Hollywood Utopia

46 Hollywood Utopia
vast gasoline station for human exploitation’. Adorno in Revolt of Nature continued in this vein
and prophetically contended that mastery over nature inevitably turns to mastery over men (cited
in Anderson 1996: 134).
7. In particular in the early nineteenth century, German Romantics, ‘in protest against
Enlightenment rationality’, called for a rebirth of mythology and what Schelling termed a new
‘universal symbolism’ based on the ‘things of nature’ which ‘both signify and are’ (Buck-Morss
in Levin 1993: 317). This form of nature romanticism had disastrous consequences for the first
half of the twentieth century, most notably with the evolution of Nazism.
8. The word ‘biosphere’ has three meanings: ‘the totality of living things dwelling on the earth, the
space occupied by living things, or life and life-support systems, atmosphere, hydrosphere,
lithosphere, and pedosphere’. The term was invented by Eduard Suess (1875), who wrote of a
sphere of living organisms or biological processes (Huggett 1995: 8).
9. Nature as female became a root metaphor for sixteenth-century Europeans but such an allencompassing
metaphor can be a double-edged notion, often rendering both women and nature
as passive and submissive (Merchant 1995: 142). However, Patrick Murphy's argument that
James Lovelock's original Gaia hypothesis can be regarded as an essentially sexist one is possibly
over-stretching its intended meaning.
In 1980 at a ‘survival gathering’ of native Americans in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a
‘Declaration of Dependence on the Land -Mother Earth’ (see Akwesasne Notes, Summer 1980)
was issued which declared: ‘We call for the recognition of our responsibilities to be stewards of
the land, to treat with respect and love our Mother Earth who is a source of our physical
nourishment and our spiritual strength. We are people of the land. We believe that the land is not
to be owned but to be shared. We believe that we are guardians of the land’ (cited in Merchant
1995: 155).
10. Consequently sales of Leopold's ‘bible of this new environmentalism’ reached over 270,000
copies in 1973 alone. Most variations of radical ecology also tend to assume this holistic ethic of
creation.
11. The polarising beliefs that form the core of this biocentric ethical outlook, include ‘the belief
that humans are members of the earth's “community of life” in the same sense and on the same
terms in which other living things are members of that community’ (Taylor in Gruen 1994: 43).
12. Ecological historians often attempt to (re)construct a master eco-narrative to help replace, or
supersede, what they regard as ‘reductive’ and ‘outworn’ controlling ideological categorisations,
namely: ‘red/blue’ or left/right oppositions, which some argue have become less relevant to the
globalised West. We have, according to the more pessimistic critics like David Pepper, become
trapped within an apparently relativist, postmodernist culture which unintentionally promotes
exclusivity.