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Sustainable Consumption
and the Good Life

What does it mean to live a good life in a time when the planet is overheating,
the human population continues to steadily reach new peaks, oceans are turning
more acidic, and fertile soils the world over are eroding at unprecedented rates?
These and other simultaneous harms and threats demand creative responses at
several levels of consideration and action.
Written by an international team of contributors, this book examines in-depth
the relationship between sustainability and the good life. Drawing on a wealth of
theories, from social practice theory to architecture and design theory, and dis-
ciplines, such as anthropology and environmental philosophy, this book promotes
participatory action-research-based approaches to encourage sustainability and
wellbeing at local levels. It covers topical issues such as the politics of prosperity,
globalization, and indigenous notions of “the good life” and “happiness”. Finally,
it places a strong emphasis on food at the heart of the sustainability and good life
debate, for instance binding the global south to the north through import and
exports, or linking everyday lives to ideals within the dream of the good life, with
cookbooks and shows.
This interdisciplinary book provides invaluable insights for researchers and
postgraduate students interested in the contribution of the environmental
humanities to the sustainability debate.

Karen Lykke Syse is Associate Professor at the Centre for Development and the
Environment, University of Oslo, Norway.

Martin Lee Mueller is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and the
Environment, University of Oslo, Norway.
Routledge Environmental Humanities
Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin

Editorial Board
Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK
Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK
Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK
Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia
Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK
Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia
Andrea Gaynor, University of Western Australia, Australia
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, US
Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, US
Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK
Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, US
Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK
Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia

International Advisory Board

William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK
Sarah Buie, Clark University, US
Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, US
Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing
Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, US
Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University
of Edinburgh, UK
Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Australia
Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel
Carson Centre, LMU Munich University, Germany
Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, US
Kirsten Wehner, Head Curator, People and the Environment, National Museum
of Australia
The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture
recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and
resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, over-
population, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture.
The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and
future environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental
studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one
that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and
allied social sciences.
We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences
disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts
aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style.
The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social
sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of
environmental change.

Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities

Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman

The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress

An environmental history
Cameron Muir

The Biosphere and the Bioregion

Essential writings of Peter Berg
Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel

Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life

Interdisciplinary perspectives
Edited by Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller
‘Unlimited growth has not only damaged the biosphere, but also disrupted soli-
darity and cohesion within and between human groups. Sustainable Consumption
and the Good Life presents and questions various adaptations to the environmental
crises. The book is timely as it challenges and reframes issues of consumption and
well-being to meet the demands of an overheating planet.’
Peder Anker, New York University, USA

‘Living well is an aspiration freighted with environmental, economic and ethical

import. It pulses through contemporary society, just as it did the ancient world.
In this book, affirmative responses are found to critical questions about new
designs for life, always mindful of twenty-first century challenges. It gives us
insights into how consumptive habits can become more just and wise, as well as
answerable to needs and relations scaled from the personal to the planetary.
In these pages, our own reckoning is identified as the means for a powerful
reawakening.’
Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, UK
Sustainable Consumption
and the Good Life
Interdisciplinary perspectives

Edited by
Karen Lykke Syse and
Martin Lee Mueller
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-01300-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-79552-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Goudy
by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton
Contents

List of figures and tables ix

List of contributors xi

Introduction 1
KAREN LYKKE SYSE AND MARTIN LEE MUELLER

1 Enough is enough? Re-imagining an ethics and aesthetics

of sustainability for the twenty-first century 7
LAWRENCE BUELL

2 The essayistic spirit of Utopia 27

THORUNN GULLAKSEN ENDRESON

3 Towards a sustainable flourishing: democracy, hedonism

and the politics of prosperity 43
KATE SOPER

4 Is the good life sustainable? A three-decade study of values,

happiness and sustainability in Norway 55
OTTAR HELLEVIK

5 Well-being and environmental responsibility 80

BENGT BRÜLDE

6 The problem of habits for a sustainable transformation 100

HAROLD WILHITE

7 Well-being in sustainability transitions: making use of needs 111

FELIX RAUSCHMAYER AND INES OMANN
viii Contents
8 Human needs and the environment reconciled: participatory
action-research for sustainable development in Peru 126
MÒNICA GUILLEN-ROYO

9 On the good life and rising electricity consumption in rural

Zanzibar 146
TANJA WINTHER

10 Celebrity chefs, ethical food consumption and the good life 165
KAREN LYKKE SYSE

11 Follow the food: how eating and drinking shape our cities 183
JESPER PAGH

12 Caged welfare: evading the good life for egg-laying hens 204
KRISTIAN BJØRKDAHL

13 Being salmon, being human: notes on an ecological turn

in the modern narrative tradition 224
MARTIN LEE MUELLER

14 Afterword: beyond the paradox of the big, bad wolf 244

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Index 257
List of figures and tables

Figures
4.1 Values and value dimensions of the Norwegian Monitor 57
4.2 Position on the materialism–idealism dimension and choice
between five wishes one would most like to have fulfilled (per cent;
NM 2003–2011 combined) 58
4.3 Dimensions of value preferences as discussed by Inglehart, Flanagan,
Schwartz and Hellevik 60
4.4 Position on the materialism–idealism value dimension and
subjective well-being (per cent; NM 2003–2011) 61
4.5 Position on the materialism–idealism dimension and actual versus
perceived necessary income (in NKr 1,000; NM 2003–2011) 62
4.6 Position on the materialism–idealism dimension and attitude
towards Norwegian aid to developing countries (per cent; NM
2003–2011) 64
4.7 Trend for the materialism–idealism dimension (per cent deciles
distribution and average deciles score times 10; NM 1985–2011) 67
4.8 Trends for selected value indexes (transformed to vary 0–100;
NM 1985–2011) 68
4.9 Trends in subjective well-being (level of happiness and level of
satisfaction; NM 1985–2011) 69
4.10 Trends in average actual and perceived necessary income (in
NKr 1,000; NM 2001–2011) 70
4.11 Trends in subjective economic situation (percentages; NM
1985–2011) 70
4.12 Trends in environmental attitudes and behaviour (percentages;
NM 1989–2011) 71
4.13 Percentage agreeing to the statement: “We should solve the
problems in our own country before spending money on helping
other countries” (NM 1985–2011) 72
4.14 Trends in civic attitudes (percentages; NM 1985–2011) 72
7.1 Sustainable human flourishing 115
x List of figures and tables
8.1 Summary of negative, utopian and synergic strategies in
Acostambo 133
9.1 Electric lamps and appliances observed in Uroan homes in 2000.
The figures show the frequencies (percentage) with which the
appliances were kept in 131 electrified homes (Survey Uroa
2000–2001) 152

Tables
4.1 Position on the materialism–idealism dimension and subjective
economic situation (per cent; NM 2003–2011); satisfied with
own economic situation: 2005–2011 63
4.2 Position on the materialism–idealism dimension and
environmental attitudes and behaviour (per cent; NM 2003–2011) 63
4.3 Position on the materialism–idealism dimension and support for
the welfare state (per cent; NM 2003–2011) 65
7.1 Matrix of needs including examples of corresponding strategies in
four categories 113
8.1 Matrix of fundamental human needs 129
8.2 Research strategy in Acostambo 131
8.3 Ranking of perceived contribution of the OVG strategy by mean
score 137
8.4 Correlation coefficients between synergic satisfiers, wellbeing
and sustainability 139
9.1 Responses to the question ‘What do you need to live a good life?’.
Figures are given in percent of the 106 women and 80 men who
responded (Survey Uroa 2000–2001) 149
List of contributors

Kristian Bjørkdahl, Rokkan Centre for Social Studies, Uni Research, Bergen
Bengt Brülde, University of Gothenburg
Lawrence Buell, Harvard University/Centre for Development and the
Environment, University of Oslo
Thorunn Gullaksen Endreson, Centre for Development and the Environment,
University of Oslo
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo
Mònica Guillen-Royo, Centre for Development and the Environment,
University of Oslo
Ottar Hellevik, University of Oslo
Martin Lee Mueller, Centre for Development and the Environment, University
of Oslo
Ines Omann, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig
Jesper Pagh, Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change, Roskilde
University, Copenhagen
Felix Rauschmayer, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig
Kate Soper, London Metropolitan University
Karen Lykke Syse, Centre for Development and the Environment, University of
Oslo
Harold Wilhite, Centre for Development and the Environment, University of
Oslo
Tanja Winther, Centre for Development and the Environment, University of
Oslo
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller

