It's Not Nice to Fool Mother (Herland) Nature!

In explaining the objections to the Cornucopians’ environmental stance in his book, Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard points out that:

A more serious objection is that cornucopians take little or no account of the non-human environment except insofar as it impacts upon human wealth or welfare. Nature is only valued in terms of its uselfulness to us. Many environmentalists argue that we need to develop a system which takes intrinsic value of nature as its starting point. (Garrard, Ecocriticism,18)

Working from Garrard’s statement, we might wonder whether the inhabitants of Charlotte Glman’s Herland are, to some degree, Cornucopians. (I capitalize Cornucipians because, though it sounds so wonderfully Swiftian.) Herland has forests that are amazingly fecund and fruitful and, above all, useful to the human inhabitants of Herland. Everything in Herland’s “natural” environment is gauged by usefulness to the human community. The forest in Herland could hardly be considered “wild” since it consists of only trees and plants which serve a certain utility to the humans, namely, providing foodstuffs. Brambles and briars and brush and “weeds” are all removed from the Herland environment. Entires species of Herland’s plants were wiped out by this approach.

But not only plants. Many species of other (non-human) animals also faced extinction at the hands of the Herland society.

“Have you no cattle – sheep – horses?” I drew some rough outlines of these beasts and showed them to her.

“We had in the old days, these,” said Somel, and sketched with swift sure touches a sort of sheep or llama, “and these,” dogs, of two or three kinds, “and that” – pointing at my absurd but recognizable horse.

“What became of them?” asked Jeff.

“We do not want them anymore. They took up too much room – we need all our land to feed our people. It is such a little country, you know.” (Herland, 49)

Undesirable plant species? Discarded .

Undesirable animal species? Eliminated.

Undesirable humans? (And by humans, I mean here, women, of course. And women separated from the influence of men for as much as 1,400 years.) Also - disposed of. (as recently as 600 years before the fictional conversation, some women were (natural born?) “criminals” in Herland. The society simple “bred out” or “trained out” the undesirable elements of the human population. (Foreshadowing of future readings from Huxley? Shadows of the Third Reich?) Even humans that didn’t fit the narrowly contrived social standards of Herland society fared no better that useless “dogs” or “weeds.”

Like the Prometheans as described by Garrard, Herlanders did “actively manage” their environment, but with total disregard to ensuring “as much biological diversity as possible” (Garrard, 20). The women in Herland were, in this sense, less kind “managers” of the environment. In fact, the managing of the environment in Herland amounts to a very heavy-handed forcing of nature to yield to its hu/wo-myn colonizers.

Goodbye, spotted owl. Goodbye Spot. Goodbye women who have the individual audacity to think you have rights to bear and raise your own children