Stephanie Rutherford: Illuminating how power shapes our relationships with nature (ep301)
What is green governmentality? And how might the commodification of nature experiences limit our ways of relating to Earth?
In this episode, we're joined by SDr. Stephanie Rutherford, an Associate Professor in the Trent University School of the Environment. Her work is interdisciplinary, focusing on the intersections among the environmental humanities, animal studies, and environmental politics. She is the author or co-editor of three books, including Governing the Wild, that consider these themes, and she and has a new book forthcoming on wolves, settler colonialism and biopolitics in Canada.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Come Over Tonight by Luna Bec.
“How might [the commodification of nature experiences] close down other possibilities for relating to Earth that might be more generative, more about healing and kinship rather than separation?”
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Transcript
Kamea Chayne: I would love it if you could start us off by sharing a bit about your background and how you came to focus on the intersections of environmental humanities, animal studies, and environmental politics.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: It was a bit of a circuitous journey. I never really considered myself an environmentalist. In fact, I was a little bit suspicious of environmentalism to some degree. But I was always curious about questions of power. That's kind of where I came to the environmental humanities and then later animal studies.
So I was just a reluctant environmentalist. Even though I enrolled in a Ph.D. in environmental studies, I was still this reluctant environmentalist because I thought at the time that environmentalism was all about this sort of veneration of wilderness. I had grown up in Toronto, in Canada, in a community that would be defined now as an environmental justice community. We didn't have any of the majestic wilderness. But that seemed like what environmentalists wanted to save.
My questions are always more about poverty, racialization, and the relationship to poverty and questions of power. Then I enrolled in this program and met really, really great and smart people and began to tie together my interest in questions of power with how we talk about the environment and the sort of stories that we tell and who that includes and who that excludes.
Kamea Chayne: I don't think you're alone in having those preconceptions about the field of environmentalism. And I think this conversation will be really helpful in unpacking all of these ideas as well.
So in your book, Governing the Wild, you highlight four emblematic American scenes that shape people's perceptions of nature: the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Disney's Animal Kingdom Theme Park in Orlando, an eco-tour of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, and the film An Inconvenient Truth. Even though they all seem quite different, you look at how they're all manifestations of what's called ‘green governmentality’. Can you unpack for us what this means and why it was important for you to understand these sites through this lens?
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: So it was the same sort of question about power. I was convinced that there was a kind of storytelling in these types of national nature, almost, like these famous places where we go to visit or consume specific ideas around nature. What I wanted to do, and this is what I talked about in terms of greedy government politics, but I think a different way of saying that is: What's the story that gets told in this place, and how does that open up the possibilities for some understandings of our relationship to nature while foreclosing other understandings of our relationship to nature?
So you brought up national parks and, of course, all of them are storied in terms of the relationship between nature and nation and how we think of this idea of wilderness—that Bill Cronon has famously deconstructed, as have many others. You can get to this idea with his now-famous essay, The Trouble with Wilderness. I was curious about how the story of nature was pulled in these seemingly disparate places.
What I came up with was the way they told the story of nature was often separate from people and strangely commodified. This is most obvious in the case of Disney's Animal Kingdom, which is the selling of a particular experience with nature, but also was evident in other places. Yellowstone functioned on commerce as well in this particular consumption of nature.
So I was considering an interest in the way in which that framing of nature sort of closed down other possibilities for a relationship that might be more generative, more about sort of healing our relationship to the natural world, more about thinking in terms of kinship rather than separation.
Kamea Chayne: The idea that nature has been commodified and extracted is, of course, nothing new, although I think a lot of people see it through the lens of products that are made from natural resources that are then bought and sold. In terms of looking at the commodification of these experiences, since they are reduced into monetary value for expenditures, I wonder, what does this reveal about how people of different genders, races, and ethnicity, and classes have been able to engage with nature in these very particular ways?
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: That's a really good question. There's always an opportunity to subvert and resist the dominant framing of nature in any of these places. And there are always different ways of coming to know and understand our relationship with the natural world. But what I was curious about was this dominant framing: What does it mean to go on this eco-tour in Yellowstone National Park? Who attends? Who is it framed around and whose interest does it put forward?
