The Delaware River Basin

Abstract

Chapter 2 begins with a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) tour of Pennsylvania to witness the devastation wrought by extreme energy extraction. In Martin Heidegger, this type of technology is an exploitative “setting-upon” nature, rather than “bringing-forth” nature’s latent possibilities in a manner that is site-appropriate and organic. Healthy interactions with nature are resonant with the “incantatory gesture” characteristic of Christian animism: summoning the presence of the numinous within the everyday. Glossing Mary Douglas, this chapter shows that Jesus, the good shaman, is a model of “bringing-forth” when he mixes saliva and dirt together to heal the blind man in John 9. According to René Girard, however, nature is not a site of healing but of dangerous boundary-violations. The chapter concludes with a vignette about the pileated woodpecker, sometimes called the “Lord God!” bird by awestruck onlookers. Like the aerial Spirit at Jesus’ baptism, catching sight of this avian deity reconciles the two orders of being—divinity and animality—Girard seeks to drive apart.