Of Carcasses and Christ: Rereading the Repugnant Ecological Other

Abstract

This essay claims that a collection of hunting and fishing devotionals provincializes a common trope in environmental literatures: the figure of the repugnantly anti-ecological conservative Protestant. A close reading of these texts reveals their authors’ and ideal audiences’ extensive knowledge of land and animal minds, which deflates their construal as unconcerned with or antipathic toward the nonhuman. Moreover, these texts are works of practical ethics that conceive of hunting as a norm-constituted activity involving complex forms of valuing nonhuman animals. These values come out in how the authors describe risking human relations and submitting their bodies to the elements to do right by animals. The authors also express their multispecies axiology through curious arts of tying the slaying and field-dressing of game to the crucifixion. I suggest that these features should evoke for progressive environmentalists a sense of the uncanny.