What does it mean to live a good life in a time when the planet is overheating,
the human population continues to steadily reach new peaks, oceans are turning
more acidic, and fertile soils the world over are eroding at unprecedented rates?
These and other simultaneous harms and threats demand creative responses at
several levels of consideration and action. Drawing on the expertise from an inter-
disciplinary pool of contributors from the United States, the United Kingdom,
Germany, Catalonia/Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, this book explores
the convergence between sustainability issues, consumption practice and ideas of
the good life in both the global north and south. While the number of people
suffering from hunger or malnutrition has stagnated at around 1 billion, as many
as 3 billion people in the world today suffer from overweight and obesity (Ng et
al., 2014). Although worldwide hunger, malnutrition, and famine have not yet
been fully overcome, people in both the north and south now enjoy unpre-
cedented levels of wealth. An increasing number of people all over the world are
enjoying higher life expectancy, and according to an OECD working paper, by
2030 the global middle class is expected to grow from under 2 billion consumers
today to nearly 5 billion (Kharas, 2010). In what has traditionally been called the
West, large numbers of people have lived in material affluence for many decades.
This affluence has led to consumption practices which – if maintained by the
global middle classes – will far exceed the limits of our planet. But are Western
levels of consumption the necessary means to happiness? Discontent lingers even
while growth accelerates, and this discontent expresses itself in the revitalisation
of an ancient notion – namely that the good life is lived in proximity to nature,
and is not dependent on material wealth above a certain level of necessity and
comfort. Happiness is closely correlated with possibilities to reconnect the sphere
of humans, somehow, with the larger living world. This sense to reconnect finds
practical and creative expressions in a multitude of ways – from farmers’ markets,
transition towns, the slow food movement, to nature writing, urban gardening,
the rural renaissance, décroissance, the growth of green movements, and a general
focus on ecological issues throughout society. All of these can be interpreted as
signs that many find the promises of modernity – the trinity of progress, growth,
and happiness through material wealth – unfulfilling. Unlimited progress and
growth have turned out to ravage the biosphere, but also to disrupt solidarity and
2 Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller
cohesion within and between human groups, leaving either in various states of
fragmentation and disruption.
Research on happiness determinants, for instance, has shown that the promo-
tion and use of local orchards, community gardens, allotments, and guerrilla
gardening have a positive effect on people’s physical and psychological well-being
(Abraham et al., 2010). This supports well-established findings that money plays
a marginal role for people’s well-being above a certain threshold, and that
personal and social relationships, employment, and relative status are more
significant determinants for good living than wealth (see the contributions of
Ottar Hellevik and Thomas Hylland Eriksen in this collection). Moreover,
human-needs research indicates that sustainability and human flourishing are
interlinked, and that aspects of a society, its people, and spaces that satisfy needs
also need to foster sustainability.
According to Epicurus, ‘philosophy is an activity, which, through discourse
and reasoning, procures for us a happy life’ (Comte-Sponville, 2011:xvii).
Philosophers from Aristotle to Martha Nussbaum have striven to answer what a
good life ought to entail. According to Nussbaum, ‘certain functions are particu-
larly central in human life, in the sense that their presence or absence is typically
understood to be a mark of the presence or absence of human life’ (Nussbaum,
2011:18). Nussbaum has compiled a list of such central functions: life, bodily
health, bodily integrity, senses, imagination and thought, emotions, practical
reason, affiliation, relationship with other species (animals, plants, and nature),
play, and finally control over one’s environment. A number of contributors to
this volume are affiliated with the Centre for Development and the Environment
at the University of Oslo, formerly the academic home of the renowned
ecophilosopher and mountaineer Arne Næss. Having himself spent many years
on his beloved mountain, Hallingskarvet, Næss summed up the benefits of
simple, good living in proximity to the wild outdoors in his memorable
catchphrase ‘simple in means, rich in ends’. It is a notion which Kate Soper takes
up for further discussion in her contribution to this collection. In this book, we
step beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy to also encompass the
humanities and social sciences, so as to explore ways in which less, or qualitatively
different, consumption can be a path to both sustainability and the good life.
We draw on contributions from a variety of disciplinary approaches to explore
various inter-related aspects of the phenomenon and the recent recurrence of
the motif of living well. Although both sustainability and consumption issues
have been thoroughly studied by social sciences and to a certain degree by the
humanities, the triple helix of sustainability, consumption, and the good life has
yet to be explored.
Why do we entertain a wish to bring the three concepts into conversation
with one another? Arguably, in doing so, a certain amount of tension arises.
Unsustainable consumption can in some cases be the means to an end which is a
materialistic interpretation of the good life, while other ways of exploring the
concept show that leading a good life can be both ends and means to less con-
sumption and more awareness of sustainability issues. A way of solving the
 Introduction 3
dilemma might have been to ask all the authors to use the term ‘well-being’ rather
than ‘the good life’, as ‘well-being’ is relatively easier to define and limit. However,
we have chosen the more overarching and inclusive term, which has allowed us
to broaden the scope of our inquiry. ‘The good life’ calls forth associations, next
to many others, with glossy magazines, TV-shows, growing one’s own vegetables,
wining and dining, and staying healthy, happy, and energetic. As such, the term
has an air of lightness and playfulness, unlike the more technical ‘well-being’. But
as Yi-Fu Tuan remarks, ‘if life is to be truly good the playful thrust must be
anchored in respect for truth and in a reflexive awareness in one’s own mortality’
(1986:11). When we cross-pollinate ‘sustainability’ with ‘the good life’, the
question of the good life becomes thoroughly anchored not only in our own
mortality, but in the mortality of the Earth itself.
That the good life entails a certain retreat to or reconnection with nature is
well established in the humanities. When Livy tells the classical story of the Rise
of Rome, he also describes a theme which still runs thick in Western thought: the
concept of the good life in the country. Horatius the warrior has become a war
hero and has done his duty to Rome. He then leaves the town and public life, and
retires to his house in the country in pursuit of a simpler, more meaningful life
(Livius and Luce, 1998). Livy not only describes a tradition of retiring to the
country, he also starts a literary tradition of describing a life close to nature as
intrinsically good. In present-day literary studies, ecocriticism has been the main
avenue within which the motif of the sustainable good life has been investigated
at some depth. Since Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), ecocritics
have been engaged with sustainability issues. There are two ecocritical contri-
butions in this volume: Lawrence Buell, in Chapter 1, argues that the fruits of a
thriving literary and ethical imagination spanning the past two centuries are
crucial to diagnosing and solving the challenges of sustainability and the good life.
He develops a layered argument spanning the individual level (discussing the
practice of voluntary simplicity), the community level (concerning bioregional
citizenship), and the national and international levels (being the arenas for
distributive justice). Thorunn Gullaksen Endreson, in Chapter 2, also looks at the
role of literature and sustainability. As ecological crises are often met with
dystopian narratives of gloom and doom, she explores whether utopian narratives
might prove to speak more compellingly and persuasively than narratives of
looming disasters. Utopian narratives may, under the right historic, cultural, and
personal conditions, turn out to be transforming reading experiences. Only by
actually envisioning that we have a future can we start mobilising towards that
future, and the path to this sustainable future does not need to be frugal in every
sense. In fact, the philosopher Kate Soper argues, in Chapter 3, that alternative
hedonism can open up a post-consumerist approach to human flourishing, one
which avoids both the simplistic assessments of need and the authoritarian
tendencies of earlier critiques of commodification. She also discusses how think-
ing about pleasure and human well-being offers a way through the tensions
between the more subjective and utilitarian, and the more objective Aristotelian
philosophies of happiness and the ‘politics of prosperity’.
4 Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller
Moving from qualitative philosophy to quantitative sociology, Ottar Hellevik
analyses, in Chapter 4, the relationship between values, subjective quality of life,
and sustainability, using data spanning the period between 1985 and 2011,
gathered through broad biannual surveys carried out in Norway. He shows how a
value dimension opposing materialistic and idealistic values is strongly correlated
with happiness and satisfaction with life, as well as with attitudes towards eco-
logical protection, redistribution of wealth, and support for the welfare state. His
work implies that an idealistic idea of the good life is superior to a materialistic
one, both with regard to subjective quality of life and with regard to support for
sustainable policies and practices. Hellevik’s chapter provides a thorough
empirical foundation which supports the claim that money can’t buy happiness,
and that whatever we mean when we speak of ‘the good life’, we cannot have a
full understanding of it unless we transcend the narrow bounds of materialistic
concerns. Yet moving back to philosophy, Bengt Brülde argues, in Chapter 5, that
our happiness actually would be affected if we adopted a more sustainable lifestyle,
and concludes that most people would probably be somewhat less happy if they
lived more sustainably – at least in the short run. Brülde suggests that we should
not appeal to people’s self-interest if we want them to make more ecologically
responsible choices, but to moral considerations. Juxtaposing these two chapters
is interesting, as they approach the question of the good life from two different
angles and disciplines. Is making a moral choice about acting in an ecologically
responsible way simply an individual choice? This takes us to reductionist
assumptions about consumers and the socio-material contexts of choice. The
anthropologist Harold Wilhite asks us, in Chapter 6, to consider how energy-
intensive habits have been shaped in the West, and further to consider the way
such habits have shown themselves to be starkly resistant to rapid change.
Cultural learning, repetitive actions, and purposive training all help shape, and
harden, habits. In order to reduce consumption footprints to levels necessary to
halt further meddling with the already changing climate, the deeply seated links
between consumption, economic progress, and well-being will need to be broken
and reformed.
In Chapter 7, Felix Rauschmayer and Ines Omann also explore issues of
everyday life. They show how the strategies we implement neither necessarily
realise all our needs nor concord with our values, and that tensions occur in our
daily life and even more in sustainability transitions. They propose a four-step
process, suggesting that working with these tensions may lead to a more sustain-
able and high-quality life. The topic of well-being and sustainability is also the
concern of Mònica Guillen-Royo in Chapter 8. Using a framework called Human
Scale Development and action-research design, she discusses the processes and
outcomes of a sustainable development project undertaken in a municipality in
the Peruvian Andes. Guillen-Royo shows how communities can improve both the
well-being of their members and the conditions of their bioregions in which they
dwell, thus contradicting traditional arguments which suggest that there is a
conflict between the interests of present and future generations when defining
sustainable development interventions.
 Introduction 5
Staying within the global south in Chapter 9, Tanja Winther provides an
anthropological account of the rising electricity consumption in rural Zanzibar
and discusses electricity’s uses – and non-uses – in the light of people’s perceptions
and experiences of the good life. How do people who have not had access to
unlimited amounts of energy and consumer items respond when such items are
introduced to their community? Winther’s study contrasts two areas of consump-
tion – television and food. In an early phase, television sets were exclusive objects
of desire and considered socially dangerous, but they soon became normalised.
After a while, the shared consumption of television programmes formed part of
good living, signifying ‘development’ and ‘progress’. In contrast, Zanzibaris kept
their food at a distance from electricity. Food nonetheless continued to be
associated with the good life, underscoring rural Zanzibaris’ sense of belonging.
Food touches on fundamental and metaphysical questions of how we relate to
each other and the world – there is a good reason why Jack Goody’s book summing
up his lifelong research in the field of development and anthropology is called
Food and Love (1998). Food is a cross-cutting topic that glues the global south to
the north through global food systems, and it cements everyday lives to ideals and
concepts within the dream of the good life, as Karen Lykke Syse explores in
Chapter 10. Here she casts a look at celebrity chefs encouraging people to recon-
nect to nature by re-establishing the links between animals and meat, or vegetable
plots and ratatouille. New venues for consumption both of food and food culture
have evolved, and the creative force that drives such alternative consumption –
or, to use Kate Soper’s term, such alternative hedonism – is the urge to craft ways
of consuming that are less damaging to, or even beneficial for, the planet.
But clearly, bridging concerns of sustainability successfully with those of
consumption is a great theoretical and practical challenge, as we see illustrated in
Chapter 11. Food halls and market places have become part of city planning, and
notions about sustainable places and spaces do not always materialise in the way
they were intended to at the idea stage. Jesper Pagh presents the newly opened
Torvehallerne market in Copenhagen as a central case in this respect, and
discusses how a performative turn within food consumption, a longing for the
good life, and the need to belong to a community have created new political-
economic situations for urban design and development. This has in turn led to an
increased privatisation of public space under the cover of urban regeneration and
thoughtful planning for the common good. With an outset in architecture and
design theory and history, Pagh discusses the commodification of architecture in
recent decades, and the ways in which architects – though envisioning the good
life in sustainable cities – in this respect serve to propagate, rather than under-
mine, a neoliberal agenda in contemporary urban planning.
In Chapter 12, Kristian Bjørkdahl explores another physical space. When
the battery cage was first introduced, ideas of industrialised egg production went
against the grain of all established wisdom about hens and their welfare.
Previously it was held that a happy hen was a hen living out its natural inclina-
tions, but with the arrival of the battery cage, the industry shifted focus towards
productivity and absence of disease – as if hens were ‘animal machines’. When the
6 Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller
EU’s ban on battery cages went into effect, the industry thus enacted a new
evasion strategy: instead of talking about hens’ productivity, they now started
talking about the cages – replacing ‘bare’ cages with ‘enriched’ ones. Bjørkdahl’s
contribution unveils newspeak used to cover up the fact that issues of welfare and
well-being for both animals and humans is not something to be taken for granted.
In Chapter 13, Martin Lee Mueller casts a light on another case of industrial
animal husbandry: the salmon farming industry. Mueller brings out its anthropo-
centric bias and its die-hard fixation with Cartesian thought. Taking up a critique
begun in Bjørkdahl’s piece, this biophilic chapter makes a case against seeing
animals as ‘mere machines’, and for recognising life’s innate interconnectedness,
diversity, and co-dependence. Our particularly human lives, Mueller writes,
unfold within the larger, richly diverse more-than-human community that is the
living Earth itself. The implication is that only by acting in ways that respect this
larger context of our own lives can we secure a good life – or indeed any life at all
– both for those currently dwelling on the Earth, and for those not yet born.
Finally, Thomas Hylland Eriksen provides us with an Afterword, wryly com-
paring members of affluent societies with the big bad wolf, suffering from a
hangover: overfed and woozy, we lounge around wondering what to do next.
Eriksen provides provocative comments, a few questions, and thankfully, some
direction. He claims that the good life, and the good society, is not the same as
affluence and longevity, and that a global collective project is needed to meet the
demands of an overheating planet. This book may provide a modest contribu-
tion to such a collective project. It gives a glimpse both of the vastness of the
undertaking, the height of the stakes, but also of the creative energy already being
applied – across disciplines, across the academia-public divide – to asking, with
sustained zeal, what it means to imagine and indeed create a good life, given the
realities of a plundered planet.

