Ecological Authenticity and the Wilderness Narrative

Modern environmentalist writing, Dana Phillips notes, has often proceeded by “troping on a vocabulary borrowed from ecology.”² Much of it has riffed on radical psychoanalysis as well. In the years following Silent Spring’s publication, New Left activists and countercultural icons sought to square ecology with existing radical commentary on postindustrial America. Such analyses often viewed psychic organization as inseparable from institutional conditions of oppression. The poet Gary Snyder observed this tradition closely when he mused that “there is a problem with the … human ego. Is it a mirror of the wild and of nature? I think not: for civilization itself is ego gone to seed and institutionalized in the form of the State.”³ Snyder’s comment aligns the ego with “civilization” and an expansive, primordial non-ego – a lack of self – with the wild aspects of “nature,” drawing an opposition between artificial and natural that corresponds to an opposition between “ego” and “eco,” the self and the system. Environmentalist writers like Snyder profess not (or not only) that nature and culture are spatially distinguishable, as preservationists of earlier generations had done, but that both culture and our resulting sense of selfhood construct themselves too thickly over psychic nature, obscuring it. This sort of statement concerns neither ostensibly pure wild spaces nor ecology so much as it does identity.

The wilderness concept – defined by Greg Garrard as “nature in a state uncontaminated by civilization” – has played an important yet powerfully malleable role in American cultural history.⁴ The idea’s flexibility has enabled it to crystallize numerous political, social, economic, and environmental preoccupations and anxieties over the course of centuries. Remarks such as Snyder’s demonstrate the concept’s continued prominence in the age of ecology, despite ecological science’s disruption of the notion that nature and culture comprise cleanly divisible spheres. Like psychoanalysis, ecology came to enjoy special prominence in the 1960s as a “subversive science,” despite its descriptive rather than ideological aims. “Ecology,” the philosopher Paul Shepard wrote in 1967, “has become an in word.” Rachel Carson’s exposé in Silent Spring divulged not that pesticides threaten a distinctively separate natural world, but that “substances of incredible potential for harm” reach consumers through a variety of ecological pathways in the city, the suburb, and the home.⁵ As events such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill hastened awareness of environmental catastrophe, ecology’s pervasive, interpenetrative scope rose to the forefront of American concern. If wilderness or the wild had conceptually cordoned nature from the civilized and industrialized for environmentalists of preceding decades, Carson made clear that such an imagined barrier had always been porous.

Nonetheless, the concept of ecology has, like wilderness, experienced a certain “discursive elasticity that allows it to be used to structure the world in any number of ways.”⁶ The science of ecology describes very real material networks and interactions. Even so, such processes are subject to the mediation of interpretive cultural practices. Our understanding of material reality proceeds in part as a social construction, a situated perspective no less real for its fabrication over time. One could hardly disagree with the very basic premise that human biological functions fundamentally entangle us in complex and lively networks of matter. From a political perspective, however, there is something banal about the frankly obvious statement that “everything is connected.”⁷ Everything will remain connected if we preserve ecosystems or pollute them beyond recognition. Our actions depend less on the fact of our interrelated condition than on what Snyder refers to as our “rhetoric of ecological relationships,” the narratives we tell about our interactions with nonhuman others.⁸

Without a doubt, conventional cultural histories of postwar American environmentalism have foregrounded those ecological narratives, typically distinguishing between mainstream and progressive paradigms. That is, environmentalism exists in a variety of modes or genres, each of which subscribes to a relatively recognizable set of representational conventions that scholarship in the environmental humanities has helped to illuminate. For example, among capitalist practices of “green consumerism” and traditional approaches to wilderness preservation, ecology plays the role of a natural “balance” that humans have disrupted but might yet fix, through either purchasing power or legislative restraint. By contrast, environmental justice coalitions have demonstrated how ecological change has disproportionately impacted communities historically disadvantaged along lines of race, class, ethnicity, indigeneity, and gender, casting both place and people as victims of capitalist exploitation. Recently, the looming threats and pervasive realities of climate change have inspired important work that joins elements of preservationist and environmental justice narratives under a global banner. These conventions change over time, find inconsistent expression, and, perhaps most importantly, exist side by side with other priorities and strategies. Still, without a doubt, they represent some of the most vital environmentalist traditions of the past fifty years.

At the same time, our familiar taxonomies of environmental thought continue to treat the wilderness concept predominantly as a spatial narrative about natural environments that exist in opposition to civilization. An account like Snyder’s appears to maintain preservationist interest in untouched environments, but its marked investment in nature’s relationship to the ego reveals a deep concern with authentic identity rather than, or in addition to, authentic environs. Scholars of American environmentalism have occasionally touched on this tendency in isolated instances, but not as a deeply ingrained cultural narrative that has continually surfaced across multiple contexts. Nor have they considered the possibility that the simultaneous emergence of ecology and personal authenticity as progressive values in the 1960s influenced the direction of environmental thought. Snyder’s opposition between wild nature and civilized ego reframes wilderness not as an environment but as an identity category, a condition rather than a location. The revision is no accident. Representations of wilderness shifted over the course of the 1960s and 1970s in response to identity’s rise to political prominence.

