The Love of Nature and the End of the World
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The Love of Nature and the End of the World
The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern
Shierry Weber Nicholsen
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical
means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writ-
ing from the publisher.
This book was set in Berkeley Old Style Book by Achorn Graphic Services, Inc. on the Miles 33 system.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nicholsen, Shierry Weber.
The love of nature and the end of the world : the unspoken dimensions of environmental concern /
Shierry Weber Nicholsen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-14076-4 (hc. : alk. paper)
1. Human ecology—Philosophy. 2. Environmental degradation—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
GF21 .N53 2001
179′.1—dc21
2001044329
Arden H. Nicholsen
in memoriam
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix

I have been deeply touched by the thoughtfulness and eloquence of the stu-
dents in my environmental philosophy courses. Many will find thoughts and
feelings they expressed reflected here. I am grateful to them all.
My thanks to all the people who read earlier versions of the manuscript and
offered their comments, which were helpful in ways they might never have
anticipated. I am particularly grateful for the exceptionally close readings my
x Acknowledgments
friend Sally Hufbauer and an unnamed reviewer gave the manuscript and the
detailed suggestions they offered.
I owe a special debt to my friend and colleague Stephen G. Shehorn, who
not only graciously allowed me to accompany him on a hunt but also imparted
some of the elegance of his own style to portions of the manuscript he edited.
This book could not have been written without the support and illumination
afforded by my personal psychoanalysis—one of whose aims is to allow the
unspoken to become speakable. For this I am deeply grateful.
The opportunity to present and discuss portions of this material in various
professional settings has been extremely helpful, and I would like to express
my gratitude to the groups and organizations that provided those occasions,
among them Antioch University Seattle, the Northwest Alliance for Psycho-
analytic Study, the Pacific Northwest Psychoanalytic Society, the Seattle
Counselors Association, The Colorado College, and the Center for Western
European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
And finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Larry Cohen and Clay
Morgan of The MIT Press for the welcoming home they provided the idea that
became this book.
Introduction
This book has its starting point in a persistent question: How can the public
mind relegate matters of the environment, which is the ground of our whole
lives, to the periphery of concern, as though they were the private interest of a
group called “environmentalists”? At the same time, I have never met anyone

tates or disrupts this process. I have drawn heavily on all these writers, and
their influence on my thinking will be evident to the reader.
The groundwork for my efforts has been laid in other areas as well. There is
an abundance of insightful, elegant, and persuasive writing in the Western tra-
dition that evokes and articulates the sense of connection with the natural envi-
ronment, from Thoreau onward to Gary Snyder, and later David Abram and
many others as well. It is now more a question of how to assimilate this vision
than how to elaborate or add to it. Berkeley architect Christopher Alexander,
continuing Kant’s understanding of the aesthetic as a link between realms, has
made a particular contribution to our understanding of the way beauty and aes-
thetic experience bridge and unify our human and natural worlds and our in-
ternal and external experience. Like the environment, he would argue, aesthetic
experience is not a peripheral specialty but the ground of our human life. His
work has been the impetus to include an exploration of the role of beauty here.
In my efforts to explore the conjunction of our attachment to and our de-
structiveness toward the natural world, I have chosen to proceed by evoking as-
pects of experience—primarily emotional and perceptual experience—in the
reader’s mind so that they can be reflected on in their complexity. I have taken
certain themes in our relationship to the natural world and tried to illuminate
some of their many facets and sound some of their various tonalities. The re-
sult might be described as a series of interconnected meditations, or perhaps,
to use Theodor Adorno’s term, a set of developing variations. In many cases I
have taken as the starting points for these meditations the words of others who
have thought deeply about these issues—those thinkers mentioned above, and
many others, published and unpublished, as well. The polyphonic effect thus
created also evokes, I hope, the complexity of the subject matter. In addition,
it affords the reader a taste of the variety and richness of the work that bears
on these questions, work that is for the most part familiar only to specialized
audiences but that deserves to be more widely read.
In giving the book this particular form I have had to forgo many kinds of ex-

