By Nancy Menning
In Los Angeles Spring (Aperture, 1986), landscape photographer Robert Adams sums up the previous century’s environmental history of southern California in one sentence: “All that is clear is the perfection of what we were given, the unworthiness of our response, and the certainty, in view of our current deprivation, that we are judged” (n.p.). Genesis 2–3 provides the overall shape of this narrative. Stripped of this mythical trope, the ethical force of the account of environmental degradation portrayed in Los Angeles Spring would be greatly diminished. In this essay, I offer four texts to invite reflection on the role of myths in shaping human relationships with the living world.
Reading Genesis, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)
The early chapters of Genesis provide familiar mythologies for the ecological imagination. Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis is an extended essay “exploring the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind” (196). In person and in her writing, Robinson is forthright about her disappointment with the modern academic discipline of religious studies. It is refreshing to turn aside from the well-worn ruts of the discursive tracks we might otherwise trod with our habitual interlocutors to listen for new insight from someone so clearly enamored of the biblical text. Robinson does not disappoint. While writers with ecological sensibilities often snag their attention on the “dominion” language of Genesis 1:26 and 1:28, Robinson points repeatedly to the goodness of creation. And to beauty. Drawing her reader’s attention to Genesis 2:9, she marks it as “an extremely elegant detail” (39) that the trees are said to be beautiful before they are said to be useful for food.
The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King (University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
In our contemporary world, which is both colonized and climate-changed, competing mythical narratives are offered. Thomas King’s The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative is a collection of essays exploring oral storytelling in Native communities. The first essay tells the Haudenosaunee creation story of the woman who fell from the sky, followed by the creation account of Genesis 1–3. King compares the worldviews conveyed by each story, then writes: “So here are our choices: a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and slides toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and moves toward harmony; a world marked by competition or a world determined by co-operation” (24-25). The essay ends with a refrain shared by all the essays in the book, in which King offers to his readers the story he’s told—in this first essay, the Skywoman story—to do with as they will, even to forget it. “But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now” (29).
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions, 2013)
“Skywoman Falling,” the opening essay of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, compares the same two creation narratives that Thomas King shared, with a similar conclusion: the deafening familiarity of stereotypical interpretations of the Genesis account in western culture shapes imagination in unhelpful directions, such that her ecology students are unable to imagine beneficial relationships between humans and other species. Initially, as in King, the implication is that we might choose one story over the other. But the guiding metaphor of the book is braiding, not choice. Braiding Sweetgrass recounts Kimmerer’s efforts to draw together western science and indigenous ways of knowing. Of interest to religious studies scholars, Kimmerer also makes occasional comments about Christianity. In an essay halfway through the book, Kimmerer recounts the moment she realized that “love and gratitude for the Creation” (222) can emerge not only from Indigenous worldviews but from Christian tradition as well. We can learn from one another and recommit to the better parts of our own traditions as we seek better ways of living together.
Animism: Respecting the Living World, by Graham Harvey (Columbia University Press, 2006)
And what of the living world beyond the human in these times of habitat loss, species extinctions, and climate change? The rich literature on “new animism” suggests avenues for reaching beyond diverse human perspectives to re-imagine mythic stories that might de-center humans and shape multispecies relationships in more respectful and loving ways. Graham Harvey opens Animism: Respecting the Living World with a compelling definition: “Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others” (xi). Harvey begins by distinguishing shifting understandings of animism in the academic community, moving his reader away from disparaging views of Indigenous spiritualities as “primitive” as well as dismissive views of myths as either irrational beliefs or pseudoscience. After describing diverse Indigenous and eco-pagan animisms, he provides thematic discussions of the varying ways in which animist communities ascribe life, consciousness, and personhood to non-human entities, and how they address challenges arising from hunting and gathering activities, intentional and unintentional deaths, and other aspects of reciprocal relation. This book is a foundational resource for the rich literature in new animism, including recent work in Christian animism.
Taken together, these four books direct our attention to the multitudinous relationships that entwine us; the subjectivity, agency, and moral value of all beings involved; and the crucial need to give some motive force—via mythic narratives and other stories—to the pressing challenges of our contemporary crisis. As the map is not the territory, neither is any interpretation the myth. May the stories we choose to tell—and to live our lives by—draw all of us, Indigenous and Christian and otherwise alike, into better relationships with the living world.
Nancy Menning is a courtesy research associate in the environmental humanities at the University of Oregon.
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