References
Abraham, A., Sommerhalder, K. and Abel, T. (2010) ‘Landscape and well-being: a scoping
study on the health-promoting impact of outdoor environments’ in International Journal
of Public Health, 55. pp. 59–69.
Comte-Sponville, A. (2011) The Little Book Of Philosophy. London: Random House.
Goody, J. (1998) Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West. London – New York:
Verso.
Kharas, H. (2010) The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries. Paris: OECD
Development Centre.
Livius, T. and Luce, T.J. (1998) Ab urbe condita, Liber 1-5. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marx, L. (1964) The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Ng, M. et al. (2014) ‘Global, regional, and national prevalence of overweight and obesity
in children and adults during 1980–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden
of Disease Study 2013’ in The Lancet.
Nussbaum, M.C. (2011) Creating Capabilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1986) The Good Life. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
1 Enough is enough?
Re-imagining an ethics and
aesthetics of sustainability for the
twenty-first century
Lawrence Buell

‘Sustainability’ and ‘the good life’ are both very elastic terms – so elastic as to raise
suspicions of bad faith.1 On one hand, what many consider the ‘good life’ is
ecologically unsustainable. On the other hand, ‘sustainability’ has a bad history
of being co-opted as a euphemism in order to justify a degree of economic
development only a little less bad than worst-case exploitation. Such has been the
ambiguous legacy of the landmark 1987 Brundtland report, Our Common Future,
as the eminent Norwegian environmental philosopher and activist Arne Næss
(2008:294–297) was one of the first to foresee. If we hope to be good earth citizens,
then we must narrow down what counts as the good life to practices that would
enable and further ecological sustainability and narrow down ‘sustainability’ to
mean an order of existence better than the status quo: one that would conduce to
and insofar as possible optimize the flourishing of human beings together with that
of nonhuman life and planetary health generally. Næss’s admonition could not
be more telling: ‘a development is ecologically sustainable if and only if there is a
long-term trend that ensures, or that may justifiably be considered to ensure,
ecological sustainability’ (2008:298).
Within these normative bounds I shall venture some reflections about
‘enoughness’, both at the level of personal ethics and at various social levels.
Given the nature of the subject, this discussion will perforce be more exploratory
than prescriptive and more idealistic than pragmatic, suggesting pathways far
easier to commend in principle than to realize in practice. As I do, readers will
quickly perceive my disciplinary bias as an environmental humanist, a bias that I
seek to turn to advantage here, however. For I maintain that literature and other
expressive arts – by reason of their power to rivet attention and to motivate
through narrative, image and symbol – have a much more significant role to play
in identifying and combatting today’s environmental crises than is usually
recognized.
The impediments to bridging the gap between notional value and behavioural
practice begin with the divergences in understanding of ‘enoughness’ among
persons and across societies and historical epochs. These differences in turn are
influenced by judgement calls about many specific ethico-environmental factors
such as proper standard of living, proper balance of work and leisure, level of
resource consumption possible without exhausting supply, and so on.
8 Lawrence Buell
It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find philosophers drawing the line very
differently when defining the standard of material enoughness necessary to the
good life. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the good life – for male citizens, that
is – presupposes a certain affluence, a certain surplus of assets: because, he writes,
‘it is impossible or at least not easy to perform noble actions if one lacks the
wherewithal’ (1962:21; I.1099a). Whereas for the Stoic Epictetus the proper
‘measure of possession’ is minimum bodily need: ‘If you go beyond its fitness to the
foot’, he warns, the shoe ‘comes first to be gilded, then purple, then studded with
jewels. For to that which once exceeds the fit measure there is no limit’
(1944:347).
In modernity, the dominant tendency has of course not only been more
Aristotelian than Stoic but also to go far beyond the moderation Aristotle else-
where counsels. ‘What is “enough”?’ asks E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful:

Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic
growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of
“enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich
country that says: “Halt! We have enough?” There is none.
(1973:25)

Schumacher wrote those words 40 years ago, and they are even truer today. No
rich country, indeed only one country worldwide, meets the UN Human
Development Index’s criteria for both sufficient human well-being and sufficiently
light ‘ecological footprint’: Cuba.2
Not that the wealthy countries of the world should rush to imitate the Cubans.
The point is simply that the world at large has a grave ethics of sustainability
problem. In a thoughtful assessment of the ethics of enoughness at the personal
level, Robert and Edward Sidalsky – a British father–son team of economist
and philosopher – make the same claim about intrinsic human nature that
Schumacher makes about societies. Human ‘material wants know no natural
bounds’; ‘they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them’
(2012:69).
The Sidalskys are too anthropocentric to say anything very useful about
environmental ethics per se. But that does not lessen the relevance for our
purposes of their historical diagnosis that the inherent human susceptibility to
immoderation has been aggravated in modernity. As they see it, a crucial
unintended consequence of scientific and industrial revolution was an ethical
paradigm shift. During the nineteenth century, they argue, this led to a fetishiza-
tion of economic growth that still persists as the key measure of social well-being
and, concomitantly, to the displacement of traditional sufficiency-based models
of the good life by an ethos of ceaseless striving after progress and improvement.
Against this, the Sidalskys offer a counter-model to the bad ethics of progress-
first: seven basic requisites of the good life, in the following order of importance:
health, security, respect, personality (that is, a sense of inward freedom), ‘harmony
with nature’, ‘friendship’ and ‘leisure’ (ibid.:165). This recipe of ingredients is
 Enough is enough? 9
certainly worth consideration. My chief interest here, however, is not in such
‘bottom-line’ seven-step solutions, but in frameworks and fundamentals. For an
environmental humanist, the importance of Small is Beautiful and How Much is
Enough? lies especially in the failure of modern ethical imagination, individual
and collective, that they both describe. This failure requires value transformations
on three interlocking levels, which if seriously undertaken by a critical mass of
people might bring about all else. These are: voluntary simplicity at the individual
level, bioregional mindfulness at the subnational level and ecosocial equity at the
national and international levels. In what follows, I shall take up each in turn.