field often find difficult. Aesthetic theory and ideas from Buddhist and Sufi tra-
ditions are included as well. While I hope the book will inspire the reader to
explore the work of the various writers I have drawn on, that is not neces-
sary. Rather, I hope that the reader will take what is offered here as food for
thought, an opportunity for things unthought and unspoken to be evoked by
allowing the phrases to resonate in the mind and lead one where they will. At
the same time, the book requires the reader to tolerate a certain degree of dis-
turbance as he or she is unsettled by the juxtaposition of unfamiliar materi-
als—materials that do, however, in the end present a surprisingly unified
4 Introduction
picture. And of course it is not only the unfamiliarity of some of the work I
draw on that will be unsettling. The book attempts to evoke the emotional im-
pact of environmental deterioration, and that impact is disturbing. A friend
who read the manuscript commented that the book’s premise was “we had bet-
ter cry a lot,” and he may have been right. I do think we have a lot of mourn-
ing to do. The importance of mourning notwithstanding, my primary intention
in the book is to raise issues and evoke feelings in an attempt to elicit reflec-
tion on our terrible dilemma rather than to offer answers and solutions. That
too is unsettling and requires tolerating uncertainty while the process of indi-
vidual and collective reflection proceeds.
In keeping with the book’s form, each chapter stands largely on its own,
and within each chapter I move from one facet of an issue to another. Yet the
reader will be aware of multiple links between the various sections and be-
tween the chapters. Sometimes those links are made explicitly and sometimes
they are provided by allusions. Sometimes they are implicit in the overall se-
quence of the material. I begin the book with our sense of connection with the
nonhuman, hoping to establish this in the reader’s experience before moving to
the questions of apathy and destructiveness. The following outline of the chap-
ters may provide a helpful guide.
Chapter 1 deals with the issue of “the unspoken.” It evokes the many and

of events and situations like Hiroshima, nuclearism, and the Nazi Holocaust.
Chapter 6 reflects on the issue of the future as a way of asking about the im-
plications for action of all that has been said here. It is particularly concerned
with our capacity to think about time and the future, and about issues of lead-
ership and group and communal life as we move into the future. Failure to
deal with those questions would mean continuing as we are. Wilfred Bion,
who in my opinion is the most original and incisive of psychoanalytic thinkers,
emerges as the major figure of this chapter.
Bion hoped we would “dare to face the facts of the universe in which we
live.” The book as a whole is clearly more concerned with elucidating the
forces that would interfere with our capacity to conceive a future than with
offering suggestions as to what we should do next. Yet the book does suggest
certain relationships between thought and action, and by doing so offers an im-
plicit perspective on the question of what is to be done about our situation. In
the brief section titled “Concluding Thoughts,” I have offered some reflections
on the book’s implications for that question.
Notes
1. In Harold Searles, Countertransference and Related Subjects, 228–242.
2. Searles, “Unconscious Processes in the Environmental Crisis,” 228.
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1 Many Silences
Our most passionate feelings—our most intimate loves, our most overwhelm-
ing fears, our most heartrending griefs, our blackest despair—are these really
spoken, even to those we love and trust? Are they really heard? Certainly not
in our abundant talk of environmental matters, argued so cogently and so fero-
ciously, documented so carefully, denounced so righteously, described so beau-
tifully. Yes, they are difficult to put into words—more so when they concern
not the human only but the natural world as well. But we sense they are
widely shared. In the urgency of our situation, this speechlessness is mysteri-
ous. In hiding the depth of our concern from others, perhaps we also hide it

1
But there are other reasons why we do not speak of our loves. What we
love, we want to protect, as environmentalists are fond of noting.
2
Though
threats to what we love often impel us to speak out, we also protect our loves
by not speaking of them. To speak may be to invite harm. Why does a fly-
fisherman refuse to divulge the location of his special trout stream? To protect
it, in many senses.
Love demands privacy. It is guarded, fiercely, by a boundary of silence to-
ward what is outside. Those feelings are the private domain of those who feel
them for one another. When the private intimacy of the love relationship spills
over the boundaries, there is a sense that it is dissipated, or sullied, contami-
nated by the less sensitive energies of the group outside. Love might then be
talked about by nonlovers, and it disappears in such talk. The group and the
couple, as Otto Kernberg says, are antagonists.
3
Love fears indifference and
scorn. Who would want to expose their love, thing of beauty, to rejecting eyes?
Perhaps we fear that the attitude in those eyes would remind us of our own
capacity for indifference.
Many Silences 9
Love also fears envy. We know that love is precious, and we are lucky to have
it. Do not tempt the gods, happy lovers! To speak of love is to expose it to the
forces of envy, and envy often wants to denigrate and spoil. Perhaps we sense that
some of the destruction of wild places is done with a feeling of vicious triumph
over those who love them. Love guards against jealousy as well. Those we love
might feel abandoned or betrayed by our love and loyalty to others. Could a be-
loved human tolerate knowing how much we love a particular place or creature?
The group too is jealous of lovers. Think of all the measures society takes to

