Books that take their readers into the pitiful and sordid and base and loathsome lives of the unfortunate and malicious … such books lower my energy and infect me with their negative emotions. For many readers this influence is probably all too subtle; most people only read books that agree with their emotional state or their desired emotional state.
Environmentalism as a moral issue in literature: Writing effective environmental literature may be even more challenging than writing literature that seeks to sensitize readers to the suffering of other people. Why? Because people, whatever their culture or color, may more easily facilitate identification and empathy than monkeys, panda bears, sheep, fish, insects, and trees. Trees? Yes, we have tree-huggers, and some are motivated by pity for trees, but many more are moved by knowledge, particularly the knowledge that some forms of “animate” life, possibly their own too, depend on trees.
Literature that addresses the challenges facing the ecosphere, or nature itself, is too far removed from familiar particulars too be able to inspire feelings of empathy; the grand environmentalist must write as a scientist, providing reasons for environmentally responsible behaviour. In other words, as the Environment (i.e. everything affected by and affecting human life) becomes the predominant moral issue facing humankind, writers will cease to find much meaning by creating characters and narratives that generate emotional appeal.
(What kind of reasons for environmentally responsible behaviour can we provide? If the negative or moral emotions cannot form part of the argument, are we to persuade people with data showing the undesirability of ecological catastrophe? A question for comedians and thinkers.)
When the entire ecosphere is at stake the moral emotion of empathy is superfluous. Why? Because, with respect to the ecosphere, everyone is already in the same boat, and no imaginative leap is needed to grasp that dwindling water resources, pollution, rising ocean levels, pandemics, high tech warfare, desertification, peak oil and death are issues that together leave no one untouched.
In the end, environmental catastrophe is not a subject fit for literature or art, and wherever it is introduced into art it is ignored. Who pays any attention to the ravaged landscape behind the Mona Lisa? The environmental destruction envisioned in the Book of Revelation is positively welcomed by Christians as a sign of the imminent fulfillment of their deluded wishes. Think of Joyce’s Bloom associating a graveyard with a honeycomb…. What? Is death the candy of the promised land?
And yet—we engineers and manufacturers of death–what if it is?
