Pollan Makin' Food

These last few chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma were easily my favorite ones. While I enjoyed the information and opinions in the previous chapters, I found these to be the most engaging and thought provoking chapters of the novel. I'm thinking in particular of the Hunting chapter here because I found myself both shaking my head in disappointment at Pollan's half-hearted attempt to marginalize hunting and nodding at his struggle to wrap his mind around how he felt after killing and harvesting the pig. After seeing Pollan's conclusions about hunting I see that he purposefully gave hunting a narrow definition, and wrote a little "hunter porn" for good measure, so that he could dispel it and recreate the idea of hunting with the reader in tow. Pollan couldn't have asked for a better hunting partner, Angelo not only sees the pig as wild food waiting to be tamed but seems to have none of the macho tendencies that he (and probably the great majority of his readers) would react to with distaste and write off as foolish and ignorant behavior. I was actually a little disappointed that Angelo (or Pollan) didn't have a little more of a ritual in regards to the animal and killing it, especially since Pollan brings up in the previous chapter that some of these customs (praying before a meal, eating only parts of an animal) are what make meat eating more palatable to us. I'm not asking for him to tell the pig "I see you" or "your spirit goes with Ehwah" but I think he wastes his breath telling us on page 358 that a virtue of hunting is that it brings up questions of the relationship between man and animals-breath he should have used giving the pig at the very least a "I'm sorry buddy." I've never been hunting but I think fishing is close enough and part of respecting the animals you eat is acknowledging that you took their life, but I feel like Pollan is too distanced from this by his journalistic (see: ironic) viewing of the scene and editorializes rather that become fully engrossed in what he's doing. Despite having these problems with it I really enjoyed his conclusions and thought it was pretty wise of him to preface it with the ethics of eating animals chapter and follow it with the gathering fungi chapter. I have more to say about this but I gotta go..

Garrad's Positions

In this excerpt of Ecocriticism Garrard explores several groups and their rhetorical and philosophical attitudes towards ecology. His approach is refreshing as he gives each group a fair reading but takes the time to point out what their critics say and the flaws inherent in certain ways of thinking. I am thinking specifically of his commentary on Environmentalism, in which he states in the same breath that environmentalism is extremely powerful and yet compromised as it makes so many concessions to society and "the ruling socio-economic order" as radicals have called it. This frankness is refreshing to me as he is being realistic in light of his own opinions and/or hopes, which he makes clear are aligned with the earth's interests-and not those of cornucopians who see natural resources as commodities. Garrard gives a view of the landscape of ecological thinking that allows us to view other writers as claiming allegiance to a branch of ecocritical philosophy. Williams, for instance, identifies with ecofeminist and social ecology ways of thinking. In her story that blurs historical events and fantasy-style poetry Williams indicts the masculine military establishment as the clear culprit of nuclear bomb testing near enough to her neighborhood that she can recall seeing an explosion from her childhood. More importantly the women of her family line become infected with breast cancer and men suffer from various forms of cancer-leaving one woman twice a widow. The government's role as rapist of the land intensifies when it throws its hands up and claims no responsibility as it is literally against the law for the government to be implicated in such a crime, let alone blamed for it. As Garrard points out in his passage on Ecofeminism the female is identified with the land-its life and seasons-and the male is identified with science and rationality: the likes of which creates such wonders as nuclear bombs.

Cronon and Thoreau

In William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness, he states the difficulties that the modern idea of wilderness, nature, and the frontier clash with the goals of environmentalism and conservation. While giving a history of ideas and the evolution of man's relationship towards nature, Cronon explains the danger of seeing untamed lands as alien to humans, as though when people walk amongst the wilds we are a purer version of ourselves that has no effect on the landscape. Thoreau appears in the essay more than once, most notably as an example of a nineteenth century writer who views the wilderness with the same fear and awe of the ancients, seeing God's fearsome creation as the sublime on earth. The two writers seem to agree on several points, the most important in my mind is that Thoreau did not live in opposition or imagine it was indifferent to his presence, he lived in and tended the land he lived on while appreciating in his travels the sublime and untouched nature of wild landscapes. Thoreau's joining of acknowledging one's effect on nature while also being able to appreciate its "otherness" is exactly the change Cronon recommended for environmentalists to adopt. However, Thoreau's writings did encourage the natural tourism that fostered what he perceived as the way in which humans justified their destructive city lifestyle.