The difficult problem of the environmental crisis faces compounding through the denial of its existence. This denial suggests a blind spot, which reframes the environmental crisis as an environ/mental crisis. The "/" refers to the unraveling ecosystems of the world on the outside as an extension of the unraveling of modern consciousness on the inside. Corresponding to the split between Heaven and Earth, mind and body, or Paradise and Wilderness, the consequences of this division are cast in terms of The Fall. Though the danger of this emergency is complex, it clearly concerns empirical data on critical leaps, for example, in population growth and the AIDS epidemic, global warming and ozone loss, while also charting equally profound resistance and failure in the public square, demanding political response and leadership. Exploring the roots of this resistance is central to the purpose of this dissertation. As such, it addresses a way of knowing that becomes a practice of unknowing, and thus, this dissertation incorporates this "/" describing the environ/mental nature of the problem, in the structure of the text.;Accordingly, the "/" in this text opens onto a space of threat and danger replete with images of apocalypse, but it also indicates a space occupied by images of liberation. The divide characterizing the environ/mental crisis is claimed in this dissertation for the political imagination as the "in-between" place where nonviolent boundaries and deadly borders exist as choices for ways of life that spiral up, or down. In the exploration of this "/" and the resistance marshaled to maintain its military, political-economic, and religious authority, this dissertation represents itself through a code operating in a research engine and time machine called "Enigma." This research engine has adopted the use of root metaphors, Paradise and Wilderness, to replicate the severed relationship indicated by the "/" as The Fall. Root metaphors, in organizing worldviews, are therefore utilized in this text for their mechanical and formistic representation of the Earth as dead and/or unconscious, and for their organismic and contextual representations of the Earth as thoroughly interrelated, and alive. Through its code (VPOMMW x 3) and the use of metaphor, the research engine and time machine of Enigma represents a particular effort. And that effort is to reopen what Richard Slotkin called, "the world of primary myth and universal archetypes, (in order to)...draw out the vocabulary of myth-images and structures" that is the legacy of Western culture. In this dissertation, Paradise and Wilderness: Images of an Alternative Futures, the method of replicating the dissociation in the "/" is reversed in the exploration of boundaries indicating a metaphorical logic of reintegration, meaning a way to paradise in the wilderness that is enlightening, rather than bewildering. The trends, just under the surface of this project, address the environ/mental crisis as a spiritual crisis, in which boundaries or borders are offered as choices of nonviolent or violent ways of life.
展开▼
