Strands: Weaving mythopoietic narratives of place as environmental ethics.

摘要

Despite the best intentions of environmentalists, the global ecocrisis persists, a sign of the failure of traditional disciplines acting alone, including environmental ethics, to successfully address it. Preaching and fear mongering clearly have not worked, indicating that a new discourse is needed---one that embeds an ecoethic, instilling in people a desire to care for the environment because they feel it to be the right thing to do and not simply because they have been told it is the right thing to do. The question becomes what kind of discourse evokes feelings and attitudes, thereby embodying cultural worldviews? The answer posited herein is mythopoietic narratives of place..;Stories are critical because they help us to make sense of life. In the telling, hearing, and reading of stories, one connects with others not only on an interpersonal level, as one identifies with the teller-protagonist, but on an intrapersonal level. Such a feeling of "uniting" and "convincing"---or communitas, as Victor Turner--- calls it suggests that the coming together for a common cause like environmentalism can only take place when there exists an embedded ethos within a guiding narrative that is recognized and internalized within a community. Because Euro-Americans lack such a guiding narrative, are not indigenous, and are thus estranged from the environment, it is suggested that mythopoietic narratives of place may alleviate nonnative existential alienation, thereby presenting an opportunity for re-connection or "indigenization" to specific localities.;Ecopsychology presents an archetypal perspective informed by the Neo-Platonist concept of anima mundi, or World Soul, as posited by Theodore Roszak and James Hillman. Such an ethos, however unconscious, may be seen in the works of Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson, as well as in many indigenous traditions, including the ancient myths of the Greek nature goddess, Artemis. Because Native American myths, including those of the California Chumash, embody an Artemisian spirituality, these narratives function as ecoethical stories of placescapes that inform not only literary mythopoietic narratives of place but films like Avatar. In so doing, these stories model how others may experience place as ethopoietic in their own microlocalities.