Voluntary simplicity
The question of enoughness arguably starts with individual persons, especially
those with the freedom and means to make discretionary choices. If a large
number of well-off people, in the rich world especially, made a concerted effort to
consume less and manage with less stuff, planetary health would surely benefit.
Voluntary simplicity (VS) is an ethos towards which many more are attracted
than can justly boast of having achieved, however. I cannot deny living in a
single-family home in a prosperous suburb, notwithstanding the distinct
remembrance of passionately agreeing with my best friend in youth that the curse
of life was superfluous property. But I take consolation knowing I am not alone.
The prominent American poet-essayist and agricultural reformer, Wendell Berry,
rightly insists that: ‘A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is . . .
a convocation of the guilty’. (1972:74). The protesters themselves are inevitably
more or less complicit in the wrongs they decry. So too with a forum on VS at a
Western research university. Many, if not most, of the participants who are
sympathetic to the VS as an ideal are likely to prove reluctant, when put to the
test, to adjust their lifestyles more than a limited degree in accordance with it. In
a late 1990s poll of American attitudes towards materialism, 83 per cent of those
responding agreed that the US consumes too much and a still higher percentage
agreed that ‘protecting the environment will require “major changes in the way
we live”’, but only 28 per cent claimed they themselves had voluntarily made
lifestyle changes in accordance within the past five years (UNEP). I suspect that
the same poll would yield quite similar results today. Such has long been the
nature of what might be called ‘environmental doublethink’.
A certain slippage between professed values and behaviour is only to be
expected. Such has no doubt been the case universally and for all time. The
prophets of the great world religions stood for a degree of self-restraint that
institutionalized Confucianism, Christianity and Buddhism have never matched.
In the secular arena, US history offers perhaps a particularly egregious case insofar
as American promise has for centuries been linked both to striking it rich and to
the dream of a purified social order. As the American historian David Shi writes,
the dream of the simple life – Puritan, Quaker, Shaker, Transcendentalist, etc. –
took hold in early colonial times and remains deeply embedded in national
culture, but it also has a way of ‘becoming enmeshed in its opposite’ even while
10 Lawrence Buell
serving ‘as the nation’s conscience’, and ‘thereby providing a vivifying counter-
point to the excesses of materialist individualism’. ‘The simple life’, he predicts,
‘will persist both as an enduring myth and as an actual way of living’ (1985:
277–279), but with no guarantee that any one movement will endure for long.
Indeed, there is good reason to worry about worsening trend lines in the
contemporary US, of accelerated techno-social change depleting planetary
natural resources and a widening gap between haves and have-nots.3 These have
been aggravated by the entrenchment of the conjoined assumptions that
economic growth is the key to well-being and that mass consumption is crucial to
that growth process. The ‘Consumer Republic’, as historian Lizbeth Cohen aptly
calls the American variant of that persuasion, seems actually to have been born
during the Great Depression, although it did not really take off until the broad-
based boom in national prosperity after World War II, which devastated the
economies of all other major world powers and put the US in a uniquely
advantageous competitive position for the next several decades. The consumer
republic ‘promised the socially progressive end of economic equality’ (Cohen
2003:118) – unfortunately without establishing adequate ‘means of redistributing
existing wealth’ (ibid.:129), the temporizing argument among policy-makers and
legislators being that ‘an ever growing economy built around the dynamics of
increased productivity and mass purchasing power would expand the overall pie
without reducing the size of any of the portions’ (ibid.:401). Although this grand
vision looks less credible today, Cohen rightly points out that ‘patriotic shopping’
continues to get held up in the twenty-first century as a distraction from foreign
wars and as a remedy for recessions, despite recurring worry that the US and many
European countries are spending beyond their means.4
Meanwhile, however, the valuation of economic prosperity itself as a measure
of well-being has been increasingly questioned by economists and psychologists
as well as ethicists. Does more money really make people happier? The unsur-
prising answer seems to be that although every society’s haves are happier than its
have-nots, ‘extra income increases happiness less and less as people get richer’
(Layard 2005:230).5 On a 2005 life-satisfaction poll, the cohort of ‘Forbes richest
Americans’ rated only slightly above groups of ‘Traditional Masai’ tribesmen
and of Pennsylvania Amish farming communities (cf. Biswas-Diener 2008:314).
That the Masai and the Amish, whose ecological footprints are so much smaller
than the billionaires, claim to feel so good – relatively speaking – seems a
strong prima facie argument for simplicity as a corrective to the prodigalities
of affluence.
VS as a self-conscious persuasion by that name, arose in the US as a counter-
weight to the Consumer Republic idea. Social philosopher Richard Gregg, a
Gandhi admirer and nonviolence advocate, coined the term in a 1936 pamphlet
written, he wrote, against ‘Henry Ford’s idea that civilization progresses by the
increase in the number of people’s desires and their satisfaction’. (1936:4–5).
Gregg would keep consumption within bounds by propagating an ethic of
‘singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within [and] avoidance of exterior
clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life’ (ibid.:25).
 Enough is enough? 11
Gregg knew that he did not invent the ethic he describes. He cites many
precedents ancient and modern – Moses, Buddha and Gandhi among them. Of
the American precursor whom Gandhi himself would have cited, however, Gregg
curiously makes no mention: Henry David Thoreau. That Thoreau could matter
much more to Gandhi than to Gandhi’s disciple Gregg can ironically be traced to
Thoreau’s own mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. In late Victorian Britain,
admiration for Thoreau as a progressive thinker in matters of politics, diet and
general lifestyle was nurtured by the radical intelligentsia whom the young
Gandhi met there, whereas the stateside vision of Thoreau that dominated until
the mid-twentieth century was the image made famous by Emerson’s remem-
brance of him as a standoffish person who could be admired only with a shudder,
because ‘the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency
of human society’ (1903–4:479).
What this image blocks out is restored by sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s
enlistment of Thoreau in a perceptive book about traditions of moral restraint
embedded in the American version of the Protestant work ethic. Wuthnow
distinguishes two such strands, which he calls ‘ascetic moralism’ and ‘expressive
moralism’ (1996:340). Both, he rightly claims, still persist, although in attenuated
form. The first operates according to a ‘fixed set of morally prescribed rules of
behavior’ (ibid.:72) that regulate it. The second operates from the quest for
modes of work fulfilling to the spirit. Wuthnow classifies Thoreau as a type-two
expressive moralist.
Emerson of course knew Thoreau intimately and Wuthnow only through his
writings. But Wuthnow is the better guide to the spirit of Thoreau’s Walden
(1971[1854]) – his most influential book, and today a classic of American
literature well-known worldwide. This philosophical reminiscence of the author’s
two-year homesteading experiment sets forth its programme of simplifying the
terms of existence to the bare essentials, not as austerity for its own sake but to
optimize the possibility of human flourishing. Thoreau seeks to persuade us that
‘to sustain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live
simply and wisely’ (1971[1854]:70). Even more fundamental than his dictum
‘simplify, simplify, simplify’ is what he calls living ‘deliberately’. By this Thoreau
means a slowing-down of the tempo of life to the point that mind and senses
become attuned to extract the maximum of aesthetic pleasure and heightened
consciousness from each moment, from sunrise to sunset and beyond, so that even
‘the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through
my apartment at earliest dawn when I was sitting with doors and windows open’
(ibid.:89–90) finds its place in a ritual of awakening experienced as intensely
meaningful. Countless touches of this kind make Walden a testament to the
pleasures of what today American gurus and bloggers on VS call ‘downshifting’.
A better example from Thoreau’s day of ‘ascetic moralism’, Wuthnow’s type-
one, is a book about to go into its 33rd printing as Walden went to press: a tract
called The American Frugal Housewife, by Lydia Maria Child (1835). It too is much
admired today in American VS circles, rivalling even Walden. The two books
resemble each other in their vigilant attachment to small things and overlooked
12 Lawrence Buell
moments in daily life. But Child prizes frugality as an ethical goal in itself rather
than as a pathway to intellectual or aesthetic refinement, declaring at the outset:

Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible to make any use of it,
however trifling that use may be; and whatever the size of a family, every
member should be employed either in earning or saving money.
(1835:3)

