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'I do therefore there is': enlivening socio-environmental theory

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 Environmental Politics
Vol. 18, No. 1, February 2009, 1–17

‘I do therefore there is’: enlivening socio-environmental theory

Michael S. Carolan*

Department of Sociology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA

Socio-environmental theory needs to be enlivened, to be made with bodies –

literally – in mind. Experiences of nature do not always fit neatly within
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categories of reason and rationality. Embodied knowledge plays a

significant role in shaping how we think about nature. Following a brief
overview of some literature on embodiment, to place ‘flesh’ on this
argument, case studies, ethnographies and the like are examined to clarify
the idea that we think – and thus think about nature – as bodies. Finally,
discussion turns toward what an enlivened environmental politics may look
like once we begin thinking of nature as being embodied.
Keywords: Merleau-Ponty; social theory; nature; environment; knowledge;
embodiment

Enliven:
To give life, action, or motion to; to make vigorous or active; to excite; to
quicken; as fresh fuel enlivens a fire. (Webster Dictionary, 1913)
Socio-environmental theory is dead. In stating this, I am not suggesting that we
no longer have use for these conceptual frameworks. If anything, the reverse is
true. Nor do I want to imply that social theories of nature, landscape, and the
like have exhausted their descriptive and explanatory currency – that they have
told us, in other words, all that they can about human–environmental
relations. My proclamation, instead, is meant to be taken more literally. To
formally announce socio-environmental theory as being dead is to simply point
out that it is not alive; that it is inanimate, motionless; that it is without
bodies – or, more specifically, without doing bodies. To put it another way,
while contemporary socio-environmental theorists would not deny the
existence of people with biological bodies, these bodies remain largely passive.
Here, the body (if mentioned at all) exists as a vessel of consciousness,

*Email: mcarolan@lamar.colostate.edu

ISSN 0964-4016 print/ISSN 1743-8934 online

Ó 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09644010802622748
http://www.informaworld.com
 2 M.S. Carolan

ontologically sealed off from the world it is conscious of. The body thus acts
within space. It does not, however, enact space.
This paper seeks to enliven socio-environmental theory by focusing on the
role of the body in the re/production of nature. The goal is thus to turn these
previously conceived biological vessels into acting, enacting, and thus creative
forces by highlighting that we do not simply exist within a material reality.
Rather, bodies help constitute that reality, at least in part, through our doings
within it.
Approaching understandings of nature from this direction, from the angle
of embodiment, reveals important insights that would otherwise fly below our
theoretical radar. For example, if nature is shaped by our doings – that is, if it is
an embodied effect – then what ‘natures’ are possible (or probable) become
constrained by the embodiments available to a society. Can we, then, call for
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the conservation of a particular type of nature without also giving attention to

its corresponding supporting corporeal practices? If we cannot, which bodily
hexis, to borrow a term from Bourdieu (1995, p. 93), goes with which nature?
Similarly, what will happen as embodiments, such as those found among
indigenous communities who have lived within nature for centuries, become
folded into the corporeal regime of the so-called modern world? What will this
do to our collective understanding of the natural world? Questions like these
are explored in the pages that follow.
I begin by situating experience within the body, looking specifically at
literatures that detail the corporeal poetics of everyday life. While approaching
the subject from diverse disciplines angles – from geography to sociology,
philosophy and anthropology – these literatures are in consensus on the point
that experience and bodily practice cannot be divorced from one another. In
other words, what we see (and hear, smell, taste and touch) is shaped by our
doings. As Harrison (2000, p. 507, emphasis original) explains, ‘our belief is in
our acts . . . and in acting [we] can, quite literally, make sense’ of the world.
While it may be helpful to stand on the shoulders of giants, my point is to
bring bodies into socio-environment theory (it is already full of shoulders). In
short, the argument thus far remains, well . . . dead. A work that purports to
enliven socio-environmental theory cannot be divorced from the very thing it
condemns current frameworks for ignoring: the corporeal poetics of everyday
life. Thus, to place ‘flesh’ on this argument I turn to a variety of different bodies
embedded within a host of various space/times. In doing this, I look toward
case studies, ethnographies, and the like to clarify the idea that we think – and
thus think about nature – as bodies.
This brings me to the final section, where I speak to the ecological politics
underlying this argument. Those looking to feed their modern appetites for
ready-made programmatic solutions – this is ‘good’, this is ‘bad’, etc. – will
have to look elsewhere. Enlivened theorising suggests, multiplies and helps
amplify; it does not, however, seek to prescribe. Yet, while I refuse to engage in
a type of cookbook scholarship (e.g., do X, Y and Z and all will be resolved), I
do offer some suggestions about what an enlivened environmental politics may
 Environmental Politics 3

look like once we begin thinking of nature as having bodies – as being, in a

word, embodied.