Such a transition was only made possible by the long arm of what Doug Rossinow calls the American New Left’s “politics of authenticity,” the student movement’s broad commitment to the liberation, fulfillment, and singular identity of the self. Authenticity remains an opaque term at best, its meaning having shifted routinely over its history of use. The word is poorly defined in the Port Huron Statement, despite the fact that the manifesto begins with a declaration that the “goal of man and society should be … finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” The term never found consistent definition, but as one activist wrote in 1962, “not systems or institutions … but the person, in his totality, in his freedom, in his originality and in his essential dignity” remained “the ultimate and most irreducible value” across the Movement.⁹ According to the New Left platform, the liberal establishment subdued the self in its perpetuation of oppressive social institutions, its willingness to police behaviors, maintain class inequities, and entertain the rampant anticommunism of the previous decade. Student radicals viewed the Marxist socialism of past generations with similar suspicion. “Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities,” the psychiatrist and social critic R. D. Laing wrote in 1967, and from the New Left’s perspective both postwar liberalism and the Old Left preserved a social environment “alienated” from “a natural system.” Only direct democratic governance could liberate an overly managed population from the artificiality of a rigged party system beholden to corporate interests. Laing’s contention that the “experience of oneself and others as persons is primary and self-validating” resonated with the New Left as powerfully as Herbert Marcuse’s call for a “great refusal” of capitalist economic and political traditions. As Rossinow puts it, a stringent “opposition between the natural, or the ‘real,’ and the artificial” came to constitute “a kind of preface to any discussion of specific practices and values that ought to change.”¹⁰ As the call for liberation expanded beyond exclusively economic concerns, personal matters became, for a variety of movements, political.

The New Left, for whom social liberation was only possible alongside self-liberation, largely derived its program from a coterie of intellectuals who positioned authenticity, personal fulfillment, and direct democratic governance against the artifice of postindustrial civilization. Anthropologically speaking, civilization is a pluriform concept that changes according to context. As Chapter 1 will explore in detail, however, student radicals largely came to understand the idea of “civilization” according to a Freudian narrative that collapsed this diversity into an abstract totality: civilization set against a primordial, ostensibly pure psychic nature. Under the influence of thinkers such as Marcuse, the era’s politics of authenticity drew disproportionate inspiration from a loose collection of social theorists who joined psychoanalysis with libertarian socialism in the 1950s and 1960s, a “Freudian Left” that also included Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown.¹¹ A variety of postwar conversations circled around the social dimensions of repression, playing out among a diverse cadre of thinkers who opposed institutional ego psychology’s fixation on producing “normal” individuals. Despite their criticism (as well as their differences), these figures all preserved certain psychoanalytic concepts in their work. In 1974, the feminist psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell wrote that the “generalizable” features of Laing’s writing established his popularity as “one of [the] chief spokesmen … of the preponderant ‘personalism’ of 1960s radicalism.” Laing and other psychoanalytic revisionists introduced “the radical counter-ideology of the restoration of ‘whole’ … people” in response to “oppositional stereotypes of man/woman, sane/insane, black/white and so on.”¹² However, the Movement’s psychoanalytic influence often replicated the “oppositional” quality of such dualisms by merely replacing them with new ones: whole/not-whole, free/repressed, and real/artificial. The New Left never succeeded in defining “authenticity” in its founding documents, but its Freudian model gave shape to a pronounced, if inchoate, interest in liberating the repressed unity of the psyche.

The Movement viewed the ecological issues Carson introduced to a wide public as largely inseparable from this broader program of self-liberation – the “restoration” of “whole” subjects. That changes acted upon environments by the corporate state impacted human health seemed yet another social limitation on individuals’ quality of life.¹³ However, as concepts jointly applied to liberation politics, ecology and authenticity made contentious bedfellows. Their interaction in the 1960s coincided with Movement politics’ visualization of authenticity specifically as “a state of unity with the self.”¹⁴ This standard of “unity” manifested in extravagantly inconsistent ways across the countercultural landscape. Student leaders at SDS broadcast their commitment to self-fulfillment even as other figures, such as countercultural drug gurus, preached a gospel of self-deterioration. “Unity” came to signify, by turns, the harmony of a discrete individual or of a holistic system in which the self seems to lose its integrity. Nowhere did this discordance prove more salient than in radical flirtations with ecology, whose disclosure of biophysical interconnections among organisms undermined the notion that there ever could be a singularly unitary self. The natural unity of the ecosystem would always trump the merely apparent unity of the self.

In the New Left framework, this dilemma presented a moral as well as an ontological quandary. Among radicals of the student left, as well as the new social movements that followed, “political potential” proceeded from “alienation.” For the mostly white members of SDS, however, feelings of existential alienation largely came to supersede the political alienation they located in people of color, which motivated identity politics along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender that emerged in the years to come. The spiritual undertones of the New Left’s search for “wholeness” imparted a distinctively moralistic flavor to the politics of authenticity that dominated the 1960s. The authentic self was right and the social order that would repress, alienate, and/or exploit it was wrong. In seeming contrast to this creed of self-fulfillment, mainstream environmentalists of the decade preached a gospel of self-renunciation, of making do with less to protect the wilderness. Despite their apparent disagreement, though, SDS and preservationism largely obeyed the same moral logic: what is unspoiled is right.¹⁵

How does one reconcile the rightness of the unrepressed self with the rightness of a nature defined by its ecological intricacy? For a figure like Chris McCandless, one simply equates self with ecosystem. McCandless styles himself “free from society” and therefore unconstrained by a socially mediated ego.¹⁶ There are spiritual undertones to these proclamations as well. They evoke the “oceanic feeling” that Sigmund Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), one of the many psychoanalytic touchstones that informed the New Left and counterculture. For Freud, beatific apprehensions of “limitlessness,” of subjective continuity with one’s surroundings, hark back to an earlier, infantile stage of psychic development, an originary inability to “differentiate between what is internal – what belongs to the ego – and what is external – what emanates from the outer world” that predates civilization and its repressions.¹⁷ For Freud, the ego – the part of the psyche that registers a bounded sense of self – is neither a positive nor a negative thing. It simply is. For McCandless, however, the fact that selfhood is socially constructed renders it unnatural, an illusion that masks the “limitlessness” of our ecological interconnection. He pursues a fantasy of subjective merger with his surroundings because this state of affairs strikes him as natural rather than artificial, unspoiled and therefore right. As such, he preserves a certain moral investment in authenticity even as he expands authenticity to include all of the ecosystem. This fantasy of self-erasure in nature paradoxically positions the vanished (often white and male) self as the privileged subject of both environmentalism and a seemingly anti-identitarian stance.