It didn't seem to me that it was certainly a racialized and class experience of the wild. It followed this trajectory of a sort of white environmentalism, where caring for nature becomes a thing of the expected expenditure of cash or also a place that you visit, but it's not actually the place where you live. That's the kind of commodification of the experience that I think it is a bit of a problem if we want to actually build a genuine relationship with nature.
We exist now at this moment that some people have called the Anthropocene, or the age of man. There's lots of debate about whether that's the best way to think about our environmental crisis. But there is something that says we have fundamentally altered the biogeochemical processes of the earth, and that's a flawed relationship. The way in which we have encountered nature, some of us, not all of us, haven't been about flourishing; it's been about diminishment. So if we're going to tell a different story, maybe we need to ask different people how they encounter nature and move away from the more dominant framing of what nature looks like and what it can look like.
Kamea Chayne: When thinking about the iconic sights that you look at, what stands out to me is how they each play with temporality and distort our perceptions of time and therefore reality as well. For example, you say, “In Yellowstone and Grand Teton, it can appear as if nature has already been saved. Visitors can pretend that the clock has been turned back, that nature exists here as it did before westward expansion. Due to the efforts of national park staff, combined with the foresight of those who crafted the park ideal, visitors can leave their urban homes and encounter a quote-unquote, authentic and pristine nature. The management of the lives of these animals, from the reintroductions to tracking, has made it so that they can thrive in this small, yet breathtaking parcel of the United States, leaving much of the rest wide open to business as usual. It is in this oasis, this recreated Eden, that the wholesale slaughter of bison, wolves, and bears that made the nation can be forgotten.”
I wonder if you could speak more to how these very curated experiences, even national parks that may appear as if they've been left untouched, play with ideas of permanence and impermanence and past, present, and future, which then distort our perceptions of reality and understandings of nature.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: What a fabulous question. I do think that the ways in which the environment is presented in the places that I looked at in this book, particularly the American Museum of Natural History history, there was a bit of this incarceration of nature as of the past, as you suggest, this kind of distorted temporality.
So if nature is separate from culture, and if that is of the pack, then the things that we do outside of these types of nature are of the future, right? “Look, there is a future entity to it, and so it can authorize and enable all kinds of ways of relating to the environment that is quite destructive. But as long as we maintain these sites of protected nature, then it's fine.” It almost lets us off the hook for everything else.
This is what Bill Cronin talked about when he talked about the trouble with the wilderness— the trouble with wilderness is it lets us off the hook for the places that we actually live. And I think playing with temporality does precisely the same thing. It means that as we live into the present and as we look to the future, those two charities don't have to pay attention to our entanglement and enmeshment with the natural world and all of its critters. Because that's incarcerated in a packed time, in a small place, in part of northwest in the northwest United States.
Kamea Chayne: When I went through the book, this quote that you wrote about the Bengal tiger in the museum really stuck with me. I don't remember the exact words, but you basically said that this Bengal tiger has sacrificed its life so that it can live forever in this setting. And with national parks as well, even though they are living and breathing, the people that are managing these spaces have ideas of what they want the visitors to experience.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: Yeah, absolutely. In national parks, there's this idea that we are visiting akind of primeval nature. But there's a lot of effort, for instance, in national parks or provincial parks here, too, that goes into making it seem that way. And as you say, there is a particular narrative that is being told. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but we should be aware that there is a narrative, that this is not just this unmediated encounter with wild nature.
This is a particular kind of experience that is created in a specific sort of way. There's like a pedagogical intent. We're supposed to learn the right thing. And I think it's often interesting when people learn the wrong thing, when they take away from that experience something which is quite different than the then the managers who constructed it intended. There's always slippage in these narratives. But they are the existing narrative. And we should understand them in that way.
Kamea Chayne: Right. To that point, I feel that oftentimes, we're constantly consuming narratives and experiences without taking time to peel back the curtains to look at the powers that are shaping and curating those stories and settings. So, for example, you say, “I suggest that much more goes on at these sites than the mere experience of a preexisting nature. Rather, these sites create nature in particular ways but simultaneously erase the fact of its cultural production. And I would argue that the result of these kinds of tales is that other ways of encountering nature are rendered unthinkable, other stories unsayable.” What should we keep in mind in regards to how power works to define nature for us, as well as consequently, the solutions to our ecological crises that now get the greatest publicity and attention?
