Remembering Premodern Environs

In the early 1990s, activist and poet Wendell Berry character-ized the popular use of the term “environment” as “utterly preposterous.” The word, he says, “means that which surrounds, or encircles us; it means a world separate from ourselves, outside ourselves.” In outlining how the “real state of things,” which “is far more complex and intimate and inter-esting” than an anthropocentric term like “environment” allows, Berry generates a list: “The real names of the environment,” he itemizes, “are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodland, lanes, roads, creatures, and people.”1 Nearly contemporaneously, the philosopher Michel Serres also exhorted us to “forget the word environment.” “If the soiled” and endangered “world” is what we mean when we employ the term, then we have it all wrong, Serres says: this use of the term “assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature.” He instead proposes that “we . . . place things in the center and us at the periphery, or better still, things all around and us within them like parasites.”2 Like Timothy Morton’s “Nature” (with a cap-ital “N”), “environment,” Berry and Serres indicate, seems to be “getting in the way” of environmental work and theory.3 We would do well, then, to unlearn the term.