I use the term identity politics of ecology to loosely capture any environmentalism that makes this move. The IPE invokes ecological authenticity by suggesting that because selfhood is socially constructed, the ecosystem as a whole comprises our most essential identity. Posthumanist philosophers have long noted that ecology disturbs the supposed inviolability of the human subject passed down by Enlightenment thought. Because the body houses microbes, absorbs nutrients, and nourishes the soil and other creatures with waste and decomposition, one cannot easily draw clear distinctions between self and environment. This premise ordinarily troubles the very concept of identity, but the IPE mobilizes it to recapitulate identity in essentialist terms. The machinations of what Marcuse referred to in 1955 as “repressive civilization” obscure the fact that we all share the same status as matter. That matter circulates ecologically. Ergo, the ecosystem is all of us. An appeal to ecological authenticity is in this respect always an appeal to universal authenticity, in that it flattens distinctions among individuals and communities into a single, unified identity position: the ecosystem. Sociocultural forms repress this state of nature.

A writer invokes the IPE any time he or she frames ecology in terms of authenticity as the Freudian Left and its acolytes understood it – that is, as a matter of psychic alienation. If selfhood emerges from civilization’s repressions, then selfhood itself is responsible for our removal from a natural condition of ecological wholeness, a “unity” both psychic and material, “a state of oneness” that the analyst Harold F. Searles described in 1960 in terms of the billions of atoms that “make up our body … second-hand.”¹⁸ The presence of psychoanalytic concepts in environmentalist writing is not merely a matter of coincidence. As Chapter 1 will explore in more depth, many New Left voices turned to ecological politics in earnest when the Movement began to fracture late in the decade, such that Left Freudian rhetoric transferred directly to environmentalist discourse. As new generations drew inspiration from their predecessors, those narratives spread. Paul Shepard explicitly built on Civilization and Its Discontents in Nature and Madness (1982), writing that the all-embracing breadth of the infant’s “maternal relationship” is more inclusive of “living plants” and “unfiltered, unpolluted air.” The historian Theodore Roszak sought to access an “ecological unconscious” buried “at the core of the psyche, there to be drawn upon as a resource for restoring us to environmental harmony.” Murray Bookchin, the father of Marxist social ecology, denounced the Western valuation of “intellectual experience over sensuousness, the ‘reality principle’ over the ‘pleasure principle,’” over the course of forty years. More recently, posthumanist scholars such as Rosi Braidotti have gestured to a “vitalist notion of death … which frees us into life” and “disintegrates the ego.”¹⁹ Such passages take their cue from the same logic as Snyder. Not every iteration of the IPE employs an explicitly psychoanalytic framework, but the concept of ecological authenticity fundamentally rests on a Freudian structure that generates a series of corresponding oppositions between nature and civilization, real and artificial, whole and fragmented, eco and ego.

By articulating ecological interconnection as the subject of repression, the IPE makes of ecology a wilderness – one premised on a psychic distinction between nature and culture rather than a spatial one. Just as civilization obscures the putative wholeness of nature, the ego obscures an expansive, primary, ecological subjectivity. The texts examined in the following chapters illuminate the extent to which representations of wilderness after the 1960s accordingly function as meditations on identity’s status in relation to conditions of ecological interconnectivity, rather than as reflections on pristine natural spaces.

This is not to say that environmentalism writ large has come to map itself over the IPE’s assumptions. The IPE is one among many environmentalist traditions that emerged in the postwar era. Like these others, it is also a tradition that other political practices have shaped and informed. For example, the New Left’s understanding of alienation emerged largely from the student movement’s engagement with civil-rights struggles in the 1960s. Its rhetoric of authenticity developed in tandem with a racial politics whose leaders also articulated relationships between identity and the liberal establishment. Chapter 3 will consider how iterations of the IPE accordingly emerged in this context. Similarly, Chapter 4 will explore how the same psychoanalytic questions that gave shape to the IPE also played a role in feminist debates in the early 1970s. What I want to emphasize, however, is that the IPE arises concurrently with the cultural movements that produced race, gender, and ethnicity as models of identity with which we are more familiar, not in reaction to them. It emerged in tandem with these others at a chaotic and diffractive political moment whose participants nonetheless – and to an unprecedented degree – organized around widespread interest in questions of identity and attitudes regarding sociopolitical alienation. As a result, even as the IPE presents ecological authenticity as a pure, unmediated psychic condition, it inevitably reflects and recycles concerns and tropes that manifested across the political landscape, in many cases even directly overlapping with or proceeding from the same antecedents.

However, the IPE is not itself a coherent movement. Sometimes appeals to ecological authenticity define an entire oeuvre. More often than not, they merely complicate (and occasionally enrich) other modes of thinking identity or environment. One does not join the IPE, but rather invokes the IPE narrative. That narrative pops up in sometimes surprising places, often augmented by other political narratives depending on the context. The very idea of interconnection “implies separateness and difference.” Even so, what Timothy Morton describes as the ecological “mesh” has evidently appeared tight enough to inspire numerous activists and intellectuals to invoke the IPE narrative in multiple venues from the 1960s to the present, from social and deep ecology to organic hallucinogen circles and even social media platforms of the past five years.²⁰

Much excellent criticism has already been written on these traditions and their vicissitudes, strengths, and weaknesses. Any consideration of deep ecology, for example, owes a great debt to ecofeminist writers of the 1980s and 1990s such as Val Plumwood, Karen Warren, and Carolyn Merchant, who pointed out deep ecologists’ tendency to emphasize total identification with the nonhuman and overlook other systems of domination, especially along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. Plumwood is indeed one of Wild Abandon’s primary theoretical influences, given her attention to the antinomies inherent in deep-ecological rhetoric of self-transcendence. However, my aim is not to merely reiterate insightful analyses of deep ecology, neoprimitivism, or even the essentialist “nature feminism” that the ecofeminist Catherine Roach (pejoratively) distinguished from ecofeminism writ large. While I draw insight from these well-established critiques, and in some cases will outline their development, my goal is to supply a broader historical narrative of the discursive antecedents and cultural consequences of deep ecology’s occasionally self-pulverizing rhetoric, rather than enumerate its philosophical liabilities. Placed against the backdrop of broader political trends of the late twentieth century, such apparent idiosyncrasies (often identified with deep ecology alone) emerge not as a rhetorical eccentricity specific to a single cohort or generation of writers, but as a vital facet of North American environmentalism’s agonistic and pluriform development in the postwar era, whose effects continue to influence writing and activism today. An exploration of the role played in that ongoing evolution by widespread political appeals to authenticity, as well as their underlying psychoanalytic narratives, is precisely what I hope to contribute to established commentary.

