Taking care of the earth body: Using the metaphor of illness to approach environmental issues
9 Jun
Sandy Penn, Simon Fraser University
Download this essay: Sandy Penn_nature culture
“The Earth’s declining health is our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy earth,” states Lovelock (2006) in his book, Revenge of Gaia. Brian Handwerk[1] used the same metaphor in his article “The Earth’s Health in Sharp Decline, Massive Study Finds,” in which he highlights a “UN-backed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report [which] revealed that nearly two-thirds of Earth’s life-supporting ecosystems, including clean water, pure air, and stable climate, are being degraded by unsustainable use.”
The notion that the environmental crisis has led the earth to suffer from potentially terminally illness is a metaphor that relies upon our familiarity with illness. It places global environmental concerns within a tangible anthropocentric framework. Illness, an affliction or pathology of the individual body that causes suffering, is universal in nature, but personal in its effect. It has been with us since the beginning of human time. Our understanding, reactions, responses, management and approaches to human illness have evolved with us. In contrast our perceptions of earth, as a complex, intricate, fragile, discrete object is a recent phenomenon. Our responses to global environmental concerns are fresh, untried and unproven. We are faced with rethinking our position and our impact as earthly inhabitants. The illness metaphor framework allows us to empathize with the environmental crisis and explore how the variety of approaches to illness may be relevant when attributed to the global environmental setting. This essay will take advantage of this paradigm shift in our understanding of the earth to explore the environmental crisis through the various lenses we usually confine to health and illness.
(more…)
