Introduction: Special Issue on Environmental Narrative

Abstract

A few years ago while reading Paul Taylor's Respect for Nature in my environmental philosophy class, a quiet student, a member of the Blackfeet nation, raised her hand, asked "But why no respect for rocks?" Thinking she'd missed a simple conceptual point—that having a telos, that is, having interests or at least things in one's interests, is a necessary condition for having standing—another student explained it to her. "But rocks are alive and do have interests," she replied, and then proceeded to tell us a story that was cosmologically, morally, and aesthetically as rich as Plato's highly poetic closure to Book X of the Republic, the book in which, ironically, he rails against the social and moral degeneracy of poetry. Her story, the short version, took a full, glorious half hour. "Can't argue with that," another student said when she'd finished. Nor with Virgil. In the Metamorphoses, Pyrrha and her husband Deucalion, the sole survivors of a devastating world flood, are told by the oracle to "veil your heads, loosen the girdles of your garments and throw behind you the bones of your great mother." So they went down a hillside, veiled their heads, loosened their tunics, and began throwing stones just as they'd been told. "Who would believe what followed, did not ancient tradition bear witness to it? The stones began to [End Page 1] lose their hardness and rigidity, and after a little, grew soft. Then, once softened, they acquired a definite shape. When they had grown in size, and developed a tenderer nature, a certain likeness to a human form could be seen, though it was still not clear: they were like marble images, begun but not yet properly chiseled out, or like the unfinished statues. The damp earthy parts, containing some moisture, were adapted to make the body: that which was solid and inflexible became bone. What was lately a vein in the rock kept the same name, and in a brief space of time, thanks to the divine will of the gods, the stones thrown from male hands took on the appearance of men, while from those the woman threw, women were recreated. So it comes about we are a hardy race, well accustomed to toil, giving evidence of the origin from which we sprang" (Metamorphoses, Book I).