The narrative of ecological authenticity that emerges, however, certainly does neglect the conditional identities individuals experience along lines of race, class, gender, and so forth (not to mention selfhood). An earnest identity politics of ecology would view such sociocultural matters simply as artificial aspects of civilization, despite the very real material conditions and effects that generate them and they in turn generate. Complex matters of sociopolitical struggle seem to vanish, for example, when Roszak entreats readers to willfully “become the Earth and all our fellow creatures on it.”²¹ However, such declarations often encode certain social differences even as they purport to transcend them. The proud, self-satisfied, even aggressive tone with which McCandless insists that sociocultural phenomena merely repress the reality of our ecological interconnection would even seem to announce the IPE as an environmentalist ethics of white masculinity – though I want to again be clear that it emerges concurrently with, rather than in reaction to, other traditions. The rhetoric of heroic self-effacement that often accompanies the IPE often recalls the bombast of New Left leaders eager to combat the “emasculation” of alienation with “a strenuous sense of self.”²² Such connections drive home the IPE’s continuity with other political trends, and also emphasize the extent to which the very concept of authenticity, as Chapter 2 will explore in more depth, often functions as a tool wielded to enshrine the colonial attitudes of white men.

That said, I am less interested in tracing a hermetic account of the IPE’s white masculine prejudices than I am in exploring the atmosphere of contention that has built up around it over time. Ecological thinking emerged at the same chaotic moment as the cultural movements that advanced race, gender, and other social indexes as models of identity. Accordingly, the following chapters accumulate around literary and cultural scenes in which appeals to ecological authenticity experience friction not only against parallel appeals to personal authenticity, but also against complex identity negotiations undertaken by marginalized peoples. The IPE presumes to transcend or eliminate social distinctions, but remains locked in conversation with the concurrent rise of identity politics among women and people of color, as well as with alternative accounts of subjectivity in general – a conversation that plays out in the literature of the era.

The Uses of Dissolution

Wild Abandon follows two closely intertwined paths. First, it traces the development of an identity politics of ecology across a variety of postwar institutions and environmentalist traditions. Second, it examines how a number of literary texts have staged conflicts between the notion of ecological authenticity and other conceptions of identity. They do so, I argue, by dramatizing the dissolution of the ego that the IPE calls for, thereby laying bare that narrative’s representational and political dilemmas. The IPE presents ecological authenticity as the “natural” state of affairs, unmediated by social practice. Identity, however, has meaning in relation to the representations that constitute it. Dissolution – the moment at which a text appears to erase the self in favor of identification with the ecosystem writ large – is the IPE’s chief representational strategy. It is also the motif by which literary texts illuminate that tradition’s limits and contradictions. Dissolution, that is, serves as a nexus of debate over the relationship between identity and ecology. Wild Abandon is therefore in many respects principally a study of this recurring motif, undertaken to examine how a certain conflicted history of writing about nature has taken shape and met criticism in conversation with other social, political, and cultural preoccupations of the late twentieth century.

“Proposals to do away with the self,” the critic Richard Poirier once wrote, have enjoyed a rich literary history “nearly as old … as efforts to represent it.”²³ Environmentalist expressions of dissolution also participate in a long, albeit undertheorized, tradition. Wild Abandon’s title references the almost capricious rejection of self-identity that characterizes the “epiphanic fusions with … natural surroundings” that Ursula K. Heise, among other critics, observes in texts authored by “white male environmentalist writers between the 1950s and the 1970s.”²⁴ The anarchist-environmentalist Edward Abbey, for example, felt himself vanishing into the sediment of the Colorado River Valley even as Left radicals found themselves caught between contradictory imperatives to self-fulfillment and ecological sacrifice. Such moments certainly deserve scrutiny, but the historically quick dismissal of dissolution as an unsophisticated expression of privileged retreat neglects its potentially critical aspects. At the very least, such a reading fails to account for the substantial presence and function of dissolution in writing by women, people of color, and queer individuals from the postwar era to the present. What does it mean when a Black man finds himself meshing comfortably with a forest in a novel by Toni Morrison? How did Simon Ortiz’s poetic exploration of the Acoma Pueblo’s intimate ecological relationships contest countercultural appropriations of Native cultures in the 1970s? Why does Margaret Atwood continue to write about what it would mean to identify solely with the body’s biology? To what extent have so-called new materialists – scholars who assert the liveliness or vitality of matter – refuted or upheld the notion that ecology constitutes an identity position? Though any generalization comes with its exceptions, women and writers of color have tended to pen more critical narratives about the relationship between identity and environment than their white male counterparts. These instances complicate the conventional interpretation that expressions of dissolution only ever constitute an aesthetics of naïve holism. They suggest that the motif might also call into question attempts to define or experience identity according to ecological authenticity.

