
aesthetic in nature. If nature is not a product of mind,
then, as Freud and Jung argued, mind may be a prod-
uct of nature. The function of art then becomes once
again representational, to picture and console the
potential space of creativity opened up in the human
pysche as we pass from the infantile illusion that we
created. the mother (and, by extension, the world)
who nurtures and supports us, to the adult recog-
nition of our human separateness from nature and
mother (Fuller 1988, p. 25). In contemporary
painters Fuller claims to find a new resolution to the
universal questions of our relations with the world of
nature:
We have become peculiarly ill at ease in the nature that
nurtures us, constantly worried that through our own
activities we will cause it to fail, certain that no God
exists within the rocks and trees to save and console, sure
that not much is for the best in this, our only possible
world . . . The stubborn refusal of a Sidney Nolan, or a Fred
Williams, to accept the intractability of the Australian
landscape, their insistence upon realizing an aesthetic
response to it, was not merely something new and
admirable in art: it also bore witness to that irrepressible
impulse in the human breast to affirm beauty in, and
unity with, the natural world, regardless. (Fuller, 1988,
pp. 28-29)
Fuller shares with Jung the belief that is in nature
apprehended through the psyche rather than treated
merely as an analytical object that the unity of self
and world sought in environmentalism is to be found
Through images and metaphors we simultaneously
apprehend and create nature as meaningful and
geography need not be excluded from this endeavour.
Fullers comments on Modem art echo Erazim
Kohaks on Modem philosophy (1984). Kohak also
Environmental thought and action 355
regards the crisis of Modernism as ultimately a crisis
of nature and our relations with it:
If there is no God, then nature is not a creation, lovingly
crafted and endowed with purpose and value by its
creator. It can only be a cosmic accident, dead matter
contingently propelled by blind force, ordered by
efficient causality. . . If Godwere dead, so would nature be
and humans would be no more than embattled strangers,
doomed to defeat, as we have largely convinced ourselves
we in fact are. Kohak, 1984, p. 5)
His text is structured around the natural rhythms and
passages from day to night through dusk to dawn, of
winter passing to spring, summer and fall, as he con-
structs his house in the New England woods. Kohak
seeks to realize an intimacy with the natural world, but
his argument is no more a restatement of Thoreaus
Walden than Fullers is of Ruskin. It is a sustained and
critical commentary on Modem philosophy and an
appeal for a post-modem environmentalism, for a
philosophy which recognizes the being of humans as
integrally linked with the being of nature (Kohak,
1984, p. 8).
Such a philosophy restates many of the assump-
tions we have traced through sixteenth-century
science. It conceives of a cosmos which is vital and
moral, a more intuitively correct thesis than the
Modernist vision of a measured and mechanical
nature which is as morally neutral as the mathematics
by which its elements and dynamics are calculated,
measured and described. There is however a differ-
ence in the relation of metaphor to this cosmos.
Renaissance Environmentalists still accepted the
authority of a divine text through their shared
Christian faith. Their metaphors were thus both con-
stitutive and grounded. Although one senses a desire
for grounding in Fuller and certainly in Kohak, a rejec-
tion of aesthetic self-sufficiency, they have too great
a sensitivity to otherness to claim a particular
transcendental authority for the metaphor, whose
constitutive capacity is thus free-floating.
Kohak points out that the Modernist vision sur-
vives today largely at the popular level rather than at
the leading edge of theoretical physics or the philos-
ophy of science (Kohak, 1984, p. 18). But, he claims,
the nature of contemporary life and the penetration of
advanced technology through consumer products
into every sphere of our lives has made the Modernist
creed existentially convincing. Thus his relationship
with the machine is uneasy. He finds it necessary to
pass beyond the powerline for a direct contact with
the natural world, not so much in order to abandon
the framework of modem life as to grasp an order
which continues to underpin our lives, to recover the
moral sense of the cosmos and of human life therein
beneath a layer of artifacts and constructs (Kohak,
1984, p. 26). In so doing his attention is directed at
the same foci of observation as the Renaissance
environmentalists: the firmament, the earthly
elements and the rotations of the spheres as evi-
denced in the seasons and the skies. How he will
integrate these insights with the world of techne
remains unclear.