Bodies in nature
I find it strange that the active, corporeal poetics of everyday life have not been
given greater attention by socio-environmental theorists. To be sure, there are
some truly exemplary works that seek to sensualise our understanding of the
world (e.g., Bateson 1982, Merleau-Ponty 1992, Rodaway 1994, Abram 1996,
Brown and Toadvine 2003, Thrift 2004, Cataldi and Hamrick 2007). As a
whole, however, a noticeable agnosticism remains among environmental social
scientists toward issues of corporality, which helps explain its relative omission
in the literature.
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Yet, in ignoring the body, socio-environmental theory is confining its gaze

to a surprisingly small aspect of what it claims to represent tout court. As others
note, unconscious thought makes up approximately 95% of all cognition
(Lakoff and Johnson 1998, p. 13; Norretranders 1998, p. 127), while ‘95 percent
of academic thought [tends to be] concentrated on the cognitive dimension of
the conscious ‘‘I’’’ (Thrift 2000, p. 36). The non-corporeal rationalism that
pervades social theory thus constitutes only the smallest part of social reality
(see, e.g., Damasio 2000). The remainder of thinking ‘lies in the body,
understood not as a fixed residence for ‘‘mind’’ but as a dynamic trajectory by
which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of’
(Thrift 2004, p. 90; see also Wittgenstein 1953, number 211, Williams 1977,
p. 131, Deleuze 1988, p. 97, Varela 1992, p. 336, Bourdieu 1995, p. 91). It is
time socio-environmental theory acknowledges that other 95% of how we
understand the world.
Fortunately, there is a growing body of literature directed at sensualising
social theory. In this section, a brief overview of some of this work is provided.
In doing this, specific attention is paid to those works that afford insight into
how our embodiments allow us to make sense of nature.

The embodied experience: tuned bodies

There is a growing line of scholarship coming from social scientists highlighting
the quotidian relation between active bodies and knowledges of the world (e.g.,
Rodaway 1994, Stoller 1997, Feld 2000, Ingold 2000, Thrift 2000, Carolan
2007). While these literatures do not speak in unison as to how this relation
plays out on the rough ground of everyday life, they do share at least one
conviction. Specifically, they each note the existence of an embodied
consciousness.
One way to begin thinking about this is through Gibson’s (1986) ecological
theory of perception and in particular his concept of affordance. Affordance,
for Gibson (1986, p. 127), is defined as ‘what it (the environment) offers the
animal, what it provides or furnishes’. To put it another way, affordances
 4 M.S. Carolan

speak to how the environment affords the body with a variety of actions and
sensations: e.g., light affords the body to see colour; a landscape dotted with
objects affords the body a sense of visual depth; and an environment of water
affords the body such actions as swimming and floating (in addition to certain
kinesthetic sensations unavailable to a body on dry land). Gibson’s theory
reminds us that, while environments do not determine apperceptions and
actions, the biophysical ecology of space does make possible an array of doings,
doings that in turn ‘tune’ bodies for certain understandings of the natural
world.
For an example of how understandings of nature are shaped by bodies
‘tuned’ for a particular kind of experience let us look briefly at the Inuit (an
indigenous people located in northern Canada). Whereas Westerners tend to
privilege sight over the other senses (Foucault 1979), the Inuit privilege inputs
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from the ear; a point that has led one scholar to conclude that the Inuit ‘define
space more by sound than sight’ (Carpenter 1973, p. 33). This helps explain
why the Inuit had such difficulty complying with early European explorers’
requests to draw maps of their territory – namely, because their perceptional
field was ‘tuned’ to different environmental affordances (Blakemore 1981). As
Rodaway (1994, p. 110) explains:
The wind was perhaps more important than the vista, offering environmental
information from its noise, force and direction, and from its olfactory content as
well. The long periods of darkness in the tundra winter and the snow and ice
expanses where sky and land and sea merge make visual sensitivity less useful,
especially when the individual is hidden well into his or her parka to keep out of
the cold and biting wind. Instead, the other senses take on a greater importance;
including the hearing of distant and invisible sound sources – the water against a
shoreline hidden by fog, a subtle change in the sound of ice over which the sledge
is moving, the tone of the wind as it howls. It is a land not of objects – that is the
world of sight – but one of events and relationships – that is the all-round
alertness of the ears.

