Land Ethic and White Noise

Land Ethic and White Noise

Don DeLilo's novel White Noise examines the variety of anxieties affecting people in the late-Cold War and contemporary period, with certain portions focused especially on the role mass media plays in the construction of ideas related to ethics and the environment. In fact, one can examine White Noise by applying Aldo Leopold's conception of the "land ethic" in order to better understand the novel's argument in regards to the mass media's effect on contemporary ethics. In particular, a conversation between two professors regarding the mass media spectacle of catastrophe demonstrates in a satirically exaggerated way the "conservation" ethic regarding land use which Leopold sees as inefficient, and reveals how the mass media transforms even the natural disaster into a fleeting commodity, to be consumed by its eager customers.

Before examining how land ethics are dealt with in White Noise, it will be useful to explain the essentials of Leopold's theory. Leopold begins by making an analogy of ancient Greece, noting that "the ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels," and that only "during the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only" (Leopold 1949). Leopold's point is to propose immediately, before even getting to his actual argument, that the progress of ethics is evolutionary, and as such that any new ethics are simply the further extension of "ethical criteria" into new fields of conduct. Leopold identifies two initial stages in the evolution of ethics, dealing with relationships between individuals and the community, respectively, and proposes that an ethics governing use of the land "is the third step in a sequence." Thus, even though "there is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it," the fact remains that "the extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity." Undoubtedly the notion that there are no ethics governing the relationship between humans and the "soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land" will strike some as hyperbolic, considering the variety of environmental efforts underway to manage resources, but Leopold sees "the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation," still largely lacking in the proper consideration of humanity's position in regards to the land.

Leopold sees an important distinction between a land ethic and "conservation," and this distinction is vital to remember because White Noise presents a hyperbolic, farcical interpretation of conservation as a result of mass media's need for dramatic images. "In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it," which immediately creates complications for conservation, which places humans in a distinct position of control, responsible for meting out the judgments as to what is valuable and what is not. "One basic weakness in a conservation system-based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value," so economic justifications must actually be invented in order to justify the "conservation" of any number of species, so that "when one of these non-economic categories is threatened and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance," such as arguing that "insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them" as a result of dwindling songbird numbers. Although Leopold is pleased to see any conservation, no matter how uneven, his ultimate goal is to make "the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of biotic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us."

Thus, "conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land or of economic land-use," and in order for human society to achieve its full potential, it must "cast off […] the belief that economics determines all land-use" and instead realize that the majority of land use is determined by the ethics of the individual land user. In this ideal, humans are still able to use the resources of the land for their own ends, but there is no assumption that those resources exist only for those ends. To see how the adoption of any land ethics developed in the years following Leopold's essay, one can look to White Noise and its conversation between two professors as a means of understanding how the postmodern media and the ubiquity of news coverage has in fact created a kind of hyper-conservation, where everything visible, including the environment, becomes one more resource for the visual media machine.

Jack Gladney, the main character of White Noise, has a conversation with his colleagues in which he asks "why is it […] that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?" (DeLilo 66). Colloquially, the example of not being able to look away from a car crash is used to describe this phenomenon, with the implication that catastrophe and carnage foment a dark curiosity in people, perhaps as a means of confronting their own fears regarding death. White Noise, however, focuses on a very specific set of catastrophes, namely, those caused as a result of natural disasters, such as earthquakes or wildfires, as well as those caused by a misallocation of the land, such as famines and political strife. Furthermore, instead of suggesting a curiosity regarding death as the motivating factor behind this fascination with catastrophe, Jack's colleague Alfonse argues that it stems from the "need [for] an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information" (DeLilo 66). Mass media has made every piece of information available in an instant, urgent and always updated, so humans have developed a need for the catastrophic, the shocking, in order to punctuate the now-constant buzz of the mildly awful.

White Noise offers a glimpse into a particular historical moment in the evolution of ethics to include the land and its constituent biological and geological parts, showing how the truly mass media just beginning to emerge in the 1980s has precipitated a crisis in humanity's relation to nature. By the time of Jack and Alfonse's conversation, reality has been condensed by technology to the point that "for most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set" (DeLilo 67). This line helps to explain the hyper-conservation described by Alfonse when he says "only a catastrophe gets out attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them" because the entirety of the environment, and every possible bit of land everything in it is subsumed into the single location of the television.

Leopold predicts this problem in his essay, noting that "your true modern is separate from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it […] turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a 'scenic' area, he is bored stiff." The television's leveling screen and the content producers which fill it serves to form a barrier between humanity and any consideration of the environment, so that people's conception of "the land" is actually replaced by a nearly-identical image of that land, but one that is contained and made discrete by its transfer onto the glass screen. In a sense, mass media precludes land ethics, because it separates humanity from the land so much that it would be nearly impossible for humans to even imagine themselves as members and citizens of it.