Fantasy Climates: An impetus to environmental ethics
Susan Dunston
emerita, New Mexico Tech
Dr. Susan Dunston is professor emerita at New Mexico Tech where she taught philosophy, American literature, nature writing, and environmental ethics to science and engineering students. Her research interests also include Native American literature and intersections of literature with philosophy and science. She has recently completed Emerson and Environmental Ethics, forthcoming from Lexington Books.
Abstract
In “Wealth,” without seeming to grasp the fantastical aspects of his description, Ralph Waldo Emerson heralded coal as “a portable climate” with the capacity to transport itself wherever it might be wanted. A skeptical... [ view full abstract ]
In “Wealth,” without seeming to grasp the fantastical aspects of his description, Ralph Waldo Emerson heralded coal as “a portable climate” with the capacity to transport itself wherever it might be wanted. A skeptical Nathaniel Hawthorne included visions of pluviculture and utopian climates as part of “The Hall of Fantasy.” Though romantic writers inclined to nature-given climates rather than manufactured ones, they saw the technological writing on the earthly wall through a cloud of conflicting attitudes toward science that included interest, hope, reservation, and censure. Emerson criticized science for freezing the life it purported to study with a “wintry” understanding, a metaphor fictionally fleshed in Hawthorne’s character Chillingworth. Ultimately, the concern is that an engineered climate fosters the illusion that actual climate is irrelevant and, by extrapolation, that a “next generation” or “virtual” earth presumes the obsolescence of the “real” earth, a presumption that would embolden active destruction. Hawthorne’s narrator conceives the Hall as a “destruction” in which “earthliness” is lost: “the solid earth has come to an untimely end.” Anticipating questions of sustainability, he styles the Hall as offering no real sustenance; the narrator has to leave to find a meal. The west functioned in the imaginations of many as an undefined space where climate could be manipulated. Evincing varying degrees of scientific rigor, schemes for climate-control proliferated in the west, often with unforeseen or disregarded negative environmental consequences. This paper explores origins and development in romanticism of an environmentalist critique of anthropocentric-minded climate control.
Authors
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Susan Dunston
(emerita, New Mexico Tech)
Topic Area
Individual paper
Session
P101 » Romantic Climates (10:45 - Sunday, 25th March, Enchantment E)
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