Sound is integrative; it does not come to us as isolated bits of information

(Feld 1984). The world is, quite literally, a symphony, full of consonance,
dissonance, and harmonies (each of which presupposes an entanglement of
‘notes’). Nor can we easily set ourselves apart from this symphony, as anyone
can attest to who has felt a loud clap of thunder in their chest or had their
vision blur with each thud emanating from a subwoofer. Conversely, vision is
fragmenting; a sensation that involves extracting phenomena from a back-
ground, which creates the appearance of isolation and independence (Abram
1996). This explains why the Inuit, by emphasising sound over sight, are better
‘tuned’ for events and relationships and why they had such problems
complying with early European explorers’ request for a map (for a map is
about located ‘things’ in space).
Other research has documented how socio-technical quasi-objects too can
‘tune’ bodies, particularly by altering, amplifying and dampening sensations.
For example, Michael (2000) describes how the commonplace technology of
 Environmental Politics 5

walking boots has led to the emergence of a particular body-regime, which,

together, have brought forth a novel way of perceiving the natural
world. Elsewhere, Lewis (2000) details the mediating effects of modern rock-
climbing technologies in the dialogue between mountains and rock-climbing
bodies.
These examples highlight the chimerical quality of the so-called pure (true)
understanding of nature. A ‘pure’ view of nature presupposes a body-from-
nowhere. Yet we can only know nature as bodies-in-the-world; as bodies doing
nature, from somewhere, in a particular way.

The phenomenological turn

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Nietzsche (1969) famously mocked the West’s quest for eternals, a quest for
that which is furthest away, while the closest things – such as the rough, bumpy
ground where flesh meets the world – are ignored due to their perceived
banality. Wittgenstein (1969, number 467) also understood how embodiments
allow us to make sense, literally, of the world:
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he [sic] says again and again ‘I know
that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears
this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.’

What Wittgenstein’s philosopher friend failed to realise is how their active

embodiment in the world – a world with trees – played into their knowing of
trees (see also Harrison 2000, p. 507). What this individual did not understand,
in other words, is that our knowing and perceiving of trees is wrapped up in
acts, such as climbing trees as children, making a shelf in woodwork class,
dancing on hardwood floors, getting splinters, crumpling paper, and hitting a
baseball with a wooden bat. The same holds for our knowing of nature. Our
beliefs about nature are intimately tied to our acts and practices. They are
shaped, in a word, by our doings.
In Merleau-Ponty’s writings we find the most sustained critique and
corrective to the mind/body distinction. Merleau-Ponty (1969) discusses the
incarnate cogito, which places mind, body and world in a state of perpetual co-
production. In accordance with this non-dualistic ontology, it is incorrect to
speak of bodies having consciousness. Instead, bodies are consciousness. In
doing this, Merleau-Ponty seeks to shatter one of the West’s most fundamental
philosophical assumptions: that we are independent agents (res cogitans)
ontologically independent from a world we work on (res extensia). As Merleau-
Ponty (1992, p. 82) argues, ‘I am conscious of the world through the medium of
my body . . . I am conscious of my body via the world.’ Merleau-Ponty’s (1992,
p. 215) ontology is therefore not about absolutes or pre-givens but potentials
that emerge out of the ‘folds’ of embodied activity: ‘I am not, therefore, in
Hegel’s phrase, ‘‘a hole in being’’ but a hollow, a fold, which has been made
and can be unmade’.
 6 M.S. Carolan

Merleau-Ponty speaks of ‘the flesh’ to refer to this reciprocal presence of

the sentient in the sensible and of the sensible in the sentient (Abram 1996). In
his own words:
The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should
need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth,
and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-
temporal individual and the idea. . . . The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of
Being. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, pp. 183–184, 139)

According to Merleau-Ponty (1992, p. xviii), ‘The world is not what I think,

but what I live through.’ To illustrate this, Merleau-Ponty (1992) offers the
example of the blind person and their cane, which in time becomes absorbed
into their living body. As Merleau-Ponty explains, when probing the ground,
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the unpractised person only feels the ground through the cane. As habituations
slowly lead to the absorption of the cane into the body, however, more
sophisticated forms of interaction develop. In doing this, one begins to feel the
ground directly, in which case the stick ceases to be an object in itself and
becomes instead part of the body.
The flesh thus refers to how we and the world are, in a sense (pun intended),
one. For example, during a thunderstorm I feel the clap of thunder as it shakes
my body and the floor beneath my feet; looking out of the window I see, even
without touch, the sogginess of the soil and the softness of flower petals as they
cushion the pounding rain; and I hear the hardness of the pavement as the
raindrops bounce on impact (see also Weston 1994, p. 67). In phenomen-
ologically grasping the world, we are grasped back. Yet we have managed to
unlearn this fundamental truth:
Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because
scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we have
unlearned how to see, hear, and . . . feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily
organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear,
and feel. (Merleau-Ponty 1992, p. 89)