Feminist critique of Modernism
If Fuller and Kohak represent the green strand of post-
modem culture, Sandra Harding (1986) and Elizabeth
Grosz (1987) serve to articulate a feminist strand.
Feminists have both contributed to and furthered the
post-modem criticism of rationalist epistemology
and belief in the capacity of human reason to consti-
tute a single language of true meaning. They criticize
too Modernisms capacity to universalise culturally
relative presuppositions into potentially tyrannical
philosophical systems (Scott & Simpson-Housley,
1989, p. 232). But they read these features in gender
terms: Grosz argues that the Modernist scientific pro-
ject is inherently phallocentric, privileging mind,
intellect and logic, conventionally gendered as male
attributes, over heart, empathy and intuition
(gendered as female) in the search for human
understanding:
Science affirms the unique contributions to culture to be
made by transhistorical egos that reflect a reality only of
abstract entities; by the administrative mode of interact-
ing with nature and other enquirers; by impersonal and
universal forms of communication; and by an ethic of
elaborating rules for absolute adjudications of competing
rights between socially autonomous-that is, value-
free-pieces of evidence. These are exactly the social
characteristics necessary to become gendered as a man in
our society. (Harding, 1986, p. 238)
The practice of Modem science, and indeed its
epistemological foundations, are thus regarded as an
expression of patriarchal suppression of alternative
forms of knowing. Some historical evidence for this is
provided by Merchants (1980) interpretation of
changes in the gendering of nature in Renaissance
Environmentalism and the changing meanings
attached to human interventions into nature during
the period of the Scientific Revolution. She claims
that the death of nature, recognized by Fuller and
Kohak, was in large measure a consequence of
356 DENIS COSGROVE
Modernist universalising of a male-gendered dis-
course. Certainly within alchemy and its final
metaphor of the mystical marriage there is a more
androgynous vision of nature. Speaking for today,
both Harding and Grosz appeal to a broader science,
informed by feminist theory. The five features of such
science which Grosz identifies are to be found in the
characteristic thinking to both pre- and post-modem
environmentalism: (1) admission of context and
observer dependency in scientific knowledge; (2) the
relational nature of theory, rejecting the binary divide
of subject-object; (3) the fluidity of language and
representation; (4) the continuity and relatedness of
self and world and (5) rejection of the hierarchy
implied by binary categorizing.
Similar arguments are put by Harding in her study
of the history of Modem science. She argues that the
non-metaphorical appearance of Modem science and
its languages belies an elaborate system of metaphors
as necessary to conceptualize this as any other domain
of human knowledge. Both the nature of these meta-
phors and the very lack of recognition serve to repress
both females and ways of knowing gendered as
female. Harding too promotes a new science, empha-
sizing among other features personal experience as a
form of knowledge (Harding, 1986, p. 240)-a fea-
ture which she too associates with late sixteenth-
century science--and the search for a unity of
knowledge combining moral and political with
empirical understanding (Harding, 1986, p. 241):
there is another world hidden from the consciousness of
[Modem] science-the world of emotions, feelings politi-
caI values; of the individual and collective unconscious; of
social and historical particularity explored by novels,
drama, poetry, music and art-within which we all live
most of our waking and dreaming hours under constant
threat of its increasing infusion by scientific rationality.