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: There is a kind of framing of nature, particularly in Western thought, and it confuses philosophy and ways of articulating our relationship to nature that people are both unique and superior because of our capacity to reason and their ability to use language. This idea of nature-culture divides. But that's always been fiction, right? This sort of human exceptionalism that some of us embrace, often in Western culture, has ignored the fact that nature has always been lively and full of agency. And we are always enmeshed with that agency.
One way of moving beyond potentially the environmental crisis we face when you know, these are existential threats. Right. Like we need to be serious about the environmental problems that we face because they are multiple and they're intersecting and they're cascading. And as a person who is concerned about, for instance, the biodiversity crisis, I can't just be concerned about animals. I also have to think of climate change because those two things are knit together tightly. Right. But I also think that until folks are willing to have a real conversation about the ways in which, for instance, the Anthropocene — Anthropocene sort of broadly as this shorthand for the environmental crisis — is tied to colonialism, is tied to white supremacy, is tied to articulations of capitalism, along with things like speciesism. But I don't know that we're going to be able to solve this. Right. Like, I think that my answer is that we have to think and this is following lots of indigenous scholars, for instance, and activists to whom they have said and said these things first, that we need to think about these issues in concert with one another. But particular ways of understanding our relationship to the natural world, for instance, come out of settler colonialism and particular ideas of private property. And until we start to understand that and take apart those connections, I don't know how much further we're going to get. It’s a joint project all the way down.
Kamea Chayne: So, a lot of our solutions right now are still operating out of the same frameworks and don’t go deep enough to address the extractive system and world itself that led us to where we are. And a lot of these curated nature experiences that still center on the commodification of nature, like you mentioned earlier, they're disproportionately consumed by wealthier and more privileged people who, generally speaking, have more power to influence our society and culture and lead the direction that we head towards as a country, as a civilization. So I wonder if you could speak more to power in the sense that the people that are driving our society and our future are the very people that are most buying into these socially-constructed ideas of nature that are rooted in stories of separation and how that might be a barrier for us to achieve collective healing.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: Yeah, I think it's a great question, sort of the way in which we have articulated the solution to environmental problems often looks like, well, it would be good to buy a Tesla, for instance. And sure, it would be good to buy it if you are going to continue to drive, for instance. But you might want to have a deeper conversation about your relationship with automobiles. Right. And so there is the kind of easier way of answering the environmental question and then the sort of tougher one that actually does pay attention to the fact that wealth seeks to reproduce itself. And one of the ways in which I think capitalism has been particularly effective is in seeking to sort of colonize and subvert resistance to it. So, environmentalism, for instance, can have a very radical edge to it, a very sort of anticapitalist edge to it. Or, in the ways in which it's been taken up, it can be about buying environmentally friendly products. Right. And this is not me saying that we shouldn't buy environmentally friendly products. I certainly think that we should do those things. But that doesn't get, as you say, to the deeper question, it doesn't get to the question of how inequality, economic inequality can produce environmental harm. It doesn't get to the question of how racial minorities and poor people are more likely to experience environmental harm. Those things are tied to capitalism, too. And so if the answer becomes we should just buy better things rather than we should deal with the fact that the whole structure is set up so that extraction either through green products or some other kind of product is the answer, then we're kind of in trouble. We might just be shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Right. Maybe buy ourselves a bit of time. But I don't think that's going to be the thing that helps us live better in the world.
Kamea Chayne: Right now, we really have a top-down approach to storytelling, as in the narratives and experiences that have the most influence over public perception, are mostly shaped by power. So how do you think our relationship with Earth would change if our ways of knowing the world were shaped mostly in decentralized ways and coming from people who are closest to the land and people that are currently most marginalized by our dominant culture and society?