The justification of thrift, efficiency and living simply is that it’s the right way to be.
But is VS of either kind still possible in the urbanized, high-tech world of today?
Yes it is. Here are two examples, one ascetic and the other expressive. In 1977,
former professor Charles Gray decided at the age of 52 that the ‘crisis of late
Twentieth century humanity’ demanded that he live within what he considered
the ‘World Equity Budget’ – that is, his proportional share of ‘the world’s total
[dollar] income’ – which he reckoned to be $142 per month (Gray 1995:98–100).
That demanded a far more drastic lifestyle change than anything Thoreau or
Child underwent. It immediately cost him his marriage and plunged him into
loneliness and depression until he found ways to adjust. But he kept to it at least
until the time of his writing nearly 20 years later.
A less drastic but equally suggestive case is written up in Colin Beavan’s book
No Impact Man (2009; see also his blog, Beavan n.d.). A couple in their early
forties with an infant daughter commit to a one-year experiment in incremental
downscaling from their NYC apartment base: first take the stairs, not the elevator,
and walk everywhere rather than drive or ride; then reduce trash to zero including
no more Styrofoam and disposable diapers; then eat only food as local as possible,
grown within 250 miles at most; then reduce electricity use to the bare minimum
and depend as much as possible on a rooftop solar energy device. Although
sometimes annoyingly self-promotional, Beavan delivers in the long run a
persuasive account of eco-responsible negotiation of metropolitan living – and
how his family of three found new and unexpected satisfactions from that
experience.
More questionable about VS initiatives of whatever kind than feasibility is how
far they go towards addressing large-scale problems of overconsumption and
maldistribution of the resources.6 The personal-integrity-first approach more or
less endemic to VS ethics is a particularly problematic roadblock. Thoreau’s great
political essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ praises heroic individual acts of conscience in
disentangling the self from the state; but it took Gandhi and Martin Luther King
to convert that vision into a movement. To be sure, some personal initiatives do
have potential for immediate broader social impact – like Austrian millionaire
Karl Rabeder’s 2010 commitment to donate his whole fortune to a microcredit
nonprofit for small entrepreneurs in Latin America and ‘move into a small
wooden hut in the mountains or a studio in Innsbruck’ (Neilan 2010). Far less
dramatic but potentially even more important if practiced on a large scale would
be some version of the kind of voluntary transference of wealth proposed by
philosopher Peter Singer:
 Enough is enough? 13
that anyone who has enough money to spend on the luxuries and frivolities
so common in affluent societies should give at least 1 cent in every dollar of
their income to those who have trouble getting enough to eat, clean water to
drink, shelter from the elements, and basic health care.
(2002:194)

Indeed, Singer’s proposed voluntarism (uncharacteristically for that notoriously

pugnacious advocate of animal rights) is arguably much more modest than it needs
or deserves to be. I suspect that few, if any, in the top 5–10 per cent income
bracket of household income worldwide would find it much of a sacrifice to donate
to the purposes Singer itemizes an amount at least equal to that which they spend
on all forms of entertainment annually – recreational travel, artistic and sports
events, restaurant meals, etc.
Still, it remains a serious question whether philanthropy or even significant
personal economic sacrifice at the individual level stands a chance of making a
more than modest contribution towards remediation of today’s crises of global
inequity and environmental sustainability. As the French philosopher Michel
Serres observes in another context, generally if not invariably individual action
‘has as much effect on the world as a butterfly in the Australian desert’ – that is,
‘except for the rarest of exceptions – nil’ (1995:19).
Altogether, then, VS seems a necessary but insufficient constituent of a robust
enoughness ethics, especially given the social pressures exerted upon the lone
individual anywhere. Differential of socialization doubtless goes a long way
towards explaining not only first-world habits of overconsumption but also why
the Masai and the Amish are so content. We also need feasible alternative models
for collective sustainable living above and beyond individually chosen redirections
of lifestyle.
Place-based communities, utopian or otherwise, that attempt to subsist within
the ecological constraints of the spaces they occupy are perhaps the most obvious
place to look. One example of a fairly large and growing initiative of this kind in
contemporary times is the movement known in North America as bioregionalism.

