Black Rocks Camping Trip

The week 11 reading, Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative by Carolyn Merchant, assigned to go with the Black Rocks camping trip had me feeling all types of emotions. For my past three assignments in Global classes I have been focusing on gender inequality and sexual violence, and this reading was the icing on the cake for everything I could handle in such a short period of time. The separation of women and how they are perceived to be through original eve, fallen eve, and mother nature, made me sick to my stomach. For so long men have sexualized, taken, and exploited women and nature, placing themselves above and separate rather than next to and equal. After glimpsing at sexual violence from multiple the perspectives: politically, economically, environmentally, and culturally, I feel women have been put at a disadvantage for such a long period of time and there’s no way to escape. With religious stories and interpretations at the root, such as the creation of the universe and human in Genesis, expanding to accepted behaviors and beliefs on the genders, the light seems to be at the end of a very long and draining tunnel.

The reading also talked about the taking of land and from the western cultural perspective, the land is there for the taking and recreation of the Garden of Eden. There is the use of technology and science to control nature and tame it to human benefit. Humans stole land from others who didn’t seem fit to handle it, recovered them into parks so they could be set aside as wilderness areas where people can visit but not stay. Control over land is a huge reoccurring topic and connects directly to control over women, men were greedy and needed more, or they were doing god’s work and recreating the garden that was lost by Eve. Then they began creating cities in the garden to expand on the capitalist market, allowing the earth to be destroyed by machines and technologies, but not seeing it as mass destruction, but as creation of a new and improved world. But new and improved does not always mean building up, it could be keeping the same and maintaining. That is what I saw and understood on our camping trip to Black Rock. The preservation of this site by the custodians of the land, allow it to be in the best condition they can keep it in. They protect that land and provide the care and attention it needs. This is their Garden of Eden, their connection to their ancestors, the land that brings them beyond themselves.

Merchant, C. (1996). Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative. In W. Cronon (Ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (pp. 132-159). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.