it to be. But he was also affirming his humanity in that, had he not cut the
cords, the desperate cries of the animal would have told him what he already
knew, that it was a sentient, feeling being and not a machine at all.”
4
To feel
the desperate suffering of any creature is terrifying. It can be so terrifying that
we want to shut it out of our awareness. We ourselves are prey, sometimes con-
sciously, sometimes beneath the surface of our awareness, to a host of desper-
ate anxieties—about the holocaust of nature, the collapse of the world, the
failure of a future. These we leave almost wholly unspoken. “It’s scary,” some-
one will say, and then be silent. It is as though we are cutting our own vo-
cal cords.
One reason we keep silent about these profound anxieties is that we are
afraid of “losing it,” going mad. Think of the silliness of soldiers on leave from
the front. They simply cannot bear to contemplate their situation as a whole.
That way madness lies. What madness is that? These are the dreadful anxieties
first encountered in early infancy: the fear of annihilation, of utter loss of orien-
tation, of abandonment by any kind of caretaker or benevolent authority who
can take responsibility and protect us from destruction. Fears of wholesale envi-
ronmental destruction are of precisely this kind—states of terror combined
with utter helplessness and dependency. The more desperate we feel, the more
we wish to ignore these fears, to keep moving straight ahead without looking
to the side. Susan Griffin characterizes this state of mind in words that evoke
the urgency of the denial that pervades it:
Yet perhaps it is the very extremity of the danger, bordering as it does
on the continuity of life itself, the desire for safety as an ultimate state
that seals away all fear as if into a foreign country, the wish for a miracu-
lous, mysterious security won not so much by practical effort, or seen
through theoretical understanding, but by a determination to keep on in
one direction despite every indication of trouble, hence vanquishing not

vate domain of love—shaming and scorning, for instance. It is taboo to express
one’s feelings for the natural world too strongly. We might be called anti-
human, immature, unhealthy, obsessed, not to mention greenie, nature-lover,
tree-hugger, weirdo, kook. . . .
A friend of mine grew up on a farm. His family was not close and offered
the boy little emotional support. He was an anxious child and spent a good
deal of time alone in the fields and the woods. The trees were reassuring pres-
ences to him. They endured, season after season, and each one seemed an
12 Chapter 1
individual. Animals were more frightening: they made loud noises and could
move fast and get out of control. They gave birth and were killed and eaten.
But all those experiences of the natural world remained wordless. Who would
he have talked to about them? There was no hearing for a child’s emotional ex-
periences in that family. Even if he had had words to express them, he would
have felt silly doing so. They were part of a private world. Words were for the
public world of school, but there was no talk of feelings or anxieties there. To
try to bridge the divide between public and private, he felt, would be to risk
unbearable shame and scorn.
Experience that is unbearably painful is impossibly difficult to communicate,
and one falls mute. As Susan Griffin remarks, “a certain kind of silence is a
common effect of catastrophe.”
6
The very fact of not being heard gives rise to a
shame that is further silencing. The more violently painful the experience, the
more abusive and traumatic the lack of reception, the greater the muteness and
the shame. This is why war leads to so much muteness. War uses up words,
as Henry James said. What happens then to the experience? It is as though
the not-hearing is taken back into the self and becomes a barrier of silencing
turned inward, shutting away and even erasing the experience itself. Men re-
turn silent from the battlefield, poorer in themselves.

ther and dreaded those summer visits. Going fishing for catfish in the cowpond
during those summers was part of the ritual of coming into manhood his grand-
father’s way. One day his grandfather landed a big catfish and asked the boy
to grab it. The boy let it slip by mistake, and it escaped into the pond. He
was ashamed and cried; he was failing as a man. He tried to make up for it
by catching a catfish himself, and he did catch one. Then it had to be cleaned.
His grandfather’s way of cleaning a catfish was to nail the snout of the living
fish to a board and then pull the fish’s skin off with a pair of needle-nosed
pliers. The fish the boy caught must have revived a little during the process,
for it screamed—the horrifying, chattering, unforgettable scream of a crea-
ture in agony. The boy could never forget that scream, or ever make up for
what he had done by catching that fish, or ever speak of the experience to the
one he had shared it with, his grandfather. The scream of agony was matched
by the silence and shame in which the experience was buried.
Sometimes the bond with the natural world is forged through suffering. The
scream of the catfish is received by the boy, who knows suffering. But how
loud and how excruciating is this suffering that cannot be acknowledged and
talked about! And how strong a role fear plays in this unspokenness. The boy
is afraid of his grandfather, who has shown how he can deal out pain to living
creatures, and he is afraid to acknowledge this experience of shared suffering,
of which he and his grandfather are the witnesses. And the pain in the grand-
father, which led him to be so hard? Unspoken, the food of truth denied, the
child condemned to silent shame.
The Voice That Comes to Speech
I fell ill, broken in body and spirit. The main symptoms of my illness
were fits which began by my hearing the voices of my fellow soldiers
14 Chapter 1
becoming louder and louder until I could bear it no longer and lost con-
sciousness.
—Alfred Wolfsohn, The Problem of Limitations

crawl to him,” my inner voice shouted—“No, you cannot, you must save
yourself. Who helped you? Your comrades also passed you by.” And I
crawled on, was buried under rubble and awoke amongst corpses. It