My neighbor Cal and I went to the Town Board meeting tonight to urge a responsible approach to the American Transmission Company’s proposed hundred million dollar build out of facilities including a 345kV line to nowhere across our marsh. Cal is a wetlands ecologist and quite a Christian, a combination that I find baffling, but it works for him. (”Oh me of little faith…”)
Tonight after we had our way with the board, influencing them to file for intervenor status with the State Public Service Commission and to write a letter to the County Board supporting a moratorium on construction of new power facilities until a needs assessment has been completed, we stood talking in the parking lot for a while. Cal was all about how our language gives us away: “Do we call all this black stuff underground ‘fossil fuel’ or do we see them as great carbon sequestration systems that made the planet habitable?” He pointed out that until the ‘enlightenment,’ our metaphor for creation (yeah, the planet - lots of xtians call it “creation” - as distinct from “tarnation” I suppose, and of course “tarnation” in the context of exploiting carboniferous stuff… well you get my drift) … anyway the dominant metaphor for creation was a book, a book to be read. Then somehow it shifted to the earth as a machine, a great storehouse of “natural resources,” goods to be used, to be consumed.
He was talking about this article by William J. Mills, unfrotunately it’s part of the great information sequestration system called electronic serialization, and it would cost me twenty-five clams to read the whole thing. The abstract says:
Metaphor plays a fundamental role in our perception and comprehension of our environment, not just as a means of escape from customary vision but, more importantly, as the means whereby that customary vision first becomes established. Societies differ in “metaphorical vision” because their vision of the world derives from different metaphors. Three periods in the history of the Western world are distinguished. In the Middle Ages, nature was seen primarily as a book. In the Renaissance, it was believed to be organized in the same manner as a human being. In the modern age, the most influential metaphor has been the machine. A society’s choice of one metaphor rather than another as the primary vehicle through which it seeks to comprehend its environment is highly indicative of the needs and aspirations of that society.