Facial vision refers to our ability to experience the world through a sense of
presence. While the sighted are often unaware of this sensory information
(because they have been conditioned to be ‘blind’ to this information), the
blind provide accounts of how they can ‘see’ with the body. John Hull, a
Professor at Birmingham University, has written extensively on the sensory
world of the blind. Hall, who had vision problems from his teenage years,
became totally blind as an adult. In describing his personal experience with
facial vision, Hull has difficulty locating it in any one of the senses. In his own
words:
One wants to put up a hand to protect oneself, so intense is this awareness. One
shrinks from whatever it is. It seems to be characterized by a certain stillness in
the atmosphere. Where one should perceive the movement of the air and a certain
openness, somehow one becomes aware of a stillness, an intensity instead of an
 Environmental Politics 7

emptiness, a sense of vague solidity. The exact source of the sensation is difficult
to locate. . . . Awareness is greater when the environment is less polluted by
sound, and in the silence of my late evening walk home, I am most intensely aware
of it. (Hull 1990, p. 20)

Hull explains how facial vision is a matter of awareness; not of one sense
compensating for the loss of another (a common misconception). He goes on to
explain how facial vision is often lost in a busy urban environment, where
noise, air flows and acoustics are in constant flux as a result of the mass
movement of cars and people. Yet during those late night walks home he
describes how he has been able to extend this corporal ‘reach’ to sense trees,
lampposts, and other pedestrian objects as far away as 8 feet.
Such decentred modes of experience might at first seem strange. But think
about it: the reason we can experience anything is because we are part of that
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sensible field (Abram 1996). This is what Merleau-Ponty (1968, p. 127) is

getting at when he writes that ‘the presence of the world is precisely the
presence of its flesh to my flesh’. Or to phrase this point slightly differently: the
sensible field and that which senses are, ultimately, one.

Interjecting some ‘flesh’ into the argument

A wealth of social science literature details how understandings of nature differ
across social groups: for example, indigenous groups versus international
conservation organisations (e.g., Neumann 1995, Peluso 1995); urban versus
rural residents (e.g., Varshney 1995, Alm and Witt 1996); long term residents in
amenity-rich communities versus seasonal residents (e.g., Green et al. 1996,
Smith and Krannich 2000); and conventional farmers versus sustainable/
organic farmers (e.g., Kaltoft 1999, Carolan 2006). More often than not, we
find in this literature the popular variables of culture, income, education, age,
ethnicity and gender used to account for these different constructions of nature.
But do not these different social groups also diverge from each other in terms of
their doings; practices that are in part a product of their very social locations?
Take, for example, the Brazilian Rubber Tapper Movement. Is it not
possible (indeed probable) that the daily act of tapping rubber trees – in
addition to all the other corporeal acts and sensations tied to living in the
Brazilian rainforest – distinctly shapes how the seringueiros (the rubber
tappers) respond to the ‘is’ (e.g., what is it?) and ‘ought’ (e.g., who ought to
have access to it?) questions of nature, questions that are answered differently
by international conservation organisations which also have an interest in
‘saving’ the rainforest (noting, for example, that often their conception of
‘rainforest’ does not include people) (e.g., Cowell 1990)? Or take the divergent
natures described by residents in so-called amenity rich communities (e.g.,
Smith and Krannich 2000). Might the differing understandings of nature that
have been noted to exist between short term (e.g., who live and often work
within nature) and long term (e.g., who travel to nature to play/recreate)
 8 M.S. Carolan

