Elemental Philosophy , livre ebook

SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics

J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, editors

Elemental Philosophy
Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas
—— David Macauley ——

Front cover photo credit: Banyan tree, Goa Gajah (Elephant Cave Temple), Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Photo by David Macauley, 2009.
Front flap/Back cover art credit: “ The Wheel of the Four Elements,” by Shaila George, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the artist.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Macauley, David.
Elemental philosophy : earth, air, fire, and water as elemental ideas / David Macauley.
p. cm. — (Suny series in environmental philosophy and ethics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3245-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Four elements (Philosophy) I. Title.
BD581.M25 2010
113—dc22                                                                            2010004835
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to my parents: Howard Kane Macauley and the late Marion Ernest Macauley

Preface
Many projects have a distant catalyst that sets them in motion, providing an origin, if not a guiding trajectory, for their unfolding. This one stretches back to my youth. In retrospect, the elemental world exerted a strong and abiding presence during the course of my development. I grew up along the Susquehanna—the longest river on the east coast of the United States—several miles outside of Bloomsburg, a sleepy college town in northeastern Pennsylvania. In our backyard, we put to use a well and maintained a large garden where my brother, sister, and I often were exiled to weed or harvest organic vegetables either to be enjoyed by the family or to be sold at a roadside stand the three of us operated in front of our property, an early venture perhaps in “natural capitalism.” Cherry, apple, and pear trees punctuated the yard and supplied us intermittently with fruit when the bugs or birds didn't get to it first, while willow and maple trees offered us strategic perches on which to survey the neighborhood or erect arboreal forts, including a two-tiered structure with sliding board, “bat pole,” and tent-top roof. The brick house contained a fireplace, a potbelly stove, and later on a wood-burning stove. We also maintained a fireplace in an outdoor pavilion and constructed a fire pit close to the river. Keeping the vestal flame alive necessitated cutting and splitting wood in the warmer months and then hauling and stacking it in the winter.
As a child, I witnessed firsthand the recurring force of seasonal ice floes and floods. Especially memorable was the fury of Hurricane Agnes, which subdued and swamped the northeastern quadrant of the Commonwealth and upstate New York, taking 129 lives and causing billions of dollars worth of damage in one of the worst storms in U.S. history. I watched the river deposit foreign objects from far-away upstream locales and sweep away belongings—picnic tables, garden posts, and firewood—from our backyard to unknown destinations as the water filled our basement and crested at three feet on the first floor. My father paddled over the mailbox in a rowboat to reach the island of our house, and when the floodwaters retreated, we spent the next several years slowly removing a pasty veneer of mud, dirt, and detritus from floors, furniture, and two garages.
This kind of event, however, represented one pole of a periodic personal oscillation between more common interactions with earth, water, night, sky, rock, snow, fire, and night and less ordinary and even sublime encounters with elemental phenomena. The former entailed regular camping, canoeing, hiking, rock climbing, distance running, and biking as well as years of scouting. As a ten-year-old, for example, I scavenged for and collected dozens of rocks and minerals, ranging from jasper and pyrite to calcite and talc and then proudly mounted and labeled my objets d'art on a shellacked wooden board that I still keep in my basement. The latter involved seeing the Aurora Borealis in Norway and, astonishingly, rural Ohio; exploring underground caverns and caves; visiting the Everglades, Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, and Niagara Falls; journeying to glaciers in Europe and amazing limestone pillar hills in southeast China; or being caught without warning in an ocean undertow or violent lightning storm. These experiences, quite naturally, generated a lasting fascination with the physical world and an “accidental environmentalism.”
The more proximate genesis for this book lies on the north shore of Long Island, where I set out late one night on a protracted run in the frozen silence of February. I had just moved into the carriage house of a cliff-top mansion that had been converted into a group home for graduate students. After loping along the beach at a brisk clip, I turned up into the woods and was shortly enveloped in what seemed like total blackness. A few minutes later, a severe thunderstorm began, and when the trail mysteriously stopped, I was lost wholly in unknown territory, barely able to discern the ground in front of me. Eventually, after tumbling blindly over low-lying wires that bloodied my shins, dead-ending in a bamboo grove, and then running on pure adrenalin in different directions for several miles, I found my way to a road that led me back to my new abode. Drying out by the calm of a fire, the opaqueness of the dark lifted and the bone-chilling cold was replaced by the warmth and incandescent light of a domesticated flame. This confluence of circumstances—the cloak of the night segueing into the palpable density of the woods, the revelation provided by intense fits of lightning giving way to a more steady pacifying fire, the serrated wind-driven waves of the Sound mingling with the beat of a driving rain—gave me pause to begin reflecting upon the sense and significance of the elemental into which I had been suddenly thrust and so deeply immersed. Given that I was then reading the Presocratic philosophers and their cryptic, if poetic, meditations on water, fire, air and earth, I drew inspiration tacitly from my youthful forays into wild, feral and semi-domesticated elemental regions, and a theoretical project was thus germinated and later given birth.
Despite initial appearances, this book, however, is not a wistful look back at or even simply a celebration of an ancient world lost to the inexorable march of time. The perennial elements, of course, continue to exercise profound influences upon our daily lives in new and challenging ways. Within the span of the past few years, Hurricane Katrina has ravished the Gulf Coast; a great tsunami has decimated parts of Indonesia; wildfires have been on the loose in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the Far West; and major earthquakes have rocked Haiti, Pakistan, and Iran. “Extreme weather” outbreaks in the guise of tornados, sudden storms, flash floods, heat waves, cyclones, and El Niño are increasingly familiar and dangerous problems due in part to rising population densities, anthropogenic transformations of the environment, and poor social planning. We also have recently slowed and subsequently stopped in its invisible tracks the movement of light, a phenomenon so elemental as to appear and disappear outside our purview. At the very same time, we have created new chemical elements in the laboratory and proved with reasonable scientific certainty that a primal or elemental “dark matter” pervades the universe.
Environmental philosophers, however, have surprisingly neglected the perennial elements and elemental realms. We have tended, for example, to focus on the status of the snake molting on an outcropping of rock rather on than the underlying earth; we have embraced the bird in the sky or the fish in the sea but, until recently, ignored the air or water itself; and we have stressed the cultural objects forged by fire but not the flame per se. In a broader sense, this amounts to a philosophical disregard of meteorological entities and events as well. “There are seven or eight categories of phenomena in the world that are worth talking about, and one of them is the weather,” notes Annie Dillard. 1 Although the present work engages multiple closely associated topics, a true discussion of the theoretical or empirical dimensions of weather would require another volume. This study likewise does not take up the elements in relation to esoteric subjects such as alchemy or astrology. Nevertheless, the project is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in orientation; while rooted firmly within philosophical traditions—and environmental philosophy in particular—I invoke the ideas and insights of other relevant fields, including literature, ecology, history, public policy, art, and natural science.
Two final notes are in order before commencing with the investigation: first, with respect to the use of Greek terms, I opt for the sake of accessibility to place them in transliterated form without the addition of diacritical or accent marks (e.g., episteme) rather than reproducing unaltered Greek letters (e.g., πιστ μη). Second, should the reader not be interested in the nuances of fairly complex theoretical analysis or exegesis but instead be more prone to explore the ecological aspects or practical appli