Why We Should Fear Postmodernists

Postmodernism is the raging fad, and in geography Michael Dear is perhaps its best known Brooks Brothers, Wall Street ad man. Uncharacteristically, in his commentary on what I have to say about Australia's wild horses, he loses his cool and flails away at me with a ceremonial tomahawk and a parlor house derringer. He shows that he does not understand biology or biologists. He can't find his way into my public publishing record. He chooses to turn away from the delicious horse fodder I offer up. He plays coy and querulous with the simplest of ideas. He equivocates and contradicts himself. He appeals to a cheap literary trick (Let's have fun reconstructing Symanski's unrecorded thoughts). And, to what will surely be the bountiful delight of those enamored with tropes, he spawns several ironies, a couple of which are more than a little disheartening. How ironical that Dear should accuse me of being "stubbornly anchored in an outmoded Judeo-Christian tradition that emphasizes Man's Dominion Over Nature." The British, Dear's ancestors, introduced the many domestic animals into Australia that turned feral, now well more than a million critters that are having, and have had, such a devastating impact on Australia's native flora and fauna, on fragile ecosystems best suited to small and lightfooted wallabies, bilbies, and lizards. Innocent as Dear may be of all this (I'd be the last to argue that one ought to be blamed for the arrogance of one's ancestors), he has little reason to be taking the high-moral ground with me, implying that like all good postmodernists, he embraces a biocentric point of view. Were it true, one would expect Dear to be as keen as I am to rid the Australian outback of calamitous introduced feral species-not just horses. He would not be interested in having his ancestors' mistakes persist in the name of horse love and indifferent temporizing while overbearing foreign intruders pillage natives and animal liberation crackpots are given a hearing. The embracement of filibustering under the seemingly enobling idea that "all voices are of equal value" sanctions mischievous politics, and, in this instance, leaves the strong impression that Dear harbors imperialist and colonialist sympathies. Using a disreputable literary technique a la Joe McGinniss, Dear also mistakingly infers my state of mind on this issue of Judeo-Christian dominance over nature. Between the spring of 1992 and December of 1993 I taught four lecture courses on environmental analysis to more than 1,600 students. These were courses in which a centerpiece idea was the imperative to adopt some form of biocentric philosophy. Dear's assertions that "supporters of a postmodern science are perhaps most common in the field of biology" . . . and that "they typically endorse the Gaia thesis" bear no resemblance to the mind-sets of biologists who have been my primary reference group for the past fifteen years or so. The overwhelming majority of professional biologists I know or read (and the one I live with) are hardcore materialists, positivists, or realists. They have not the slightest interest in (or even know about) postmodernism; and those who have heard about its basic tenets consider them irrelevant if not mindless. Nor do they think of the Gaia hypothesis as other than "indisputably wrong" (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1991:20; Schneider 1991). And this point: Does Dear know the difference between the Gaia hypothesis and a biocentric philosophy? Dear's angst over "my reality [being] preferable" and my cheek for attacking postmodernism without having any kind of "published record" on postmodernism strikes me as a strangely twisted perspective on the postmodernist concern with privilege. It all reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my wife's biology Ph.D. students on a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory in May of 1991. Two days after arriving in Australia, which was