residents be grounded, at least in part, on the different embodied actions

associated with these groups (see, e.g., White 1995)?
The Koyukon Indians of central Alaska view ‘nature’ in ways quite foreign
to many in the West. Specifically, the Koyukon Indians understand nature as
bodies dwelling within this space. This sensual positioning within the natural
world is reflected, for example, in their belief that nature is aware, that it is, in a
word, sentient (and not just that which is sensed). As Richard Nelson (1983,
p. 14) explains:
Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest with eyes. A
person moving through nature – however wild, remote, even desolate the place
may be – is never truly alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified.
They feel. They can be offended. And they must, at every moment, be treated with
the proper respect.
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This is no different from the Batek, one of the indigenous ethic minorities of
peninsular Malaysia. These hunting and gathering ‘people of the forest’ (a self-
imposed identity – Tuck-Po 2004, p. 50) believe, for example, that to speak the
name of an animal being hunted is to alert it to its oncoming fate.
Consequently, they use nicknames unknown to the animal, which allows
them to communicate with each other about their prey without conveying their
intensions to the forest (Tuck-Po 2004, p. 113). Or take their understanding of
wild yams:
[T]he Batek do not say that yam roots ‘grow’ in this or that direction (suron);
rather the roots cip (walk). And when a root doesn’t want to cip anymore, that’s
when you get a stub. Then when it changes its mind in mid-course, it cam (looks
for) another place to cip. These plants have fairly mobile tendencies, just like
humans and animals. More than simply have a mind to move along a path,
however, the root may have the capacity to apprehend the harvester’s intentions
as well: when a dig fails, the yam is deemed to have talak, the general purpose
verb to denote any kind of flight or escape. (Tuck-Po 2004, p. 114)

The Batek, like the Koyukon Indians, understand nature as sentient, as

something that can see, hear, walk and escape. No doubt this is at least in part
due to having dwelled within this space for generations. For them, concepts
like ‘nature’ and ‘forest’ are multivariate categories, depending largely on who
is living within this space. And there is always a ‘who’ in their understandings
of nature, as evident in the fact that they do not even have the language to
speak of ‘wilderness’ (as understood in the West as a space devoid of human
activity) (Tuck-Po 2004, p. 178).
My last example draws upon research examining how understandings of
nature differ between the Menominee (Wisconsin’s [US] oldest continuous
residents) and their Anglo-European neighbours. Among other things, this
research notes that while the white children had problems recognising that
people are animals, the Menominee children had little difficulty grasping this
idea (Medin and Atran 2004). As for the adults, those of European descent
cited the importance of teaching their children that nature needs to be
 Environmental Politics 9

protected (a viewpoint that places them outside of nature), while Menominee

adults stressed teaching their youth that people are part of nature (a view that
places them within this space) (Bang et al. 2007). Finally, researchers also note
how the Menominee and their Anglo-European neighbours differ in terms of
their embodiments with the natural world:
Compared with rural European American children and adults, Menominee child
and adults spend relatively more of their time engaged in outdoor practices in
which the natural world is fore-grounded and relatively less time engaged in
practices where nature is back-grounded. These findings suggest that the
Menominee ecological orientation in reasoning strategies is paralleled in their
framework orientation and practices. (Bang et al. 2007, p. 13871)

The Menominee reservation is heavily forested. Hunting and fishing are

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important activities for the women, men and children living in this space.
Consequently, the Menominee are, for much of their lives, corporeally engaged
with the natural world. Nature is where they dwell. Is it any surprise, then, that
they report understanding nature like a dwelling-body-in-the-natural-world?

An embodied environmental politics

It is remarkable that we know parts of extraterrestrial space better than we
know the terrestrial world beneath our very feet (Weston 1994). According to
E.O. Wilson, we have only catalogued 10% of the world’s species (and much of
what we know about that 10% is fragmented) (Eilperin 2007, p. A06).
Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be spent annually to
explore other worlds in search of the as of yet elusive prize – life – all while life
(e.g., biodiversity) continues to be lost on our world daily.
I once mentioned such points to a friend. Her response was one of
bewilderment. ‘Have we lost touch with reality?’, she inquired. I think my
friend was onto something. We have lost touch with something. But just what
is it that we have lost touch with?
In Cultures of Habitat, Gary Nabhan (1997, p. 2) describes the following
notable correlation: ‘Where human populations had stayed in the same place
for the greatest duration, fewer plants and animals have become endangered
species; in parts of the country [US] where massive in-migrations and exoduses
were taking place, more had become endangered.’ Reading this I was reminded
of something Aristotle once pointed out: that although ordinary citizens lack
the cobbler’s expertise in how to make good shoes, they still know when the
shoe pinches. While Aristotle was referring to the politics of popular
government, there is an important embodied lesson to be learned here: that
we dwell in the world much as our feet dwell in our shoes. And just as no one
knows the world of my feet better than my feet, no one knows the world of my
body better than my body.
Yet, admittedly, this overstates the issue. As discussed earlier, bodies dwell
with differing degrees of attachment to the natural world. Not previously
 10 M.S. Carolan

examined, however, are the politics that unfold from this. In what follows, two
‘movements’ are discussed that highlight the significance of embodiment to
environmental politics: saving embodiments and restoring embodiments.