Wild Abandon as such demonstrates how dissolution operates as a system of representation in two registers: (1) politically, as a serious appeal to ecological authenticity; and (2) literarily, as a narrative experiment that dramatizes and critiques the premises of the IPE and arranges alternative narratives about our relationships with the nonhuman world. In other words, there is a difference between the IPE and dissolution. When I refer to the IPE, I am talking specifically about a loose (often white and male) environmentalist tradition that presents the ecosystem writ large as the most authentic of identity positions. Dissolution, on the other hand, is a system of representation – one that might signal either an appeal to ecological authenticity or a critical dramatization of the limits to that sort of appeal. Dissolution’s critical function proceeds from two constitutive characteristics. First, it is always rhetorical, never actual. Even if one’s sense of self appears to disintegrate, an “I” always remains to testify to that apparent disintegration. To take one oft-cited example, Abbey’s account of “distinctions shading off into blended amalgams of man and man, men and water, water and rock” in Desert Solitaire (1968) exemplifies what Morton describes as the paradoxical project of achieving “ecology without a subject.” “Even if ‘I’ could be immersed in nature, and still exist as an I,” Morton writes, “there would remain the I who is telling you this, as opposed to the I who is immersed.”²⁵ It seems unlikely, however, that the remarkably self-conscious Abbey could write of his self-erasure without recognizing his own hand in describing it. The passage expresses the sort of holistic identification characteristic of the IPE, but the project wavers and falls apart even as (in fact because) Abbey puts words to it. Dissolution relies on its expression, such that its second characteristic emerges from the first: it captures an unsurpassable representational tension between self and ecosystem, individual and network. “I” cannot eliminate my own self-conscious role in articulating my self-erasure. I can only illustrate the process of trying to do so. If political expressions of dissolution take for granted that one can, in fact, wipe away the self, literary uses expand the motif, unfolding it like an accordion, enabling us to observe its contradictions, tensions, and resonances with other accounts of identity relevant to a given context.

Of course, it would be negligent to claim that some clear, convenient line exists between obtuse environmentalist and canny author. Expressions of dissolution differ in degree, not kind. Where would one draw the distinction between the ecstatic urge toward merger expressed by the plant hallucinogen guru Terence McKenna, on the one hand, and the often-tortuous theoretical rumination undertaken by the deep ecologist Arne Naess, on the other? Or the carefully considered negotiation between identity with race and identity with place explored by Bell Hooks? Dissolution first and foremost performs the work of thinking through relationships between identity and environment. The way in which one deploys the motif – one’s intention, context, style, and tone, as well as degree of self-reflection and complexity of engagement – has a considerable effect on whether one’s writing seems to pin down identity as a matter of ecological authenticity or approaches the matter as a sort of literary thought experiment. The distinction I have drawn between dissolution’s literary and political registers is a matter of rhetorical effect rather than categorical classification – a pair of poles between which the motif oscillates.

The principal question that guides this book’s analysis is: What cultural work is dissolution performing at any given moment, and why? Furthermore, what do different iterations of this motif tell us about the relationship between ecological thinking and the variety of identity models that emerged concurrently? These questions invite literary study and also deeply resonate with issues raised by work in the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field whose own attention to the relationship between ecology and representation has in turn informed my approach to literary history. In her 2008 book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Heise identifies Google Earth as an “aesthetic model” for environmental writing of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a frame that straddles the local and global “in such a way that the user can zoom from one to the other.” The “zooming” Heise describes, however, also characterizes a critical practice, one that she herself mobilizes by toggling from the “whole” to the “minute” and back again.²⁶ It strikes me that this scalar oscillation plays out discursively as well as geographically. To “zoom” between micro and macro to observe transits between them is also to shuttle between broad, “global” cultural narratives – about environment, about identity – and the situated, “local” representations that contribute to their constitution and/or contestation over time. To my mind, it is exactly this sort of critical movement that has fostered a productive relationship between literary and environmental studies to begin with. Environment and identity take shape in part through the representations by which we comprehend them. Close attention to the aesthetic conventions and innovations that constitute those representations is central to analyzing how our ideas about environment and identity have arisen, changed, and exerted material influence over time.

Accordingly, the chapters that follow perform an oscillation of their own, in terms of both methodology and argument. Methodologically, the chapters alternate between two primary scales of attention. On the one hand, I gather threads drawn from diverse corners of sociocultural thought and activism – ranging from ecological philosophy and New-Age psychedelia to feminist dialogue and Black nationalism – to stitch together a more or less chronological narrative about the IPE, tracing its emergence and development as a recognizable tendency in environmentalist thought. In these moments, the book favors intellectual history, presenting an argument about the significance of concepts like environment and identity, informed by patterns I observe in the way certain ideologues expressed them. On the other hand, I “zoom” in on literary representations of identity in an environmentalist mode. I turn frequently to close reading to examine how different writers have deployed the dissolution motif to wrestle with the tensions between socially discrete (though always shifting) identity positions and material conditions of ecological interconnection. These two approaches complement each other. Environmentalist intellectual history enables us to grasp the macro-level cultural frames in which literary representation participates and to which it contributes. Critical methods of close reading facilitate our understanding of the micro-level conventions that structure – and potentially undermine – certain accounts of environment and identity, as well as their material effects.

To my mind, this oscillation between intellectual history and close reading makes possible Wild Abandon’s central insight: that the story of the IPE is itself a story of oscillation, of a back-and-forth between writers attempting to shore up a narrative of ecological authenticity and those questioning it. It is in this back-and-forth that we might observe the extent to which the IPE has grappled with myriad cultural influences that its rhetoric has sought to efface. The IPE presents ecological authenticity as an originary state of affairs, free of social baggage or mediation, but it borrows its framing techniques from a variety of concurrent identity politics and other social movements, as well as from psychoanalysis. Reading earnest appeals to ecological authenticity in conversation with the more thoroughly narrativized dissolutions that play out in the era’s literary works helps us to tease out these obscured relationships. Such scrutiny also demonstrates how such texts stage critiques of the IPE’s contradictions and political weaknesses. Novelists, memoirists, and poets of the era often appear to gesture toward the same subjective expansion that characterizes the more overtly political writing of the IPE, but they also give themselves the narrative space necessary to dramatize what an attempt to access ecological authenticity might look like. Not for nothing does this book begin and end with McCandless, who represents the IPE’s culmination, its crystallization as a recognizable cultural form. However, as Chapter 5 will explore in more detail, Into the Wild plays out not as a celebration of this emergence, but as a conversation between McCandless’s self-aggrandizing self-erasure and a more critical perspective espoused by Jon Krakauer, the book’s author and narrator.