Bioregionalism
Bioregionalism potentially corrects against VS’s person-first emphasis by con-
ceiving individuals as embedded within mutually cooperating communities that
hope to sustain themselves through time insofar as possible in deference to the
ecological limits of their physical environments.7 ‘A fully developed bioregion-
alism’, as one representative assessment puts it, ‘favours a planetary diversity of
place-based bioregional economics conservatively and carefully producing and
consuming primarily for their own populations’ needs’, with ‘local communities
of place . . . networked at broader geographical scales from the local watershed
and larger regional watersheds to the continental scale’ (Carr 2004:3, 49). As this
latter stipulation suggests, the geographical dimensions of a bioregion are seen as
being set on the one hand ecosystemically by ‘natural’ boundaries like watersheds
14 Lawrence Buell
or drainage basins and on the other hand by the collective memory of the
inhabitants, rather than by cartographic or jurisdictional fiat. In principle, then,
they are defined more from the ground up than the top down. As such, bioregions
are both natural and cultural constructs, inasmuch as place-attachment pre-
supposes a fusion of physiographic givens and communal experience.
The term bioregionalism dates only from the 1970s. Ernest Callenbach’s
Ecotopia (1975), a futuristic novel that presupposes the secession of the Pacific
region north of San Francisco to Washington from the rest of the US, was perhaps
the most attention-getting expression of its spirit at the time. But as with VS,
bioregionalism’s underlying vision has much older and more eclectic roots.
To a considerable extent it boils down to an updated, more environmental
sustainability conscious attempt to recuperate selected now-endangered traits of
preindustrial society and economy – e.g. continuity of life in place, local self-
sufficiency, and communal interdependence – such that one finds a considerable
degree of resonance between North American-style formulations of bioregional-
ism and semi-idealized recollection of the dispensation of premodern land-based
solidarity in urbanized and urbanizing societies everywhere, from Norway
to China. The writings of the two most prominent advocates among senior
American bioregional literati bear this out: sustainable agriculture advocate
Wendell Berry and poet-critic Gary Snyder.
Berry’s many books trace bioregional ethics back through cultural history
from the grasp of local knowledge shown by the self-sufficient religiocentric
agrarian communities scattered throughout his part of the American Midwest, to
nineteenth-century Anglo-European provincial writers like Thomas Hardy
(whose country of the imagination was the author’s home district of southwest
England), to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the US as a nation of self-sufficient small
farmers, to the georgic tradition that dates to classical antiquity. For Snyder, the
compelling precedents are non-Western: classical Chinese and Japanese sages of
Taoism and Zen, and Native American placed-based culture-ways. Roughly
speaking, Snyder leans towards Wuthnow’s ‘expressive’ pole, celebrating the
cultural/aesthetic richness of multi-ethnic citizenship within the watershed,
whereas Berry leans towards the ‘ascetic’ pole, piously reminding his audiences of
the need for the ‘little economy’ of secular human life to conform itself to the
‘Great’ economy, meaning for him the principles of ecological sustainability that
to him are nothing less than the outward and visible manifestation of the law of
God (1987:54–75).8
In all versions of bioregionalism, personhood is conceived socially rather than
atomistically; the claims of collective life in place take precedence over individual
desires. And in most versions, productive labour that involves intimate inter-
action with the material environment – farming, subsistence hunting, building –
is accorded higher intrinsic value than for VS ethics. For some, specifically
ecological labour is the core vision, as with Wes Jackson’s Land Institute in Salina,
Kansas, which seeks ‘to develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability
of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to [conventionally-grown] annual
crops’ (Land Institute n.d.).
 Enough is enough? 15
Where bioregionalism and VS converge is their shared understanding of
sustenance worthy of the name as furthered rather than compromized by
conscienceful restraint. As Berry puts it, communitarian, place-based stewardship
asks us ‘to . . . need less, to care more for the needs of others. We must understand
what the health of the earth requires, and we must put that before all other needs’
(1977:65–66). The result, he insists, will be ‘poorer in luxuries . . . but . . . richer
in meaning and more abundant in real pleasure’ (1972:81).
Without doubt, as he argues, committed communities of more or less equal
small-scale stakeholders with eco-savvy local knowledge leading prudent,
temperate lives are likely to do less environmental damage, raise more healthier
locally grown food at lower per capita cost, and deliver more forms of social
sustenance too than the national average at less than average cost.
For reasons easy to surmise, the aspect of bioregional thinking that has had by
far the greatest appeal to date is its vision of foodway reform, in particular the
value it sets on producing and consuming nutritious food grown locally and insofar
as possible without agro-chemicals. The majority of urbanites and suburbanites,
who are probably also the principal consumers of bioregional writing, do not
seriously want to relocate to small self-contained communities beyond convenient
reach of metropolitan areas. Nor do they want to practise economic self-
sufficiency beyond a limited degree when push comes to shove. But everyone must
eat; and almost everyone is attracted to the idea of a healthy, nutritious diet; and
many enjoy growing at least some of what they eat. Hence, for example, the
enormous popularity of the novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable,
Miracle (2007), a lively and genially contentious bioregional memoir of the
author’s and her family’s first ‘locavore year’ of living in a small rural community
near the part of Appalachia where she grew up. The book chronicles – with many
tasty-sounding recipes along the way – their conscienceful effort to avoid all
kitchen-table and restaurant food grown by CAFOs (Concentrated Animal
Feeding Operations) and chemical-intensive methods of fertilization, and to
subsist on produce grown or raised nearby, depending insofar as possible on their
own garden and livestock.
In these ways, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle fuses the most appealing features of
bioregional and VS thinking into an eminently readable, aesthetically engaging
narrative manifesto. Whatever the book’s actual influence upon the hearts and
minds of its readers, furthermore, it’s unquestionably a barometer of an auspicious
broader trend-line in national culture and behaviour during the last quarter-
century. As the author puts it towards the close, ‘when our family gave up meat
from CAFOs’ in the 1990s, ‘that choice was synonymous with becoming a
vegetarian. No real alternatives existed. Now they do’ (2007:228), – in super-
markets as well as country-town farmer’s markets. In other words, even though
bioregional ethics and aesthetics have clearly not (yet) succeeded in transforming
North American residential patterns or even in bringing about a major resurgence
of small-scale earth-friendly agricultural practices, the increasing number of
available consumer options and the increasing consumer demand for fresher, more
locally grown food bespeaks a significant resonance between bioregionalist
16 Lawrence Buell
thinking and public sentiment at large – in this particular sector at least. Beavan’s
No Impact Man, discussed earlier, attests to this as well.
The fact that bioregionalism’s greatest success to date lies in its point of greatest
appeal to middle-class consumerism also points to inherent vulnerabilities that
threaten to limit, if not altogether disenable, its efficacy as a programme for a
more environmentally sustainable society. These include nostalgia for organic
communities of bygone days that may never actually have existed in the form
imagined and downplaying the systemic hazards of provincialism, xenophobia and
hierarchicalism that can overtake place-based communities in practice. With
such thoughts in mind, my fellow ecocritic Ursula Heise, in her important Sense
of Place and Sense of Planet, critiques what she sees as the overprivileging of place-
attachment in earlier-stage ecocritical work as inadequate for today’s world, in
which local communities are increasingly networked globally and the defining
environmental crises – pollution, global warming and species extinction – are
planetary in reach (2008:28–62 and passim). My gentler concurring judgement
is that bioregionalism potentially serves important purposes, both social and
ecological, but that enoughness ethics most definitely needs to be conceived and
implemented on a much larger social scale in order to stand a chance of making
a difference outside scattered pocket cultures or companies of the faithful.
Relatedly, and no less seriously, as one of its advocates candidly admits, ‘the
bioregional movement does not have a worked-out strategy on what to do about
the corporate sector’ (Carr 2004:301). Although VS and bioregionalism both run
counter to the institutions and culture of global capitalism – the primary threat
to environmental sustainability – their proclivity is rather to opt out of the socio-
economic mainstream than to urge a comprehensive dismantling or, when they
do, to propose a counter-model that would seem workable for an increasingly
networked world only at the social margins. For VS this is only to be expected,
given its micro-scale commitment to begin with, the preeminent importance it
attaches to individual choice. As for bioregionalism, although its commitment to
social as against purely individual reform makes it more dispositionally hostile to
systemic capitalism, its commitment to restoring local autonomy inhibits it from
advocating ‘radical restructuring of current social arrangements’, such as a
centrally mandated ‘redistribution of wealth’ (Evanoff 2011:149).
Any such project of course poses a far more formidable challenge than for-
mation of communal solidarity at the comparatively small-scale levels envisaged
by Berry, Snyder and Kingsolver. Political theorist Robyn Eckersley, hopeful as
she strives to be in articulating a better pathway for sustainability for national and
world governance than the best model currently on offer – namely, sustainable
development or ‘ecological modernization’ ushered in by the Brundtland report –
feels obliged to concede that ‘the project of building the green state of the kind I
have defended can never be finalized’ (2004:169).9 That too, I suppose, is why
Arne Næss declared himself an optimist for the twenty-second century, not the
twenty-first (2008:308).
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down, literally into ribbons; strangely enough, the flesh had escaped
even a scratch.
Drorathusa was badly shaken, and little wonder, forsooth. It had
been a miraculous escape from terrible injury, from a most horrible
death. A few moments, however, and she was as composed as
though nothing had happened. Truly there was much to admire in
this extraordinary woman.
Rhodes and I turned and examined the body, now lying quite still. It
was that of a big cat. Strictly speaking, it was not, I suppose, a cat; it
was not like anything that we had even seen or heard of. But a cat I
shall call it, not knowing what other word to use. The head was long
and of an aspect strikingly, repulsively snake-like. So was the neck.
This reptilian resemblance was enhanced by the head's being
absolutely destitute of hair, save for the vibrissae, which were really
enormous. The body was dark, curiously mottled with gray. The
breast and the belly were snowy white.
"Hum," said Milton Rhodes. "A strange and terrible creature, Bill.
This wilderness must be a real one when we find a carnivore like this
subsisting in it. And Goodness only knows of what other beasts it is
the habitat."
"Yes. And, with such creatures in the woods, our journey through
them is likely to prove an interesting one."
"Most interesting. O well," said Rhodes, "we have our revolvers, and
the Dromans have their bows and arrows, to say nothing of their
swords. And they know how to use them, too."
"And that reminds me," I told him: "I haven't reloaded my
blunderbuss."
"Save those shells, Bill."
"What for?"
"So we can reload them."
"Reload them? Do you think we'll be able to do that in this world
called Drome."
"Why not?"
"But how—?"
Rhodes turned like a flash.
"Hear that?" he said. "By the great Nimrod, another one!"
The darkness still lay impenetrable, pitchy. We flashed our lights into
the trees, this way and that, all about us; but no eyes were seen
gleaming at us, nothing was seen moving save the shadows, and not
the faintest sound was heard.
The Dromans were listening intently, but it was patent that they had
not heard that sound which had whirled Rhodes about; nor had I
heard it myself.
"Are you sure," I queried, "that there was a sound?"
"I most certainly thought that I heard something."
"Look!" I cried, pointing upward.
Through openings in the foliage, were to be seen pale flickerings of
light.
"Thank Goodness," Rhodes said, "we'll soon again have light. I hope
that this time it will last."
And we soon did—the strong mystic, and yet strangely misty, light
pervading the mysterious and dreadful wood, the flickerings and
flashes overhead soon opalescent and as beautiful as ever.
We at once (Ondonarkus having picked up his arrow and
Zenvothunbro drawn his from the body of the cat) left that spot, to
make our way deeper and deeper into that forest, which harbored
enemies so terrible and so treacherous.
"Why," I queried, "didn't we camp up there on rocks, where it would
have been impossible (save in one of these periods of darkness) for
anything to approach us unseen? We had made a day's good
journey; and here we have gone and left a place of safety to camp
somewhere in this horrible wood."
"What," returned Milton Rhodes, "would that have been but
postponing the inevitable? For into these trees we should have had
to go, sooner or later, and the thing would have been watching for us
just the same. As you say, we had made a good journey for the day;
well, aren't we making it better?"
"It isn't ended yet."
"This place, after all, Bill, may not be so bad as it seems."
"Well, there is one consolation," I remarked: "there is no danger of
our starving to death in this lovely Dante's Inferno. Look at all the
fruit and nuts and things."
"Yes. From that point of view, the place is a veritable Garden of the
Hesperides."
At length we reached the stream, considerably larger than I had
expected to find it. At this point where we struck it, the water was
deep, the current a gentle one. The rich forest growth hung out over
the surface for some distance. There was a soft rustling of leaves,
for some of the branches dipped into the water and were swaying to
and fro. This and the faint, melancholy whisper of the gliding element
were all that broke the heavy, deathlike stillness. It was a placid, a
lovely scene.
The attainment of this their objective seemed to give our Dromans
much pleasure; but, save for the fact that there was now no danger
of our perishing of thirst, I could not see that we were any better off
than we had been.
I thought that this would be the end of our march, now a long one
indeed. But the Dromans merely paused, then started down the
stream; and, of course, along with them went Rhodes and myself.
At times we had literally to force our way through the dense and
tangled undergrowth; then we would be moving through lovely aisles
—

