Issue 09: Nature Loving (Fall 2005) Lisa Uddin and Peter Hobbs In the opening sequences of Luc Jacquet’s recent film for National Geographic, March of The Penguins (2005), audiences are shown spectacular vistas of a barren Antarctic landscape. The ice-covered backgrounds are punctuated by tiny, black figures waddling across the horizon. The warm and knowing narration of Morgan Freeman assures viewers that this promises to be “a love story.” “In the harshest place on earth,” he states, “love finds a way. This is the incredible true story of a family’s journey to bring life into the world.” What unfolds in the remaining 80 minutes is a nature documentary about the breeding habits of the Emperor Penguin, made legible through the conventional rhetoric of the modern, heterosexual family. Emerging from a throng of indistinguishable, and vaguely frightening, penguin bodies, are the affective bonds between prospective male and female mates, between attentive “fathers” and the eggs that are left to their care, and between traveling “mothers” and the adorable newborns to which they return. These visible intimacies demonstrate that …

Issue 09: Nature Loving (Fall 2005) Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands Introducing queer ecology: from perspective to power1 In the opening of her 1997 memoir North Enough, Jan Zita Grover describes moving to the north woods of Minnesota from San Francisco: “I did not move to Minnesota for the north woods,” she writes. “I had only the vaguest idea of what the term meant when I first saw them in early spring, the birch, aspen, and tamarack skinned of their needles and leaves. I thought they looked diseased.”2 Given that Grover had been a front-line AIDS worker in the 1980s in a city violently decimated by the disease, it is hardly surprising that she saw sickness everywhere. “I moved there,” she writes, “to try to leave behind – or at least, at a remoter distance – the plague that had consumed my life for the past six years.”3 Of course, Grover was not able to leave her plague behind; she was still “heavy with mourning, thick with sorrow.”4 Although she moved to the north woods with the hope of finding some sort of …

Issue 09: Nature Loving (Fall 2005) Melissa Aronczyk From Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Aldo Leopold, seminal thinkers in the American environmental tradition cite wilderness as one of the distinguishing marks of American culture. The image of an unspoiled natural setting as a regenerative haven and a palliative to the stress of urban life is stamped on the country’s literary and historical texts. But if wilderness is the refuge of the true American spirit, the other emblem of American identity is how we get there – by car. The question, “What do you drive?” as an interrogation of identity demonstrates the profound sense of self that is lodged in our personal means of transportation. We are willing to let our cars stand for who we are. Indeed, the history of the automobile in America is fundamental to our conception of self and of our environment; and despite the obvious contradiction inherent in using a car to “get back” to nature, our current conception of nature, and the social movements to protect it, are …

Issue 09: Nature Loving (Fall 2005) Matthew Roth In his 1986 book, Biophilia, E.O. Wilson explores the idea that the love of nature – or, more specifically, of “life and lifelike processes” – is in our genes.  He admits that the “evidence for the proposition is not strong in a formal scientific sense,”1 and despite efforts to substantiate it, the “biophilia hypothesis” remains more an exercise in poetic imagination than in hard science.  Wilson, hopeful that humans have the capacity for redemption usually attributed to their souls, puts his faith in the nearest sociobiological equivalent, their DNA.  If he’s right, the selfish gene contains its own antidote, though even Wilson admits that this may be wishful thinking.  “The conclusion I draw is optimistic,” he writes. “To the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them, and on ourselves.”2 Whether rooted in genes or not, nature love is fraught with ambiguities that challenge simple optimism.  Like other, clinically diagnosed “-philias,” biophilia can produce perverse results:  loving nature and violating it …

Issue 09: Nature Loving (Fall 2005) Gary Genosko  Walt Disney is said to have pinned a note over each of his animators’ desks reminding them to “Keep it cute!” This demand for cuteness is not restricted to the cartoon bestiary, despite the remarkable array of cute mice and other rodents found there. Mickey Mouse was not always so cute. As he evolved, he became progressively more juvenile in appearance.1 The circles that gave form to his body – especially his ears which very early on ceased to be drawn in perspective – were subtlely adjusted to signify that his mean streak and off-color hijinks had been nipped in the bud: no more stripping and spanking frankfurters, hoisting Minnie by the knickers, and playing music on the bodies of animals. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould has argued that Mickey’s progressive juvenilization – what is known as neoteny – moved toward the features of his young nephew Morty. This was accomplished by an increase in eye size, head length and cranial vault size; Mickey’s arms and legs and …

Issue 09: Nature Loving (2005) Matthew Brower Contemporary woodlore suggests that to properly respect nature we should “take only photographs and leave only footprints” when we enter the wilderness. This expression takes photography as a model of non-interventionist right practice and offers a vision of nature as a non-human space in which humans do not belong.1  In this schema photography appears as a non-intrusive, environmentally friendly activity that shows proper respect for the fragility of nature. This rhetoric positions nature photography as maintaining a separation between humans and nature.2 It assures us that photography keeps us at an appropriate distance from nature. Thus, nature photography is the figure of an ideal relation to nature; it provides access to nature while leaving it untouched. Nature photography offers us an image of nature that it at the same time forbids us to occupy. It is this relation to nature that is at work in wildlife photography. In his essay, “Why look at Animals?”, John Berger argues that wildlife photography presents an image of the animal as fundamentally …