Each of the following chapters plays out as a sort of dialogue, at the center of which rests the dissolution motif. I arrange them as such to reflect the fact that the history of the IPE is a history of interactions – between the IPE and its literary interlocutors, and among numerous sociocultural preoccupations surrounding the status of the human subject. Edward Abbey exchanges barbs with social theorists who joined ecology with a psychoanalytic idiom, in the process drawing attention to the political contradictions inherent in that fusion. Simon Ortiz writes back against countercultural appeals to ecological authenticity by teasing out inaccuracies in the idealizations of Native cultures that underwrote them, as well as by foregrounding matters of environmental racism they effaced. In dramatizing dissolution, Toni Morrison points to how the representational conventions of the IPE mirrored those of race- and ethnicity-based identity politics, in the process illustrating what she takes to be the limitations of all such positions. Margaret Atwood writes in a climate of feminist debate over essentialism, some of which the IPE narrative in fact energized. I have selected these writers not only because each has expressed dual creative interest in the ontological and political dimensions of ecology and authenticity but also because the texts in question reflect upon the kind of thinking that informs the IPE. However, I do not view these works as representative of the IPE. They do not yearn for ecological authenticity. Rather, their diverse styles of dramatizing dissolution capture the complex cultural interactions that shaped the IPE, in the process undermining its pretensions to ideological purity and political merit.

Wild Abandon therefore aspires to a twofold objective: to better theorize and historicize the dissolution motif in order to both chronicle and contest the identity politics of ecology. Perhaps such an approach to literary environmentalism seems inappropriate at a time when critics such as Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus, and Stephen Best have called for modes of critique that emphasize “making rather than unmaking.” Still, it is worth keeping in mind that writers and texts themselves might be just as “paranoid,” to borrow a word from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as critics.²⁷ The texts gathered in Wild Abandon look skeptically on the notion of ecological authenticity. However, even as their representational strategies invite critique of the IPE, they also arrange alternative narratives of human-ecological relationships. In this respect, I hope that my readings throughout this book demonstrate how critique might be generative even as it remains suspicious. Critique emerges as the condition for advancing counternarratives.

These counternarratives are no more cohesive than the IPE against which I position them. Nor are they merely counterexamples. They emerge in tandem with ecofeminism, environmental justice, cultural movements organized around race and indigeneity – a whole variety of traditions that have informed, shaped, and clashed with the IPE. In the process, they foreground the fact that the IPE was only one of the directions that an emerging interest in the relationship between ecology and the subject could take. Generally speaking, however, the counternarratives I identify in these texts do have one thing in common: they investigate the extent to which pragmatic action, not idealized essence, constitutes just institutions, identities, and relationships.

This distinction governs the two registers in which I’ve proposed we read dissolution – the literary and the political – as well as its origins. The motif is indebted to a long history of “writing off the self,” to borrow a phrase from Poirier. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comments in Nature (1836) that “I am nothing” and “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me” especially come to mind.²⁸ Poirier and other readers have noted that in the context of Emerson’s nineteenth-century transcendentalism, self-erasure fulfilled a deeply critical function that came to heavily influence the school of American pragmatism cultivated by William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and others. The Emersonian tradition “tends to suggest that cultural formations, no matter how imposing, can be manipulated or transformed in ways sufficient to the individual.” Writing off the self became, for Emerson and his descendants, a means of testing limits – of the self, of sociopolitical life, of culture and its institutions, of writing, representation, even language itself. It is an aesthetic experiment, designed to help us “measure how much in our present circumstance can be usefully worked upon and how much is perhaps irremediable.”²⁹

I want to suggest that dissolution’s political and literary valences proceed by fracturing this philosophical inheritance. Nineteenth-century dissatisfaction with Enlightenment principles and industrial excesses influenced numerous twentieth-century reproaches to political and commercial standardization. It would be premature, though, to understand the IPE as a mere rehash of American Romanticism, at the very least because the notion of ecological authenticity would appear to erase the sacrosanct self so venerated by Romantic writers.³⁰ At the same time, the IPE upholds that tradition’s impulse to posit nature and authenticity as correctives or alternatives to civilization, even if for the IPE it is not the individual who is authentic but the ecosystem as a whole. The IPE’s political use of dissolution primarily retains this idealistic aspect of its American lineage, even as it dresses glorification of nature in ostensibly realist clothes cut from the cloth of ecological science. Political dissolution presumes to express one’s recovery of a primordial state of nature – one that does not quite or never exactly did exist.

The IPE’s literary interlocutors, on the other hand, tend to preserve the pragmatic function in their uses of dissolution. What I mean is that they often view identity not as an authentic essence buried beneath a spate of repressions, but rather as a series of what Kwame Anthony Appiah refers to as workable “scripts.”³¹ Identity, Appiah argues, is not a nature but a narrative, an assemblage of impressions, expectations, and adaptations that accrue over time. Identities and the relationships that constitute them are subject to change. Despite their great variety, the texts I examine find common ground in their shared attention to narrative’s pragmatic role in articulating meaningful relationships among selves, communities, and environments. They give their dissolutions the narrative space to run their course, teasing out the representational tension inherent in the motif – the impossibility of divorcing an “I” from the self-erasure to which it attests. In the process, they draw attention to the variety of narratives in which “I” am bound up, testing boundaries between self and world yet also positing new ones that potentially enrich relationships with the nonhuman, generating rapport between claims to discrete selfhood and impressions of continuity with one’s surroundings. In imaginatively engaging the essentialist logic of ecological authenticity, these literary representations of dissolution end up undermining it. Along the way, they invite readers to look skeptically on any argument “for affirmed selfhood and … unity” in a variety of conversations surrounding identity from the 1960s to the present.³² Dissolution becomes a tool with which writers critique the idea of authenticity altogether.