"And many a walk traversed

Of stateliest covert, cedar, pine, or palm."
We pushed on for perhaps two miles, never moving far from the
stream, and then made camp in a beautiful open spot, over which,
however, the great branches formed an unbroken canopy of leaves.
A guard was arranged for the night. Rhodes had the first watch.
It was during my vigil that it came—a sudden, fierce, frightful scream,
which awoke every member of our little party. It came from
somewhere down the river, and it was replete with terror and agony;
it was a sound that made the very air quiver and throb. It seemed
human, and yet I told myself that it simply could not be. And then it
ceased, as suddenly as it had come, and all was still again, save for
the gentle, sad whispering of the water.
"What," I exclaimed, my voice, however, low and guarded, "could it
have been? It sounded human, but I know that that sound did not
come from the throat of a man or a woman."
"I think you are right, Bill," said Milton Rhodes. "What it was—well,
that seems to be a mystery to the Dromans themselves."
I turned and saw Drorathusa, who had just issued from the tent,
standing beside Ondonarkus and engaged in hurried and whispered
dialogue, the troubled looks which she incessantly directed into the
forest, in that quarter whence had come that scream, advertising
dread and something for which I can not find a name.
"Evidently," Rhodes observed, "they know but little more about this
place and the things in it than we do ourselves."
"And that is virtually nothing."
"Did you," he asked abruptly, "hear something else?"
"Something else? When?"
"Something besides that scream. And while it was filling the air. And
just afterwards."
"I heard nothing else. Did you?"
"I believe that I did."
"What?"
"I can't say," was his answer. "I wish that I could."
"Well," I said, "all we know is that there is something sneaking or
prowling about in this wood, that it has just got a victim and that, in
all probability, it means to get one of us—maybe all of us."
Rhodes nodded, rather rueful of visage.
"We were fortunate enough," he added "to kill two carnivores—
snake-cats; I wonder if we shall be as fortunate the next time. For
there is another thing waiting, sneaking, watching, biding its time."
"Another, yes," said I. "But another what?"
 Chapter 35
A SCREAM AND—SILENCE
I am afraid that no one slept very well after that.
It was about seven o'clock when we left that place. And I confess
that I was more uneasy, more troubled than I would have cared to
acknowledge. For we were headed toward the spot—at any rate, in
the direction—whence had come that scream. What would we find
there? Would we find anything?
We did.
We had gone about an eighth of a mile. The disposition of our little
party was as it had been the day before; Rhodes and Ondonarkus,
that is, were in the lead, followed by Drorathusa, then came
Nandradelphis and Silvisiris, whilst Zenvothunbro and myself formed
the rear-guard. Had my own wishes in the matter been followed,
Rhodes and I would have been together. The formation assumed
was, as I believe I have mentioned, the one that Drorathusa herself
desired. The idea, of course, was to have the front and rear
protected each by one of the mysterious weapons of the mysterious
stranger-men, which weapons, undoubtedly, were far more
formidable in the imagination of Drorathusa and her companions
than they were in reality.
Certainly our revolvers were in every way excellent weapons, but I
could not help wishing that they had a heavier bullet.
As has been said, we had proceeded about a furlong. The dense
and tangled undergrowth had forced us away from the stream, to a
distance of perhaps three hundred feet.
At the moment a sound had fetched me up and my exclamation had
brought the party to a sudden halt.
"What is it, Bill?" Rhodes asked.
"We are being followed!"
He made no immediate response to that dire intelligence. We all
stood listening, waiting; but a silence pervaded the forest as deep as
though it had never, since the day of creation, been broken by the
faintest pulsation of sound.
Then, after some moments, Rhodes asked:
"Are you sure, Bill, that we are being followed?"
"Yes! I tell you that I know that we are!"
"Well," said he, turning slowly, "I don't see that we can do anything
about it, save keep a sharp lookout; and so on we go."
Whereupon he and the others started. I had turned to follow when
that sound, low and mysterious as before, stopped me in my tracks.
And in that very instant came another—a sharp interjection from
Rhodes, instantaneously followed by a scream, the short, piercing
scream of a woman.
I should have explained that we were in a dense growth of fern, a
growth some ten or twelve feet in height; it was a meet place indeed
for an ambuscade. Overhead, too, the branches met and
intertangled, affording an excellent place for a snake-cat or some
other arboreal monster to lie in wait and drop or spring upon any
human or brute passing below.
Now, as I whirled to that exclamation and scream—the danger there
behind forgotten in what was so imminent before—it was to find, to
my indescribable fear and horror, that my companions, every single
one of them, had vanished.
And that which chilled my heart was enhanced by the fact that before
me, where Rhodes and the Dromans must be; there was no agitation
amongst the ferns, not the slightest movement amongst them. I was
alone, alone in that place of dense, concealing vegetation, of silence
and mystery. But no; they were there, my companions, right there
before me. The ferns hid them, that was all. But why were they so
still? Why utterly silent? What had happened? That exclamation, that
scream, the silence that had followed—what did it mean?
It has taken some space to set this down, but it must not be
imagined that the space itself during which I stood there was a long
one. It was, in fact, very brief; it was no more, I suppose, than fifteen
or twenty seconds. Then I was moving forward through the crushed
ferns, as swiftly as was consistent with caution, and, of course, with
the revolver gripped ready for instant action.
I had covered perhaps three yards, had reached the point where the
way crushed through the fern-growth turned sharp to the left to pass
between two great tree-trunks; then it was that I heard it—a low,
rustling sound and close at hand.
Something was moving there; it was moving toward me.
 Chapter 36
GORGONIC HORROR
Almost that very instant I heard it, that low, rustling sound made by
something moving through (as I thought) the fern-growth ceased. My
companions! What had happened to them?
I began moving forward, every second that passed enhancing that
fear which chilled my heart. For each step took me nearer to, though
not directly toward, that spot from which had come that mysterious
sound.
Just as I was passing between those great tree-trunks, came a
sound that fetched me up in my tracks, came a sudden low voice:
"Oh, Bill!"
I gave a smothered exclamation and dashed forward. Rhodes was
safe; at any rate, he was alive. A second or two, and I burst from the
fern-growth.
Surprise, amazement brought me up instanter, and the next instant
an indescribable horror had me in its grip.
The surprise, the amazement will be explained when I say that there
before me stood my companions, every one of them, safe and
sound. There they stood, motionless and silent as so many statues,
gazing, as though held in a baleful charm, upon that thing before
them. Rhodes was the only one that moved as I burst out into the
scene.
"I wondered, Bill, why you didn't come. I was just about to call out to
you again."
"And I wondered why you all were so silent, after that exclamation
and that scream. I understand it now."
Shuddering, I pointed with my alpenstock at that thing before us.
"In the name of the Gorgons, what is that?"
"I wish that I knew, Bill. What is your name for such a monstrosity as
that?"
A silence of some seconds followed, and then I remembered
something, that rustling sound.
I turned, and another shudder went through me. Drorathusa was
standing very near that spot from which that rustling sound must
have come.
"What is in there?" I asked, pointing.
Milton Rhodes whirled to the direction that I indicated.
"In where?"
"In those ferns, behind Drorathusa. I heard something in there,
something that was moving."
"When?"
"Some few moments ago, just before you called to me."
A wan smile flitted across the face of Milton Rhodes.
"That was Drorathusa herself moving through that thick tangle of
flowers."
"But I tell you, Milton, that it was moving towards me!"
"It was Drorathusa," said Rhodes. "You only thought that the sound
was moving toward you, away from us. No, Bill; it was Drorathusa.
There was no other sound. To that I can swear."
So my imagination had tricked me. And yet how could I be sure that
it had? For, in such a moment, with such a sight before him, Rhodes
himself might have been the one deceived. In that case, any instant
might see Death come leaping into our very midst.
"Who gave that scream?" I asked.
"One of the girls, when we broke out of the ferns and she saw that.
Nandradelphis, I believe."
This turned me again to that monster and its victim. No wonder that
that piercing scream had broken from the girl!
The spot into which we had stepped was, for a distance of perhaps
one hundred and fifty feet, almost free from undergrowth. Tall trees,
looking very much at a first glance like Douglas firs, rose up all
around, but there were other growths; there were twisted trunks and
branches that had a gnarled and savage aspect; the light was pearly,
misty; all made a fitting setting truly for that which we saw there in
the midst of it.
For, sixty feet or so distant, still, white and lifeless, naked save for a
skin (spotted something like a leopard's) about the waist, the toes
two or three feet from the ground, hung the body of a man.
That itself was shocking enough, but what we saw up above—how I
shudder, even at this late date, as that picture rises before me! It was
a nightmare-shape, of mottled green and brown, with splotches of
something whitish, bluish.
There were splotches, too, upon some of the leaves and upon the
ground beneath. It was like blood, that whitish, bluish stuff, and,
indeed, that is what it was. In the midst of that shape, were two great
eyes, but they never moved, were fixed and glassy. One of the
higher branches had been broken, though not clean through, and,
wound around this branch, the end of which had fallen upon that on
which the monster rested, were what I at first took to be enormous
serpents. They were, in fact, tentacula. There was a third tentacle; it
hung straight down. And it was from this, a coil around the neck and
two around the left arm, that the body of the unfortunate man hung,
white and lifeless, like a victim of the hangman's noose.
"A tree-octopus!" I cried.
"I suppose most people would call it that. It has but three tentacles,
however, and so is a tripus. And that scream we heard last night—
well, we know now, Bill, what it was."
I shivered.
"No wonder," I said, "that we thought that the sound was unhuman!
In the grip of that thing, the tentacle around his neck! So near, and
we never stirred to his help!"
"Because we never dreamed. And, had we known, Bill, we could not
have saved him. Life would have been extinct, crushed out of him,
before ever we could have got here and cut him down."
"I thought of some dreadful things," I said, "but never of a monster
like that."
"A queer place, this forest, a horrible place, Bill," Milton Rhodes said,
glancing a little nervously about him. "But come."
He started forward. The Dromans hung back, but I moved along after
him, whereupon the others followed, though with great apparent
reluctance.
"What I don't quite understand, Bill, is this: what happened?"
"Why, the poor fellow was passing beneath the branches, the
octopus thrust down its tentacle, wound it around the victim's neck
and started to pull him up."
"All that is very clear. But then just what happened to the octopus?"
"The limb to which the monster had attached itself—see where the
limb has been struck, perhaps by a falling tree, and weakened—well,
it broke, and down the monster came crashing onto that branch on
which we see it."
"That too is quite clear," said Rhodes. "But what killed the thing? The
fall, it seems to me, could not have done it."
The next moment we halted, a little distance from the spot where
hung the still, white body of the Droman.
"Oh, I see it now," said Rhodes, pointing. "Why didn't I see that
before? As the monster came down, it was impaled upon those
sword-like stubs of branches, one going through the body, the other
out through the face. Face! The thing seems to be all face. And the
human aspect of that visage! How like the big face of a fat man!"
That, there could be no doubt, was what had happened. And that
Gorgonic horror, in the shock of the fall and its impalement, even in
its death-throes, had never loosed the grip on its victim.
"We can't leave the poor devil hanging like that," I said.
"Of course not. And to give him burial will mean the loss of time
probably more precious even than we think it. This is a wood horrible
as any that Dante ever found himself in."
"We must risk it. We can't leave him like that or the body lying on the
ground for the beasts to devour."
Rhodes and I still had our ice-picks, and we at once divested
ourselves of the packs and started the grave. And, as we worked, try
as I would I could not shake off from me—the feeling that, concealed
somewhere in the trees, something was lurking, was watching us.
Zenvothunbro cut down the victim. Along the tentacle, ran two rows
of suckers, like those of a devil-fish. So powerful was the grip, we
could not remove the thing; and so we buried the poor Droman, in
his shallow grave, with those coils still gripping him.
Forthwith we quitted that cursed spot, though Milton, I believe,
wanted to climb up and subject that monster to a scientific scrutiny!
And, as we pushed on through that dreadful wood, it was as though
some sixth sense bore to my brain a warning,—vague but persistent,
sinister:
"It is following!"
 Chapter 37
AS WE WERE PASSING UNDERNEATH
Something was following us. And we were not dependent solely
upon that mysterious sixth sense of mine for knowledge of that
sinister fact, either. Sounds were heard. Sometimes it would be a low
rustling, as though made by some body gliding through the foliage.
Sometimes it would be the snapping of a twig, behind us, off to the
right, perhaps, or to the left; never in front of us. Alas, it grieves me
to do so, but I am constrained by the love of truth, and by nothing
else, to inform the admirers of that great scientist Mark Twain that
twigs do snap when they are stepped upon. Yes, I wish that we could
have had some of those obstreperous applauders of Mark's absurd
essay on Fenimore Cooper with us there in that Droman wood!
There were other sounds, too, one of them a thing that I could never
describe—a faint humming, throbbing sound that seemed to chill the
blood in our veins, so weird and frightful a thing that neither Milton
Rhodes nor I could even dream of an explanation. And it was in vain
that we looked to our Dromans for one. They tried to explain, but
their explanation was as mysterious as the fact itself.
Onward we pressed through that terrible place, that abode of snake-
cats, tree-octopi and unknown monsters.
At last, and for the first time since we had entered the forest, a
current of air touched our cheeks, stirred the foliage and the lovely
tresses of the ladies. Soon the breeze, soft and gentle, was
whispering and sighing among the tree-tops. A gloom pervaded the
place; the wood became dark and awful, though through it the light-
mist was still drifting, drifting in streams that swayed and shook and
quivered. Rhodes and I thought that we were going to have another
eclipse. But we were wrong. It began to rain, if I may so call that
misty drizzle that came drifting down and, indeed, at times seemed
to form in the air before our eyes.
I thought that this would stop us, for soon everything was wet and
dripping—dripping, dripping. But the Dromans pressed on steadily,
grimly. Soon every one of us was wet to the skin.
An hour or so passed, and then the drizzle ceased and the gloom
lifted.
Rhodes and I were discussing this strange phenomenon when
abruptly he cried out and pointed.
"There!" said he, reaching for his revolver. "At last we have ocular
proof that we are being followed!"
Even as he spoke, that faint humming, throbbing sound again filled
the air.
"Look there! See it, Bill?"
"I see it."
What I saw was an agitation, slight but unmistakable, in the thicket
from which we had emerged but a few moments before.
Something was moving there, something was gliding through the
dense undergrowth.
I jerked out my revolver. Rhodes had already drawn his.
"Might as well try a shot," said he, "for it won't show itself, in all
likelihood, while we are standing ready to receive it."
We fired almost simultaneously. There was a smothered crash in the
thicket, as though some heavy body had given a powerful lurch
sideways. The throbbing of that mysterious sound grew faster,
louder; the agitated foliage began to shake and quiver violently; and
then of a sudden sound and agitation were stilled.
"We got it, Bill!" cried Milton, starting towards the spot.
"For Heaven's sake," I called after him, "don't go over there! Let's get
out of this. It may not be dead, and—and we have no idea what in
the world the thing is."
"We'll find that out."
I suppose that I should have been going along after him the next
moment, but Drorathusa sprang forward with a cry of horror, began
tugging at his sleeve and begging him to come back. So earnest was
her manner, so great the fear shown by this woman usually so self-
contained and emotionless, Rhodes gave in, though with great
apparent reluctance.
A few moments, and we were moving away from the spot.
This Rhodes has always regretted, for to this day we do not know for
certain what that thing was which followed us for so long. I have
regretted it more than once myself; but I confess that I had no
regrets at the time.
I say we do not know for certain: we do know what Drorathusa and
the others thought that it was; but that is a creature so grisly that it
must (at any rate, such is the belief of Rhodes and myself) be placed
amongst Chimeras, Hydras and such fabled monsters.
At length, after a long and fatiguing march, we reached the spot
where the water goes plunging over a tremendous precipice. The
falls are perpendicular, their height at least half a thousand feet. It
was necessary to move off to the right for a considerable distance to
find a way of descent. The bottom reached, we headed for the
stream. There we found the boat which the Dromans had left in their
outward journey, and beside it was a second and smaller one.
This strange craft was something of a mystery to our Hypogeans; but
Drorathusa found a message, traced on the inner surface of a piece
of bark, and that seemed to clarify the matter somewhat. Drorathusa
held up three fingers; three men had come in that boat. And one of
them, she told us, must have been the man whose body we had
found hanging in the tentacle of the octopus. What had become of
the victim's companions? Why had the trio come into a place so
dreadful? Well, why had we?
Our journey for this day was already a long one, but we did not halt
in that spot. We got into the boat and went floating down the stream,
to get away from the thunder of the falling waters.
As the current caught the craft, Rhodes turned to me, and, a smile in
his eyes, he said, quoting from The Faerie Queene:

