Over the coming weeks I will be re-reading books by two authors who have been important to me in recent years: William Jordan III's The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the NewCommunion with Nature and his new Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restoration, as well as Tim Morton's Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics and The Ecological Thought.
In particular I am interested in the relationship between two terms in these books: "shame" in Bill Jordan's work and "dark" in Tim Morton's work.
Briefly, Bill regards the jettisoning of shame in contemporary culture (or the desire to avoid shame) as being problematic since it is through our grappling with shame that, arguably, we get to transcendent values such as beauty, meaning and community (in this he is drawing upon the work of critic Fred Turner). Shame is differentiated in this account from guilt in as much as the former is not necessarily associated with wrongdoing. Rather, shame is the painful awareness of limitation or shortcoming - existential shame as Bill qualifies it. For instance, I personally feel the hot sting of shame twice each week in my French translation class, not because I have naughtily neglected my homework (when I do, I may feel guilty) but because my woeful facility with this language becomes publicly apparent. Especially significant for Bill is that ecological restoration, unlike many other forms of ecological activity (or inactivity - i.e. environmental asceticism: see here or a shorter version here) provides an encounter with shame, or to put it as Bill does, it "implicates the restorationist in the universal scandal of creation [and] provides a context for achieving communion with creation." To deal with shame then is to willfully tussle with the less seemly aspects of existence, rather than to ascetically disengage from the world with all it problematic aspects.
