Sunlit Murk

 

 

Earnest Martins Hennings

U.S. 1886-1956

Sunlit Foothills, 1947

Oil on canvas

The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma

The difference between the gallery that held this painting, which was filled with similar depictions of the southwestern US, and the gallery that proceeded it was striking. The predominately European art of the main gallery seemed always to frame nature with human constructions. The southwestern landscapes of the following gallery were the reverse, dwarfing humans (often Native Americans) with their natural surroundings. This mass generalization based on a cursory gallery walk is by no means a universal trend, but it was the impression with which I approached this painting by American painter Earnest Martin Hennings.

This landscape attracted me because of its dramatic use of light. The dark, full curve of the center horse first drew my eye, and from there I was taken to the light of the center shrub, the dark mountain, and finally to the bright clearing on the top of the leftmost mountain. The canvas is divided into three distinct horizontal sections, both by use of alternating shadow and generous sunlight and by line. The bottom third lies in shadow from a source unknown to the viewer, but which would be precisely where the viewer is standing. It was dominated by parallel, calm lines, which sloped and intersected each other to create a well-worn path that passively directed the eye up. The top third was similarly ordered, with dark grey short vertical lines clearly directing down from the darkened sky.

The middle third was a chaos of color and light, shaping the hedges and sloping hills with a maze of intersecting ellipticals. Green dominated this section, only varying with proximity to the light source, so that the white skeletal branches were in sharp contrast. They, along with the splash of white that is the third horseman, pointed clearly towards the last thing my eye came to rest upon. The focal point of this painting, or at least what all paths seemed to lead to, was a part of the foothills only partially viewable by the observer. It is where the three horsemen are looking to, where the line of the path ends, and where the tree branches point. It seems to be a clearing on the foothills, perhaps a village, that knowledge is the artist’s alone.

What I interpreted as most telling of Henning’s message is the perspective he chose to depict this scene through. The viewer gets neither a clear view ahead to where the path leads, nor even a position to see what casts the shadow. The people in the painting are dynamic, yet unhurried, seeming to have a clear sense of direction. Why, then, is the viewer left in such murk? Perhaps Henning impoverishes the viewer of orientation in the hope that they will recognize the use of and strive for this more utopian unity with nature, wherein destiny is not determined by nature or the humans that journey through it, but codiscovered.

Cynobacterial Civilization

It seems unnecessary to state that other animals alter their environments. The project of life is to change its surroundings, however drastically, to achieve homeostasis (Dr. Trachtenberg cited beavers as an example of radical ecosystem engineering). If you don’t subscribe to the distinction between beaver dams and say, the construction of the American interstates being the beaver’s position in “nature,” then often the difference is said to lie in scale. Undoubtedly, if human activity could be understood as simple niche construction, than it is an extreme and pervasive sort. Balée’s work, and the research program of historical ecology, proves that the scale is such that there is no “nature” unaltered by humanity.

 

“In more recent times, a number of scholars have argued that agricultural impacts dating from the Holocene have essentially transformed the world so much that hardly any part of it is pristine… humans created the landscapes typically referred to as examples of Holocene environment.” (Balée 2006)

 

This could give empirical fuel to the view that human modification of the environment has ceased to be natural in its pure ubiquity, but this is flawed. The Great Oxygenation Event of 2.4 billion years ago is seen as “the most significant climate event in Earth’s history” (Zurich 2013). The GOE was the introduction of free oxygen into earth’s atmosphere for the first time, triggering the extinction of nearly all the world’s anaerobic organisms and the Huronian glaciation (ibid). It was also caused by the evolution and workings of cynobacteria. A form of life as natural and unassuming as Cynobacteria interrupted the atmospheric system to an extent that the surface and functioning of the earth was altered permanently.

 

Balée’s work on Amazonian dark earth and geoglyphs debunks the notion of a pristine nature, or the separation of landscape from man, but I think there’s an even more important false conception that it critiques. The notion of a singular nature, an idea that is greater than the life or geology that constitute it, a place in which organisms and earth systems work in harmony, is simply ahistoric. This is where the GOE comes in. Life has interrupted itself before. The working of one organism has caused mass extinction before, has “ruined” pre-existing earth systems before, and these actions shaped the nature we live within. There is no ideal or pristine earth that exists outside the actions of its individual components, but a dynamic ball of rock whose inhabitants did, and will continue, to define.

 

Balée, William. “The Research Program of Historical Ecology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 75-98.

Trachtenberg, Zev. “Ethics of the Anthropocene.” The University of Oklahoma. 25 March 2014.

University of Zurich. “Great Oxidation Event: More oxygen through multicellularity.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 January 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130117084856.htm>.

Economizing Ecology

In listening to Dr. Michelle Marvier speak and reading about the debate she catalyzed I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the questions it surrounds. The central line of inquiry is the same one addressed by Michael Ellis, what the place and obligation of humanity is in the Anthropocene. It is clearly in the interest of humanity and the earth to minimize human-induced radical alteration of earth systems, although debates on how best to go about this remain. In Ecology, however, the best interest of humans and their abiotic habitat is obscured by another factor: all other life on Earth. This other half of nature, that experiences death and birth and plenty and restriction like no river delta can, these non-human biota complicate the ethics of ecological conservation enormously.

Dr. Marvier argues that to convince humans nature is worth investment, conservationists must consider how to maximize returns for humans. Proving to the public that an interest in nature is not mutually exclusive with a healthy economy but essential to it seems like common sense. What concerns me are the implications of this instrumental view of nature. I am utterly ignorant in economic theory, but I have been reading Marx’s Capital for an Anthropology course. Marvier’s approach to conservation works by operating within and to a certain extent exploiting a commodity-driven economy; therefore Marx’s critique of the commodity fetishism plaguing capitalism has become eerily applicable.

When nature is framed as investment-worthy, does it “emerge as a commodity, chang[ing] into a thing which transcends sensuousness” like any other product for consumption (163)? In Marxist theory, the final transformation of a product into “money form” conceals its connection to labor and thus the relationship between laborers by making those relations “appear as relations between material objects” (168). Commodification of nature does make conservation applicable and pertinent to big businesses, but might it place natural systems and certain ecosystems in a vacuum? It seems that a disconnect may appear between the purpose nature serves to the economy and the constituents of a natural system themselves, ignoring their integrity as individual life. This disconnect between 1) interactions between live beings and 2) the marketable purpose those interactions provide seems to have potential for a deeper alienation from and devaluing of non-human life.

This is one particular insecurity I had about Marvier’s solution, but really conservation seems to hold ethical impasses implicit in every decision it is presented with. Equally valuing the integrity of all life is impossible, and therefore the moral obligation of humans in this field is one of the most convoluted problems I’ve ever encountered. I hope this stunted interpretation of one of those issues is more decipherable than it feels, even with its lack of answers!

Marvier, Michelle. “Protecting Nature in the Anthropocene: The Battle Between Pragmatism and Purity within the Conservation Movement.” Norman, Oklahoma. 19 February 2014. Public Lecture.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990.