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: Yeah, I think my own learning and my own unlearning, I guess — I have been so lucky in my life to have learned from indigenous folks who have taught me about different ways of relating to the natural world. And a lot of this is around kinship. So my present work is on wolves in Canada. And so I've just finished this book on the history of wolves in Canada. And in the book sort of charts the ways in which settler relationships with wolves have often been violent. Certainly, if we look at the bounty or if we look at efforts of predator control. But even in this kind of narrative of loving the wolf as this last wilderness ambassador, there is not an attempt to actually know the wolf on its own terms as a creature that has specific aims and agency in the world. And so there is still a separation. There's a reinforcement of a kind of separation. And what I have learned from indigenous colleagues and friends is a different way of relating to the creatures of the earth, which focuses on kinship, which emphasizes that we haven't just suddenly been tied up together with animals. It's always been this case and acknowledging that and acting in ways that amplify kinship with the rest of creation, whether that’s plants or animals or microbes or the soil is, I think, in a different way of relating, but it's one that we need indigenous people to lead. It's not a story I can tell. We need indigenous folks. And people like me, though, need to to amplify and raise up the voices of indigenous people who are telling us that this is the way forward. So so that's been my greatest lesson is sometimes people who look like me need to just be quiet and stop talking so much and stop taking up so much airtime and instead allow other voices to come to the fore because I think the answers are there. It's about acting in solidarity and not wanting to lead all the time.
Kamea Chayne: And to expand upon this — right now, research funding disproportionally goes into, quote-unquote, solutions that are scalable and patentable with a potential return on investment. So things such as patented lab-grown meats or quote-unquote clean technologies or carbon capture technologies are things that get a lot of hype across mainstream media because of the disproportionate funding that's going into them. And so what happens is that the decentralized, place-based solutions that often can’t be extracted from, get sidelined. So, just as an example, we know that indigenous peoples make up about six percent of our global population, but steward 80 percent of Earth's biodiversity. And that to me just says everything about climate change and the sixth mass extinction. But whenever I bring this up to people in the impact investment space, they’ll say yes, we fully support community-driven approaches and we should learn from indigenous knowledge to inform the solutions we innovate and then implement. But a lot of that is still sort of extractive because it’s about taking and capitalizing off of indigenous knowledge rather than recognizing the need for deeper perspective and relationships. And if we’re talking about healing degraded land and marginalized communities, sometimes it has to be purely about giving back and restoring rather than seeing these things as investment opportunities to take and extract even more from.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: I think you're absolutely right. And I think that, for instance, academia has been particularly problematic in this regard. And you've talked about this sort of extraction — the ways in which academia extractively takes Indigenous knowledge and tries to fit it into a framework and then uses it for their own gain. Right. And you're pointing to this clean meat is another example of the ways in which resistance is kind of commodified and sold back to us in ways that are about enriching some people, but as you say, not doing anything to help or to pay attention to the knowledge and wisdom of the land that's already there. And we just need to support indigenous place-based practice. So I agree with you 100 percent.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and to pivot to your more recent focus on wolves, you wrote an article about the counterintuitive position of the wolf as a central icon for a few different North American white nationalist groups. And these groups’ identification with wolves is counterintuitive because historically, wolves were a feared and hated species often associated with indigenous peoples. And both groups were the subjects of numerous extermination efforts. So it's an interesting contradiction. And I'd be curious to hear you unpack your research on this further and what you learned in regards to why and how the narratives around wolves have shifted in recent years.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: Yeah, it was a strange discovery for me, right. Because, at the time, I was in the middle of writing my book. And I was mired in these archival sources which were charting white settlers’ relationship with wolves, and they were only ever violent and they were often like egregiously violent. Like, the ways in which settlers were killing wolves were often overkill. Like there seemed to be some sort of deep hatred. And I'm doing this work and I'm in the archives and I'm writing this stuff up. And then I start to sort of in the back of my mind or through media tendrils or whatever, start to find out that there's a whole range of white nationalist groups, though they don't define themselves in that way, they sort of take on this broad alt right idea, are using the wolf as the sort of symbol. And so I was confused about what was happening. But when I did a little bit more research, it seems like a lot of this is related to a kind of attachment to Norse mythology and Odin. But there was this kind of story of the wolf, as aggressive, as a warrior, you know, able to sort of be macho and like an alpha male. That was the sort of way in which the wolf was being deployed as a symbol in these groups. And it was always also a bit ironic for me because wolves aren't really that way. Like if you look at the biology of wolves, they're mostly a cooperative pack species. The pack is very important to them and often packs are their families. Right. They live in family relations. And there's some interesting work that talks about the difference between wolves and dogs. And one of the things that it points out is that wolves are very hard to make angry because the pack is so important to them that they are willing to tolerate a lot before they would break those bonds. It's this interpretation of the story that these folks, these white nationalist groups are telling about wolves is completely wrong. But it picks up on these cultural narratives and the idea of the alpha male and about this notion of violence in a way that they deploy for their own ends. And the research itself was pretty horrific for me in terms of learning about how it is that that sort of racism and misogyny and particular ideas of the wolf are bound together in these narratives.
