A Study Of The Environmental Ethics In Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard is among the outstanding contemporary female nature writers in the pantheon of American modern literature.Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,her winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction,is regarded as an example of American nature writing following the tradition of Henry David Thoreau.The existing scholarship about this book has been mostly focusing on religion,American Transcendentalism,the dialectal vision and the role of science.These perspectives have neglected the environmental concerns and ecological aesthetic significance embedded in the interrelationship between human beings and nature in this book.Pilgrim at Tinker Creek criticism concerning the environmental exploration of human-nature relationship has been not only scarcely touched upon but also fragmented.This thesis investigates the construction of the relationship between nature and human beings through the analysis of the environmental ethics in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.Traditional ethics have always viewed the relationship among human beings as its focus.Environmental ethics extend moral consideration to humanity's relationship with nature.This moral extension requires a new understanding of what it means for human beings to reevaluate their relationship with the natural world and to lead a moral life as members of that world.This thesis is composed of three parts:introduction,the main body that consists of three chapters and conclusion.Chapter one elaborates on the recognition of the intrinsic value of nature in the framework of biocentric ethics.Such recognition is regarded as the first step towards endowing nature with moral status.Living at Tinker Creek,the narrator acknowledges the aesthetic value,the religious value and the spiritual value inherent in nature.Such recognition is a radical departure from traditional anthropocentrism which believes that nature exists for the sake of human beings.Chapter two,founded on animal ethics,centers on reverence for animals' life thatAnnie Dillard expresses in the book.Annie Dillard is obsessed with insects and such obsession gradually develops into a kind of ethic that the status of animals should also be taken into moral consideration.On the one hand,animals are closely connected with human beings.On the other hand,they are estranged from human beings because of their own autonomous presence.Both identification with and dissociation from animals point to an ethical shift that we should reexamine the idea that human beings dominate animals and invite ethical responsiveness to them.Besides,Annie Dillard reflects on animals' harsh living conditions and exhibits her care and concern for these suffering animals in the book.Chapter three delves into the unity of all things on the basis of land ethics.As a member of the earth's community,Annie Dillard encourages human beings to reestablish an intimate relationship with nature.The return to nature and to mankind's natural being could help human beings to get closer to nature both physically and psychologically.Also,the cultivation of a sense of earth's community requires human beings to live with humility because such environmental humility regards human beings as an integral part of the land community and treats all life in nature from an ecological holistic perspective.This thesis concludes that the environmental ethics in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek not only free human beings from the entrapment of anthropocentrism but also help human beings rediscover their oneness and unity with nature.In the context xwhere human beings attempt to reconstruct the view of nature and environmental ethics,this sense of earth's community is of great significance to the construction of the harmonious relationship between human beings and the natural world.