Indigenous knowledge: a loss of doings

A wealth of literature documents the value of indigenous knowledge to
conservation efforts around the world (e.g., Gadgil et al. 1993, Brush and
Stabinsky 1995, Stevens 1997). Nabhan (1997), for example, writes about how
Native American professionals assist their communities with managing wildlife
because of their first-hand (eye, ear, etc.) knowledge of salmon runs, raptor
migration patterns, medicinal plant patches, and the like. Similarly, Tuck-Po
(2004) notes how the Batek of Peninsular Malaysia can not only identify native
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birds by their calls (a particularly important skill given the dense canopy of the
forest that makes visual identification near impossible) but also the ease with
which they are able to talk to their prey by perfectly mimicking the sounds of
the forest.
An autobiography of a leading Ainu (indigenous people of the northern
island of Japan) member opens by speaking of his childhood, dwelling in a
world of dense forest and ample wildlife (Kayano 1994). That is, until the
shamo (Japanese) entered his world and began to supplant indigenous
knowledge with something more universal:
Ignoring the ways of the Ainu, who had formulated hunting and woodcutting
practices in accordance with the cycles of nature, the shamo came up with
arbitrary ‘laws’ that led to the destruction of the beautiful woods of Nibutani for
the profit of ‘the nation of Japan’ and the corporate giants. (Kayano 1994, p. 9)

Indeed, as Knight (2000) explains, such traditional ways of life and the
knowledge they help support are eroding throughout Japan: post-war
resettlement schemes have pulled people from their forests; elaborate networks
of forest roads have transformed human mobility through this space; and
hunting is being ever more restricted by government regulations (see also
Asquith and Kalland 1997). This is all taking place even though the knowledge
created through these evaporating embodiments may very well hold ‘clues for
solving many of the problems facing Japan today’ (Knight 2000, p. 164).
The sophisticated understanding of forest ecology possessed by hunting
and gathering societies in Northeastern Luzon (Philippines) has allowed them
to use fire as a management tool (Masipiquena et al. 2000). Centuries of
collective knowledge are held throughout rural India concerning the medicinal
value of indigenous plants (Baviskar 2000). The intimate knowledge acquired
by many of these nature-dwelling bodies allowed them to perceive global
warming well before the so-called experts did (Cruikshank 2001). All of these
examples point to the important knowledge that these doing bodies possess.
And all point to the types of knowledge that would be lost if these doings fail to
endure.
 Environmental Politics 11

As global warming vanquishes the ways of life of indigenous peoples around

the world, think of all that will be lost. As people of the forest are continually
resettled to spaces outside of the lush green canopy that for centuries served as
their home, their knowledge of this space will slowly come to resemble that of
their urban neighbours (as bodies-apart-from-forest). Indeed, the consequences
of these changes are already being detected. Among the Seri (an indigenous
community in the Mexican state of Sonora), the younger generation are losing
their ability to identify native animals in photographs (Nabhan 1997). Among
the Salish people of Washington State, younger people are less successful than
previous generations at identifying local plants according to their medicinal
properties (Turner 1988). At one time the language (and embodiments) of the
Rio Grande pueblos allowed them to distinguish between many types of trees
and plants; today, however, children increasingly use their native term for
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‘firewood’ when speaking of trees and the word ‘weed’ when speaking of
herbaceous plants (Nabhan 1997). This is why we need an embodied environ-
mental politics: because conserving nature presupposes that we likewise con-
serve the bodies – the ways of life/the doings – dwelling within these spaces.
In the words of Nabhan (1997, p. 164), ‘With more than half the two hundred
native languages on this continent falling out of use at an accelerating rate, a great
diversity of perspectives on how to sustain the productivity of wildlands is surely
being lost as well.’ But it is more than just a problem of languages lost. We are
losing the very ground that language is tethered to. As Abram (1996, p. 75) points
out, ‘we thus learn our native languages not mentally but bodily’ (emphasis
original). To displace bodies, then, is to displace all that those embodiments are
intimately linked to: language, knowledge, practices, culture, identity.