Kamea Chayne: So I think all of this just points to the importance for us to really challenge how much of our understanding of nature is really socially constructed and influenced by cultural narratives and how much of it is based on the reality of, true connection with the Earth and patience and time to really observe life and everything that's here on Earth with us rather than stories that are fabricated in very extractive ways. So really fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I mean, I think you've just explored some really interesting topics through unexpected lenses. And I always appreciate being pushed outside of the dominant narratives that as we discuss, are often the products of power. So I'd love to hold space here for you before we wrap our discussion up to share anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners, as well as any other prompts or questions or ideas that you'd invite them to keep marinating on after this conversation.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: Yeah, I think I increasingly am drawn to to pay attention to and to be curious about the nature that is close to home and I think you're referring to the Governing the Wild book, and one of the key lessons in the book was that people want to travel to see nature. We want to go places and experience the spectacular. I want to see the Grand Tetons and they are stunning and spectacular. But what is our responsibility for the places that we actually live and for the people that we share lands with? Right. And so, you know, increasingly with the pandemic, we've been seeing these stories of nature kind of emerging in our absence. And some of them have been true stories and some of them haven't been. But I can tell you that in my place in the world, there's been lots of wildlife activity that's been kind of unexpected and charmingly beautiful. And I have been thrilled to see it and also want to help encourage it to flourish. So I think my advice would be, you know, if we want to unpack these narratives about nature, a good place to start doing it is the places where we stand, where we dig our feet into the dirt. And understanding, for instance, what is my relationship to the land, but also what are other people's relationships to the land — people that were here much longer than me. And how can I learn in solidarity with that knowledge? So, yeah, digging where you stand, I think is the place that I'm at these days.
Kamea Chayne: What is an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: Well, so I'm not on social media, so that kind of makes me a bit strange because I claim I’m on Instagram weirdly, but obviously it's made my life a lot better. But I think I often have no idea what's going on in the world because of it. A book I read recently that I absolutely loved is called Our History is the Future by Nick Estes. And it traces the long history of indigenous resistance that led to the Dakota Access Pipeline, the NODAPL movement, and it’s this beautiful roadmap for the power of indigenous understandings of the land and all its creatures. And how this way of relating to the world, how it offers what he calls futures, is premised on justice. So everybody should read this book.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: Hmm, I am strangely and probably unreasonably optimistic about the state of the world, and I think it's because I get to be around amazing students who I teach here at my university who are committed to change and who don't take people, people like me, they don't take our B.S. anymore. So I'm inspired by them and what they teach me about the world.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment.
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: So what makes me hopeful in a very kind of hope as a political term is that maybe one of the things that comes out of this horrible covid-19 pandemic that we are in the middle of or hopefully coming out of right now is that we can imagine new ways of interacting with the world, with each other and with the natural world. So Arundhati Roy who wrote who wrote The God of Small Things wrote this article at the beginning of the pandemic in The Guardian. You may have seen it called “The Pandemic is a Portal”. And the question is, where is the portal going to? And what I'm hopeful for is that it goes somewhere that pays more attention to the importance of justice-oriented solutions.
Kamea Chayne: And what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Stephanie Rutherford PhD: I'm going to give you somebody else's words, and those are words from Cornel West, so Cornel West tells us that justice is what love looks like in public. It's my favorite quote in the world. And so the words that I would leave your listeners with are to love each other and to love the Earth and love animals and plants and the soil. But I think also to recognize that love isn't easy. Right. And that we often misrecognize each other even I think, in our closest relationships. And so learning to love is an iterative process that we will probably get wrong again and again. But figuring it out is our job I think. So I leave you with love.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
