RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

23
castaway gives up the idea of rescue to strike a long-term balance with the wild and
achieve bioregional membership is that of Romantic ecology. Donald Worster writes that
for Romantics like Thoreau and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, their central belief
that ―all nature is alive and pulsing with energy or spirit‖ motivated them to ―search for
holistic or integrated perception, an emphasis on interdependence and relatedness in
nature, and an intense desire to restore man to a place of intimate intercourse with the
vast organism that constitutes the earth‖ (82). The ethics of living as a member of the
―vast organism‖ earth presupposes the Romantic ecology Pi finds after the sinking of the
Tsimtsum, just as Snyder‘s formulation of reinhabitation followed his fusion of Buddhism
and ecology. The ethics of the ―business of survival‖ and the ethics of the ―real work‖ of
living responsibly in the natural world can be formulated only after the natural world has
been contacted and understood.
Snyder‘s ability to return with his naturalistic and biocentric philosophy to the
post-war United States of America depended upon his acknowledgement that although
the ocean is brutal and antithetical to human life, it is also the origin of life. This mythic
ambiguity of the sea finds expression in the French homonyms mer and mère, both sea
and mother. Indeed, the nineteenth century, French zoologist Jules Michelet describes the
sea as a kind of milk, a viscous fluid through which ―ocean plants and animals‖ shimmer
and appear ―strangely iridescent‖ as though seen through a ―diaphanous veil‖ (92). He
concludes that it is nothing less than the ―essence of life‖ (96), a Tiresias-like fluid of
microbes and algae ―hovering‖ between the animal and vegetable ―kingdoms‖ (97). Like