Restoring our non-modern sensibilities

Yet an embodied environmental politics cannot only be concerned with
conserving embodiments. Equally important is the need to think about how
other bodies – particularly those endowed with modern sensibilities – need
their connections with the natural world strengthened. While we frequently
speak of the ‘mind’s eye’, never have I heard a reference to, say, the ‘mind’s ear’
(Weston 1994). The West, as Foucault (1979) went to such lengths to detail,
has a fascination with the visual, the gaze. Indeed, we often cannot help but
think and speak in visual terms. For example, the word ‘idea’ traces back to the
Greek verb ‘to see’ as well as to the concept of ‘outward appearance’ (Kearnes
2000). ‘Seeing is believing’ or ‘to take it all in with your eyes’ are typical optic-
oriented phrases for understanding, cognition, and knowledge employed in
English-speaking Western countries (Kearnes 2000). This might help explain,
for instance, the preoccupation among geographers and sociologists with the
visual in their definitions of ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ (see, e.g., Cosgrove 1984,
p. 269, Porteous 1990, p. 4, Macnaghten and Urry 1998, p. 10).
Yet, this optic orientation to the world risks nurturing a visual aesthetic,
where some landscapes, natures, forests are privileged over others. In doing
 12 M.S. Carolan

this, ‘the good’ becomes a matter decided by visual tastes, rather than, for
example, by ecological principles. In such a world, charismatic megafauna,
majestic mountain vistas and the like are given greater moral currency than
those phenomena culturally deemed to be less pleasing to the eye (e.g., deserts,
swamps and nematodes). Yet, while less likely to be depicted on a poster,
imprinted on a t-shirt, or pictured on the homepage of an environmental
organisation’s website, these entities are no less important from an ecological
point of view. Unfortunately, this point is often lost when medium and message
of the natural world are reduced to visual form.
It is difficult to know the natural world sensuously when we only know ‘it’
through the car’s windshield or by watching the Discovery Channel. What is
needed is a change in style. Whereas habit refers to passivity and a structured
repertoire of practices, style involves improvisation (see, e.g., Harrison 2000, p.
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512). A change in style implies the creation of new embodied actions, stories,
and beings-in-the-world, from which will spring forth new intelligibilities
toward nature. As Harrison (2000, p. 512) explains, ‘habits set boundaries for
forms of life and so ways of seeing and saying, delineating a field in which
certain moves are sensible’. Style, conversely, is about liquefying those
boundaries so as to create new way of seeing, saying and sensing.
The politics I am talking about thus intentionally avoids readymade
programmatic solutions. Instead, solutions must come from the ground up,
literally. An embodied environmental politics gives new meaning to the term
grassroots movement, by creating new ways of understanding these local
activities. From community supported agriculture (CSA) to farmers’ markets,
community conservation projects, and urban gardens, such phenomena create
important embodied actions with the natural world. A recent University of
Wisconsin survey indicates that the aggregate annual revenue for CSA is in the
tens of millions – an order of magnitude well below aggregate sales in retail
food cooperatives and farmers’ markets (Stevenson et al. 2004). Thus, given the
relatively small stature of CSA from an economic perspective, supporters of
CSA would do well to draw attention to its role as a catalyst for certain
embodied actions toward food specifically and nature more generally (see e.g.
Carolan 2007). These local movements arguably do more for the embodiments
they nurture than for the local economies they are said to be helping to
invigorate. For, ultimately, these local movements seek to disrupt habits by
offering an alternative style to doing food consumption and production,
conservation, education, living, and so forth.
Admittedly, the implications of an embodied politics must eventually reach
to the roots of our lifestyle and not stop with a mere tidying up on the surface.
Yet, to reach those roots requires that we begin ‘digging’ somewhere. Thus, my
suggestion to begin (re)embodying those behaviours most familiar to us is not
to imply that an embodied politics of nature is not radical. Yet, while
recognising the importance of reaching the very roots of our modern
sensibilities, an embodied politics of nature must also be interested in creating
change that is sustainable over the long term.
 Environmental Politics 13

