KENNETH BURKE: FROM MYTH TO ECOLOGY

Green Letters Vol 18, Issue 1, 2014

Please note:

Environmental Conservation, 2009

health sciences, history THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW utpjournals.press/chr Offering a comprehensive analysis on the events that have shaped Canada, CHR publishes articles that examine Canadian history from both a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective.

Examiner's comments (abridged): Professor Louise Westling, University of Oregon (author of The Green Breast of the New World, and Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens): “Berry’s “Under the Dominion of Light: An Ecocritical Mythography” is a substantial contribution to ecocriticism and ... an ambitious attempt to place myth theory in rigorous dialogue with European cultural theory of the past century in order to analyse the deep sources of the present ecological dilemma in the mythos of transcendent light… it succeeds admirably in making its case. The project is certain to be influential in international ecocritical debates, because it provides a strong new perspective on mythic tendencies driving Western economic behaviour.” Laurence Coupe, Manchester Metropolitan University (author of Myth in the New Critical Idiom series, and The Green Studies Reader): “This thesis is ambitious, erudite, well-informed and articulate. It clearly demonstrates the candidate’s ability to synthesise a great deal of diffuse material and to focus on an original theme.”

Ethnobiology Letters, 2016

Use of metaphor embodies myth in Western science and Native American traditional knowledge traditions about understanding the "natural" world and the nonhuman "other." Using personal history, I compare a myth/metaphor from each intellectual tradition that shaped my thinking. Cultural trains of thought and metaphors impacted these myths and shaped my way of thinking. From Western scientific tradition, I examine the "Balance of Nature," which dominated ecology and conservation biology from the 1850s until the 1990s. Balance and stability underlie major models in contemporary ecology and population biology, especially in wildlife and fisheries management. Before I trained as a Western style evolutionary ecologist, the myth of Wolf as creator figure in the traditions of Numic peoples (Shoshone, Comanche, Ute, Paiute) was the Indigenous creation myth that shaped my thinking. In the Balance of Nature, hidden metaphors are rooted in Western economic thought, specifically Capitalism. Similar metaphors in Numic peoples assume that humans are related ecologically to wolves, who served as teachers and guides. Stories, rather than data, served to fix these concepts into each cultural tradition. Although Numic beliefs appear "irrational" to Western society, they are more attuned to twenty-first century ecological and evolutionary thought than balance in nature, which lay at the root of Western ecological ideas until the 1980s. I discuss how my experiences with changing environmental conditions combined with my work with Indigenous peoples. Exposure to philosophical and empirical approaches from ethnobiology led me to explore these themes.

NJES, 2016

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2018

that, like those ancient myths, these studies will also inspire academic research and other kinds of action responding positively and realistically to the current environmental crisis, and leading in this way to the 'recovery of paradise lost'.

2003

2019

This issue was conceived to occupy a shared locus in the study of myth and ecocriticism which has so far been vacant. Its purpose is to link topoi such as Eden, the promised land and the new Canaan as manifestations of paradise, the Arthurian cycle, pastoral Arcadia, unexplored virgin tropical lands, and the American West with the current situation of the world we inhabit, in terms of our relationship with the land and the more-than-human world. Our aim was to show that myths and the literature of nature have been written in acknowledgement and understanding of each other, that they have evolved in parallel, with a common focus on the intervention of human beings in nature. Take the Greek myth of Prometheus for example: his betrayal of the gods led to an alteration of the world order. Prometheus became an icon of human rebellion, a recurrent symbol reminding humans of their inability to overcome divine power. At the same time, the Prometheus myth mirrors the eternal natural cycle of...

2018

This issue was conceived to occupy a shared locus in the study of myth and ecocriticism which has so far been vacant. Its purpose is to link topoi such as Eden, the promised land and the new Canaan as manifestations of paradise, the Arthurian cycle, pastoral Arcadia, unexplored virgin tropical lands, and the American West with the current situation of the world we inhabit, in terms of our relationship with the land and the more-than-human world. Our aim was to show that myths and the literature of nature have been written in acknowledgement and understanding of each other, that they have evolved in parallel, with a common focus on the intervention of human beings in nature. Take the Greek myth of Prometheus for example: his betrayal of the gods led to an alteration of the world order. Prometheus became an icon of human rebellion, a recurrent symbol reminding humans of their inability to overcome divine power. At the same time, the Prometheus myth mirrors the eternal natural cycle of...