(Harding, 1986, p. 245)
Like Grosz, Harding promotes a scientific discourse
which would incorporate this hidden world. These
writers argue that a more gender-equal approach to
understanding self and nature would produce rep-
resentations more in line with those broached by new
romanticism or green environmentalism, in other
words holistic and intuitively convincing,
CONCLUSION
A striking quality of experience in the late twentieth-
century world, noted by all post-modem commen-
tators, is its fragmentation and surface-like appear-
ance, that loss of a sense of order and direction which
has followed the death of Modernism: its apparent
irrationality. We are in new times (Smith, 1989), a
new world, a world of machine-generated images
where we leave the VDU screen after a days oper-
ations, perhaps among the flickering simulacra of
capital transfers on the world financial market, to
spend an evening at a Korean restaurant in a con-
verted Parisian warehouse, a Zen meditation class on
Venice Beach or a jog through Regents Park with
Haydn on the Walkman. Ours is a world where dif-
ference is encountered in the adjoining neighbour-
hood, the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth
(quoted in Gregory & Ley, 1988, p. 116). The material
and immaterial are confused, there is much that is
theatrical, even magical about the world we experi-
ence often vicariously through a continuously elabor-
ated range of media. The collapse of foundationalism
in philosophy is becoming existentially as convincing
as Kohak argues technology makes the Modernist
creed so that the construction of a moral order for
such a world appears a daunting task
But ours remains simultaneously an old world,
whose unchanged natural rhythms still evoke our
powerful responses and inform our knowledge, as
feminist writers especially have shown. The disjunc-
ture between these two sets of experience: of con-
stantly elaborating techne, ever more sophisticated
machines on the one hand, and of poesis, wonder at
the deeply felt sense of moral order in nature on the
other is one of the most disturbing features of post-
modem living. It informs the work of all the contem-
porary writers I have discussed here. In different and
less immediate ways it confronted also the sixteenth-
century environmentalists. For them the machine
took its form and meaning from the same principles
they felt governed nature. Human intervention in the
natural world followed rules inherent in that self-same
world, but those rules became known to us precisely
through the human capacity to create meaning in
metaphor and image.
Despite the dire warnings of both the death of
nature and the alienation of human spirit we remain
able to embrace and create meaning in our lives out of
the fragmentation and to discern the possibilities of a
moral order, The ecology of our bodies seems no less
secure-if rather more consciously nurture&than it
ever was. We live in a world of images, most of them
mechanically generated. And the machines we make
today are increasingly designed to produce and
create images, either directly in the sense of image or
sound reproduction systems, or indirectly in the form
of consumables whose prime use value lies in the
Environmental thought and action
357
creation or enhancement of personal or group status
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
images. It is however precisely the fluidity of meaning,
the instability of cultural codes, that liberates us, offers
new freedoms to touch and creatively picture the
sense of unified meaning understood by Renaissance
Environmentalists, To achieve this we are not obliged
to seek some romantic primitivism, an escape into
pure poesis. The machine image itself has the creative
power of metaphor, we may evoke our place in nature
via the word processor as much as by living in a log
cabin or painting landscape. Only our inability to
escape Modernist categories of man and nature, sub-
ject and object, makes us believe that our machines
and our images allow either escape from or alienation
within the cosmos. As Barbaro and Dee recognized,
they are merely part of it, transformations of it, and
through them we constantly re-work nature in the
only way we can-as meaning.
Geographers have always claimed the role of
describing and making sense of both the order of the
natural world and the role and record of humans in
transforming it. Geography is neither purely techne
nor pure poesis and is damaged perhaps more than any
other sphere of knowledge by dualistic thought. At
the height of Modernism geographers embraced a
particularly vulgar form of environmentalism and
remain wary of the environmental heritage of their
discipline. The collapse of many of the structures
of thought associated with modern science, and
certainly with scientism, together with a new respect
for the power of images to create meaning offers
enormous scope for geographical descriptions sensi-
tive to the unity of human life and the earth on which
it is lived.
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I suggest that the Modernist belief in linear reason-
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culturally, that our relations with nature over time are
better understood as a constant re-working by
humans of eternal moral questions: of self, nature and
society, of the appropriate forms which human lives
and institutions should take, of the ways in which the
experiential unity and wholeness of our world have
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