Dissolution’s political and literary registers turn on the difference between declaring what immutably is and suggesting what sustainably might be. These two perspectives furnish the stakes animating the conversation Wild Abandon traces between the IPE and its literary resonances. Appeals to ecological authenticity seek to dissolve the social “boundaries” that Donna Haraway describes as “the result of interaction and naming.”³³ Complex, intersecting positions such as woman, man, Black, white, Indigenous, and settler do indeed take shape socially and historically – too often at the expense of those they describe – but to articulate these ideas solely in terms of artificiality is to ignore, devalue, or deny the material conditions and consequences of their emergence. The postwar writers I most closely examine distrust the privilege the IPE grants to “natural” identity not only because such essentialism has historically justified racial and gendered oppression, but also because it makes of ecology an “epistemological shorthand to speak and conceive of humans as a single, unified category.” Particular identities “matter,” Appiah writes, because “they give you reasons for doing things,” even if “there’s … disagreement about what normative significance an identity has.” One loses those “reasons” for political action when one metaphysically lumps all matter into a single, indistinguishable whole. That humans are “‘tackily’ made of bits and pieces of stuff,” Morton writes, should signal that the most ethical act possible “is to love the other precisely in their artificiality, rather than seeking to prove their naturalness and authenticity.”³⁴ We need those “tackily” situated yet dynamic identities to articulate how best to live in relation to both human and nonhuman others in ways that ensure our continued collective existence.

A Literary History of Environmentalist Identity Politics

Comprehensive coverage of the IPE – not to mention its literary and sociopolitical interactions – would be an impossible task for a single book. By necessity, I focus on examples I find to be most illustrative, though I also attempt to acknowledge areas of contact that otherwise escape Wild Abandon’s scope. Over the course of the following five chapters, intellectual history tends to cede more and more space to close reading, as the story the book tells progresses from establishing the IPE’s roots in radical psychoanalysis to teasing out how a variety of writers have staged conflicts between ecological authenticity and other accounts of identity, in the process undermining the IPE. The two paths traced by the book proceed accordingly, charting the IPE from its birth in discursive interactions between ecology and psychoanalysis through its consolidation in rhetoric of ecological authenticity to its saturation of the American wilderness myth. Along the way, I argue that literary texts challenge the IPE by asserting identity’s narrative rather than essential quality and insisting on that narrativity for political and physical survival.

The first chapter, “The Ecological Alternative: Civilization, Selfhood, and Environment in the 1960s,” begins where the IPE does: with the intersection of appeals to ecology and authenticity among the New Left’s environmentalist affiliates. It also introduces how literary uses of the dissolution motif in fact critique this sort of alliance by dramatizing its contradictions. Edward Abbey illuminates how radicals unintentionally undermined their own project of self-fulfillment when they brought these two values together. New Left sympathizers increasingly dipped their toes into the rising waters of modern environmentalism as the Movement began to fracture toward the end of the 1960s. Some began to structure their plans for the alternative social formations demanded by SDS according to ideas borrowed from ecological science. For many involved with the back-to-the-land movement, Murray Bookchin’s social ecology furnished an attractive philosophical framework on which to construct their alternatives. However, Bookchin’s writing, like that of the New Left’s primary theoretical influences, drew substantially on a psychoanalytic narrative that, when grafted to ecology, would frame the ecosystem as a wilderness divorced from civilization and dissolve the self prized so highly by student radicals. Abbey documented this subjective confusion as he outlined his own wilderness alternative in Desert Solitaire. Once Abbey adopts ecological principles as laws and social customs, his conception of himself as an autonomous subject begins to collapse. Far from uncritically celebrating nature’s purity, Abbey and other nature writers of the decade established the representational tension between self and system that would characterize postwar literary treatment of ecology.

Chapter 2, “The Entheogenic Landscape: Psychedelic Primitives, Ecological Indians, and the American Counterculture,” examines how figures across the American counterculture, and later the New Age, appealed to ecological authenticity to sustain the idea that dissolution provides access to an originary identity with the ecosystem. This notion formed the backbone of two prevalent experiments in “consciousness expansion” – psychedelic drug tests and primitivist flirtations with East Asian and Native American spiritualities – that dominated the countercultural scene. These fads dovetailed in ecological meditations such as Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), which foregrounds the extent to which both traditions drew on the same psychoanalytic source material that informed the New Left’s early appeals to ecological authenticity. At the same time, they also derived inspiration from Native valuations of environment that they nonetheless drastically oversimplified, in the process erasing the very peoples they idealized. A number of predominantly white gurus employed a shaky psychoanalytic vocabulary to claim that, like infants, Indigenous peoples lack the advanced symbol systems Western civilization erects as a screen against ecological authenticity. By evaporating linguistic faculties, psychedelic substances served as a threshold into an expansive psychic condition that Indigenous communities had ostensibly enjoyed for millennia. Native writers such as Simon Ortiz have long argued that colonial projections of authenticity obscure Native peoples’ lived sociopolitical and environmental conditions. Ortiz’s Woven Stone (1992) clarifies the extent to which countercultural appeals to ecological authenticity misinterpret the perspectives they appropriate, and points to how language and narrative construct and enrich ecological affiliations rather than obscure them.

Chapter 3, “The Universal Wilderness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and an Identity Politics for the State of Nature” does not explore as many political expressions of dissolution as the previous two chapters. Rather, it asks us to think about how appeals to ecological authenticity might constitute their own form of identity politics by situating them in relation to more familiar identity movements that emerged simultaneously with modern American environmentalism. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) facilitates this kind of assessment. The novel pointedly juxtaposes two characters: one who caricatures the era’s Black nationalism and one who experiences dissolution in the Appalachian foothills. This arrangement effects a comparison between two accounts of authenticity: the racial and the ecological, the particular and the universal. In so doing, it enables us to consider how appeals to ecological authenticity, despite their pretense to ideological purity and universalist assumptions, rely on ideas about alienation and authenticity that mirror and often derive from the reasoning that typified movements organized along race or ethnicity. While such appeals are of a piece with the political climate, participating in broader conversations regarding identity and its social variation, the IPE denies such difference, joining the rhetoric of authenticity that characterized Red and Black Power, for example, with the sort of political universalism that such movements called into question. Song of Solomon also represents ecology as a universal condition that destabilizes the divisiveness of identity politics. All the same, Morrison critiques this specific state-of-nature romance for its indifference toward social realities. The IPE, like other wilderness narratives, might serve only to enshrine as universal the colonial attitudes of white men, in that it erases women and people of color – even those whose perspectives and politics inform it.

