The pause button on ecophobia: reflections on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, fifty years in

Abstract

One of the reasons that Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek remains very important to the environmental issues we face, even fifty years after its publication, is that it actively rejects the demonizing, anthropomorphizing, gendering, and ecophobic gestures that pervade so much of our understandings and representations of the natural environment. Dillard stresses the importance of seeing, and while some critics have characterized Pilgrim as disengaged and Dillard herself as ambivalent, if we stick to the facts, then we see something else?namely, a book that encourages its readers to broaden their view of nature and to dive deeply into the experience of it. We also see an author who is acutely committed to precisely that nature. The dive is not without risks, Dillard warns. We will see things that will unsettle our comfortable assumptions about the natural world. We will see that while we may congratulate ourselves on our understanding that our wasteful ways have led to enormous losses in the world and that our seemingly infinite desires simply don’t jive with a finite world, our behaviors may be less unnatural than they seem: we will witness, in short, “a crushing waste [in Nature] that will one day include our own cheap lives” Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. HarperPerennial, 1985, p. 160). We will see parasites in whopping numbers. We will see suffering victims. We will see beauty and life, slime and death. We will see that we are missing a lot and that what we do see we are seeing wrongly every time we impose our ecophobic templates. Pilgrim is the pause button on that ecophobia.