"'Have care, I pray, to guide the cock-bote well,

Least worse on sea then us on land befell.'"

Drorathusa, who had learned a few words of our language, was

watching him, and, after a moment's silence, she waved a hand in
the downstream direction and said:
"Narranawnzee—fine and dandy."
One thing, by the way, that from the very beginning had intrigued
Rhodes and me not a little was the relationship existing amongst our
Dromans. It had at first been my belief (though never that of Rhodes)
that Drorathusa was the wife of Ondonarkus. Ere long, however, it
had become clear to me that wife she was not. But what was she?
His daughter, Rhodes had said. And daughter I had at length
decided, and still believed, that she was. In short, we put the
relationship as follows, and I may as well say at once that the future
was to place its O.K. upon this bit of Sherlock-Holmesing of ours:
Ondonarkus was the father of all our Dromans except one, Silvisiris,
and to her he was father-in-law.
This little mystery cleared up—at any rate, to our satisfaction—we
tackled another, which was this: what was Drorathusa. I think it has
been made sufficiently obvious that she was no ordinary woman. But
what was she? The only answer that Rhodes and I had been able to
find was that Drorathusa was indeed a Sibyl, a priestess or
something of the kind. And again I may as well say at once that we
were right.
But why had they set out on a journey so strange and so hazardous
—through the land of the tree-octopi and the snake-cats, through
that horrible, unearthly fungoid forest, and up and up, up into the
caves of utter blackness, across that frightful chasm, up to the
Tamahnowis Rocks, into the blaze of the sunshine, out onto the
snow and ice on Mount Rainier?
It was as though we suddenly had entered a fairyland, so wonderful
was this gliding along on the placid bosom of the river when
contrasted with the fatigues, the dangers and the horrors through
which we had passed. There was nothing to do but steer the boat,
keep her out in the stream; and so hours, the whole day long was
passed in the langourous luxury of resting, in watching the strange
trees glide past and in making such progress as we were able in
acquiring a knowledge of the Droman language. We found the ladies
much better teachers than Zenvothunbro and Ondonarkus. In fact,
there was simply no comparison. Why they should have proved so
immeasurably superior in this respect to the representatives of the
brainy sex, I do not presume to try to explain. I merely record a fact;
its explanation I leave to those who know more about science than I
do.
For three days we glided through that lovely land, whose loveliness
was a mask, so to speak, and but made the place the more terrible,
for it was a habitat of creatures very strange indeed.
Late in the afternoon of this third day—how strange these words
seem! But what others can I use? Late in the afternoon of this third
day, we entered a swamp. The current became sluggish, our drift
even more so, and right glad were we to put the oars—of which,
though, there were only two pairs—in motion and send her along, for
that was not a place in which any sane man would want to linger.
Besides the oars, however, there were several paddles, and we sent
the boat at a good clip through the dark and sullen waters.
Weird masses of moss and weirder filaments hung from the great
branches, which at times met over the stream.
We were passing underneath one of these gnarled and bearded
arches when there came a piercing shriek from Nandradelphis,
accompanied rather than followed by a cry from Drorathusa of:
"Loopmuke!"
I dropped the oar and reached for my revolver, turned and saw
Ondonarkus, standing in the bow, whip out his sword and slash
savagely at the winged monster as it came driving down upon him.
 Chapter 38
SOMETHING BESIDES MADNESS
There was a shock, the boat, I thought, was surely going over. Came
a heavy plunge, and she righted, though sluggishly, for water had
come pouring over the side in gallons. Ondonarkus had vanished.
The demon was struggling madly on the surface, one of its great
wings almost shorn clean from the body. An instant, and the head of
Ondonarkus was seen emerging. Almost at that very second, Milton
Rhodes fired at the ape-bat; a convulsive shudder passed through
the hideous body, which slowly sank and disappeared.
Ondonarkus showed the most admirable coolness. He did not dash
at the side of the boat, as nine men out of ten would have done, but
swam quietly to the stern, where he was drawn inboard without
shipping a spoonful of water, unhurt but minus his sword.
Two hours afterwards, we reached firm ground, which soon became
high and rocky. The vegetation there was sparse and dwarfish, and
the place had a look indescribably wild and forbidding. Then at last
we came to the end of the cavern itself. Yes, there before us,
beetling up for hundreds of feet, up to the very roof, rose the rocky
wall—into a cleft in which the river slowly and silently went gliding,
like some monstrous serpent.
We passed the night in that spot and in the morning entered the
cleft, which, in my troubled imagination, seemed to open wider to
receive us.
Oh, what a strange and dreadful place was that in which we now
found ourselves! One thought of lost souls and of nameless things.
Ere long there was no perceptible current, and so out came the oars
again. The place was a perfect labyrinth—a place of gloom and at
times of absolute darkness. We were no less than three whole days