One site at which we can begin to ‘dig’ is transportation. In his book The
Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1987) speaks to how trains
fundamentally changed passengers’ – and in the end our – perceptions of
space and time. Trains transformed us into a projectile that was shot through
the landscape, an experience that removed traveller from travelled space. Since
then, our primary modes of transportation have only amplified this projectile-
like experience, making the ‘outside’ world little more than a boring blur (e.g.,
cars with 16-speaker sound systems, sound proof panelling, and climate
controlled interiors, and airplanes that fly some 35,000 feet above the earth’s
surface) (Solnit 2000).
Merleau-Ponty can help us better understand the effects of today’s
dominant modes of transportation in terms of how they give shape to our
experiences of the natural world. ‘The car’, as one scholar points out, ‘has
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become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing
limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body
impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale’ (Solnit
2000, p. 258). Yet, as Merleau-Ponty (1992) notes, prosthetics over time
become more than merely something attached to the body. With a prosthetic,
the body slowly enters into new relations with the world. Eventually, much like
the blind person and their cane, motor and perceptual competences become
altered to encompass the prosthetic. And with that, prosthetic and body
become a unified knowing unit.
It may be unrealistic to expect that these modes of transportation will be
replaced anytime soon with methods that again embed traveller within
travelled space. Yet it is not unrealistic to want to work to improve the
feasibility of more sensuously engaged forms of transportation (recognising
that the decline of, say, walking and biking is not just about the lack of
safe space to do this but also about a lack of time). Working to reconnect
traveller to travelled space is by no means the only way to strengthen
Westerners’ connections to the natural world. It is but one sensuous entry point
out of many that would allow us to better feel the flesh of nature against our
own.
Ultimately, the goal of an embodied environmental politics is to bring
people back into a sensuous kinship with the natural world – in their travel,
play, work and rest – so this world can again be experienced from within. As
Nabhan (1997, p. 164) explains,
In place of the formerly varied views of the natural world held by the myriad
ethnic groups that have inhabited this continent, we are evolving a new, shared
viewpoint – one not of experienced participants dynamically involved with their
local environment but of observers, viewing the landscape from outside the frame.

An embodied environmental politics seeks to sustain epistemic multi-

plicities, thereby resisting this tendency toward a shared viewpoint – a move
that likewise casts globalisation in a new light, given its tendency to
homogenize embodiments (see e.g. Fischer 2007).
 14 M.S. Carolan

Conclusion
My goal here has been to highlight why embodiments matter for making sense
of nature. I make no claim of being exhaustive on the subject. Far from it. In
fact, this paper should be understood as tentative, opening more doors than it
closes. Yet the fact remains: we think with our bodies (Varela 1992, Lakoff and
Johnson 1999, Damasio 2000). And if we think with our bodies then we must
think about nature with our bodies too.
Before concluding, allow me to draw one final lesson from the above
discussion (which applies to how we do both theory and politics). At a
fundamental level, an enlivened understanding of the world blurs boundaries. If
the once self-evident categories of nature/society, mind/body, reason/emotion,
and subject/object turn out be ontologically interrelated – which is precisely the
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ontological conclusion that is to be drawn from the above discussion – then

perhaps other boundaries can (and should) be challenged as well. As Wood
(2005, p. 166) explains, ‘Where the yes/no border logic is dominant, it often
reflects an underdeveloped capacity for thinking, that is, for negotiating
complexity, or the recognition that there are forces that would disempower
those who think in such a way’. Such thinking thus drives everyone to the
extreme. There is no middle ground when boundaries are fixed and immutable;
you have to be on either one side or the other.
When theory and environmental politics are enlivened, boundaries become
muddled, thereby forcing people to better understand the complexity that
underlies today’s environmental issues. Now, we no longer have to pick sides –
or, more accurately, we now pick multiple sides. In an enlivened environmental
politics, we do not have to be for either owls or people, as when debating
endangered species regulations. Nor need we necessarily have to choose
between the preservation of nature or the preservation of indigenous ways of
life, as when debating the conservation of biodiversity ‘hotspots’ around the
world. With an enlivened view of nature we can begin to grasp the world in a
truly ecological way: by seeing (hearing, feeling, touching, etc.) interconnectiv-
ity and reciprocity instead of isolation and immutability.
This is not to suggest an eradication of boundaries, however; do not
confuse a rejection of dualistic thinking for monism. Learning that we are part
of the world highlights interconnectivity as well as subtle distinctions, both of
which are essential for grasping relationships between entities. An embodied
politics of nature is thus as much about those aspects of the world that we
cannot recognise as it is about what we can grasp phenomenologically;
recognising that those relationships often extend to aspects of nature that do
not afford the body sensations. This reminds me of Wendell Berry’s response to
E.O. Wilson’s claim that science will eventually understand all of life. For
Berry (2000, p. 149), our partial knowledge of nature is not only inevitable but
desirable: ‘As soon as a mystery is scheduled for a solution it is no longer a
mystery; it is a problem.’ An embodied politics of nature is, at least in part,
about cultivating such humility, where we accept that we cannot (and will not)
 Environmental Politics 15

know everything. After which the question then becomes: ‘how does one act
well – sensitively, compassionately, without irreparable damage – one the basis
of partial knowledge’ (Berry 2000, p. 149)? I suspect that the Batek, the
Koyukon, and the Inuit have each long been in possession of an answer to this
question. One can recognise the significance of scientific understanding without
becoming intoxicated by it. It is time to nurture alternative ways to know,
recognise and understand nature. And where better to begin than with the
body.

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