Chapter 4 flips this script and considers how the IPE itself influenced other forms of identity politics. “The Essential Ecosystem: Reproduction, Network, and Biological Reduction” begins with the debate between “nature feminists” who appeal to biology as the basis of essential womanhood and critical ecofeminists and feminists of color who have found this appeal wanting. Nature feminists contributed one voice among many to feminist debates surrounding essentialism in the 1970s and 1980s, central to which were questions about psychoanalysis similar to those that animated the IPE. The IPE narrative became bound up in this debate as nature feminists claimed their reproductive capacity identified them with whole ecosystems. Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) dramatizes how this logic actually undermined the woman-centric position these feminists sought to maintain. The novel’s narrator attempts just such an identification with her reproductive capacity, but her identification with her bodily matter broadens her idea of reproduction to include all corporeal functions, from nutrient consumption to decomposition. This fixation on network disorients gender, just as the IPE narrative did for nature feminists. However, far from undermining identity, it also illuminates the extent to which social thought has at times rendered whole systems a matter of essentialism. Reading Surfacing alongside Atwood’s later work, I draw out lines of rhetorical continuity between the essentialist “all women” position in nature feminism and a potential “all matter” position in contemporary new-materialist writing. Surfacing ends with its narrator’s embrace of an ambivalent conception of subjectivity, not least because she notices a certain nihilism in her identification with the network. Total merger would require her death – her matter’s dispersal.

This fate looms large in Into the Wild, whose subject, Chris McCandless (as well as his cult following) is the focus of Chapter 5, “The Death of the Supertramp: Psychoanalytic Narratives and American Wilderness.” This chapter drives home the extent to which the IPE constitutes a certain political quiescence, in that its erasure of sociopolitical differences also eliminates reasons to care about ecological changes – including threats to our continued survival. It also suggests that the IPE narrative has largely come to redefine mainstream representations of wilderness. McCandless believes that he might access an originary yet repressed ecological authenticity, taking to an extreme a tendency among his contemporaries in the deep ecology movement to map subjectivity over the contours of the ecosystem. Ultimately, he does the most authentically ecological thing possible: he dies. Krakauer’s account demonstrates how psychoanalytic narratives persist in contemporary wilderness rhetoric, despite the decline of the Freudian Left’s influence in the late twentieth century. McCandless’s death stems from his profound conviction that his civilized ego – the self-identity that gives him reason to stay alive – has repressed his natural condition. Still, this representation of wilderness has nonetheless enjoyed great commercial power. To partake of wilderness in the twenty-first century is no longer only to consume recreational or even spiritual spaces. It is to consume a certain identity that asks its consumers to disappear, defanging the IPE of whatever radicalism it once presumed.

The identity politics of ecology shaped a renewed conception of wilderness – nature not as environment but as fixed, universal identity category – that finds its apotheosis in McCandless. To the extent that Into the Wild serves as a cautionary tale, Wild Abandon ends on the contention that an IPE is not only impossible to sustain but also politically undesirable. This conclusion’s stakes remain high given that the questions animating the IPE govern contemporary scholarship as well as mainstream representations of wilderness, as the last two chapters of this book demonstrate. The conversation Wild Abandon traces plays out over the status of the human subject, a point that situates much of the writing I study in the arena of posthumanist debate avant la lettre. Work in new-materialist philosophy, queer ecologies, and material ecocriticism circles around questions regarding the subject’s role in vital networks, its material heft or ephemerality, and the ontological and epistemological forces that center and decenter it. These contemporary paradigms are not the focus of this book, but I do hope to shed light on some of their intellectual antecedents. The decentering of the human that such interventions undertake often proceeds from the IPE’s theoretical justifications and rhetorical appeals. At the same time, many scholars working in these fields take their brief from feminist and critical race theory that seeks to recenter the subject’s political agency – projects that emerge from a number of the countertraditions that crop up in the following chapters. Chapters 2 and 3, for example, show how environmental justice emerged out of the same crucible that produced the IPE in the 1960s and 1970s, just as Chapter 4 submits the IPE to more complex and critical modes of ecofeminism and materialism that consider the same questions. Wild Abandon demonstrates how current engagements took shape in part as an effect of the conversation surrounding the IPE’s decentering of the human – its dissolution.

That conversation also gave rise to a literary tradition whose imaginative flirtation with the IPE narrative briskly discredits authenticity altogether. Assuming an anti-essentialist stance, these texts acknowledge ecological interconnection as a universal condition, but also maintain the necessity of socially mediated identity positions from which to recognize and act on that condition. In these narratives, dissolution’s power lies in its failure – in selfhood’s pragmatic recoherence. Boundaries remain contingent and ever-shifting, built of action and relation rather than essence, but they grant one a position of situated identity from which to articulate a stake in how the world changes. These narratives suggest not only that dissolution always disappoints, but that such defeat is beneficial. If one takes too seriously one’s ecological authenticity, the best one can hope for is a satisfying death, a physical means of complete dispersal throughout one’s ecosystem. With that as our goal, what would be the point of either politics or literature? Keeping this question in mind, Wild Abandon ends with a consideration of how our current reading practices might help or hinder environmentalist goals. Rather than read our narratives suspiciously as symptoms or naïvely as affirmations of ecological authenticity, we should read them for what they are: complex cultural negotiations that have made our engagements with the nonhuman universe meaningful, effective, and worth pursuing.