CONTEXTUALIZE:
In Reinventing Eden, it is also addressed that narratives are ideals that only address or include bits or biases. Religion and ethic give permission to address and exist with nature in different degrees of severity. (p. 36) Cicero writes in this second passage selected that the "lower animals" have no desire or concern for the harvested and cultivated. Perhaps it is the time at which he writes compared to my modern day perspective, but it seems as though this statement is avoidance of addressing the landscape these lower animals live and will continuing living on devoid of the natural resources humanity has depleted it of in production of the vines and the olives that are spoken of. Of course, just because the crop itself may be of no interest to animals, the land that the crop is being produced on is transformed and therefore affects the natural world in its entirety. It is the moral, the ethic, and the story we tell ourselves that permits us to act. It is as though we believe we are doing the right thing- which is evident especially current day.
Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. London: Psychology Press, 2004.
RELATE:
Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura)
(ca. 99-55 BCE)
As for planting and grafting, the original pattern for these operations was provided by creative nature herself, since fallen berries and acorns in due time produced swarms of seedlings beneath the trees; and this gave people the idea of entrusting slips to branches and of planting young saplings in the earth all over the countryside. Then they kept on experimenting with new methods of cultivating the little plot of land they loved, and saw wild fruits improve in the ground in response to their kindly care and coaxing. And day by day they forced the forests to retreat farther and farther up the mountains and surrender the parts below to cultivation, so that on hills and plains they might have meadows, ponds, streams, crops, and exuberant vines, and so that the distinctive gray-green zone of olives might run between, spreading over down and dale and plain. They created landscapes such as we see today—landscapes rich in delightful variety, attractively dotted with sweet fruit trees and enclosed with luxuriant plantations.
In mimicking the landscape we are able to produce and even regenerate with the hopes that our efforts can reinvent our idea of an original Eden. Lucretius' prose reminds me so much of the intimacy that is written in Carolyn Merchant's Reinventing Eden between woman and the earth, i.e. Eve and her curiosity in the serpent and in the ways and wonders of the earth. Cicero's description of agriculture seems respectful and observant of the earth in agricultural practice but never addresses the human tendency to cross the line between need and desire for more.
Lucretius does, however address, human expansion for agricultural practice later in the prose which is ultimately paralleled to the fall of the Roman Empire- the overuse and the over-extraction of what Cicero is calling earth's "overabundance" in this passage.
Lucretius Carus, Titus, J. S. Watson, and John Mason Good. 1901. Lucretius on the nature of things. London: G. Bell.
These readings also remind me of my favorite book called Ishmael. Ishmael, a philosophical novel, by Daniel Quinn, was written in 1992 addressing the unspoken cultural/spiritual/ethical biases driving modern day progress, industrialization, and expansion. Quinn's book addresses the Green Belt Revolution so it is really fascinating to see how deeply rooted this battle between the ethical choice of humanity and earth is within our ancestry, or planet, and humankind in total- not just within the Western world.