Research Paper

Ryan Early

December 1, 2008

Eng 304

Civilization vs. Nature in His Dark Materials

 

Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials contains commentaries and critiques regarding many important issues of the world. His writings provoke questions related to religion, destiny, love, literature, children, the theme of civilization vs. nature/savagery and many others. Man’s effect on Nature has been a controversial topic throughout literature for centuries. As scientific evidence continues to build for environmental degradation and species extinction, the literary world continues to imaginatively portray these results. Pullman demonstrates the sad realization of man’s effect on nature with subtle and obvious environmental critiques through his characters: the mulefa and Mary Malone, the Authority and Father Gomez, Will and the subtle knife, and Iorek the armored bears.

In Pullman’s trilogy, everything on earth was fine until 300 years ago when humans took advantage of nature and threw off the balance, causing each universe problems of it’s own, whether with a subtle knife or pollution. The Dust is leaving the worlds, specters are taking some over, and there are fissures between the parallel universes. Regardless of which world one is in, nature is threatened by civilization. The mulefa’s seedpod trees are dying, animals are being killed and used for humans’ advantages, and the polar bears’ ice caps are melting.

The mulefa have the seemingly good relationship with nature, as they have established a mutually conducive relationship; each organism benefits from the other, and thus each organism’s survival depends on the other. The trees give the mulefa their wheels (seedpods), and the mulefa, by riding the seed pods around, cause a very hard seedpod to crack open, which is very difficult for it to do by itself. When the seedpod cracks open, the mulefa stop using it as a means of transportation, and plant it in the ground. "Without the mulefa's attention, the trees would all die. Each species depended on the other, and furthermore, it was the oil that made it possible" (643). They are in a give and take relationship with the trees, a mutual symbiosis. However, due to the efforts of “civilized” man, “despite every effort and all the love and attention the mulefa could give them, the wheel-pod trees were dying” (646). 

Mary establishes a mutually conducive relationship with the mulefa. She tries to fix the Dust problem for them with the amber spyglass, which ultimately affects every organism in the worlds survival. Also, she fixes their fishing nets, collects shellfish that they cannot get to themselves, and keeps a watch for the tualapi. In return, they help feed, clothe, shelter, and be-friend her. Mary's survival depends on the mulefa while she is in their world, and the mulefa's survival depends on Mary, through the resolution of the Dust problem. This is balanced accord between civilization and nature.

Additionally, civilization has a rare opportunity to feel nature’s pain when the Dust starts flowing much too quickly out of the worlds, and Mary's tree falls over and dies. "Every fiber in the trunk, the bark, the roots seemed to cry out separately against this murder. But it fell and fell, all the great length of it smashed its way out of the grove and seemed to lean toward Mary before crashing into the ground like a wave against a breakwater; and the colossal trunk rebounded up a little way, and settled down finally, with a groaning of torn wood" (878). This is ultimately the fate that awaits every tree and every animal and every part of nature when civilization continually fights to establish and maintain authority over nature and savagery.

When the character, Father Gomez, is introduced, he is a civilized intruder from society. When the large bird attacks him, he shoots it with his man-made rifle that he brought. "[The bird] was hissing with malice, stabbing its head forward.... [Its] head exploded in a mist of red and white" (818). Father Gomez triumphs over nature, and then attempts to control it. He thinks, "once they had truly learned to fear him, they would do exactly as he said" (819). This is an explicit example of civilization dominating nature. After Father Gomez is killed, while trying to kill Balthamos, he ends up being consumed by nature in the end. "The lizards were scavengers...mild and harmless creatures, and...[the lizards] were entitled to take any creature left dead after dark. The lizard dragged the priest's body back to her nest, and her children feasted very well. As for the rifle, it lay in the grass where Father Gomez had laid it down, quietly turning into rust" (901). The priest gets his retribution in the end, and nature ultimately triumphs over him, a representative of civilization, and his gun, a tool of civilization.

            Again nature is endangered by civilization by Will’s use of the subtle knife. By his cutting holes in the fabric of the universe he causes the formation of the specters. The specters then go around draining the souls/daemons out of adults, so civilization hurts nature which then hurts civilization; so in this particular case civilization gets its retribution.

 

Iorek remark to Will when asked to repair the knife, “With it you can do strange things. What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too….Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends” (681). Iorek was right to question the reparation of the knife because it did do things that Will was not aware of. Every time a cut was made with the knife, a specter was created. The specters start killing all the adults in a couple of worlds. Additionally, the windows that were created by the knife allow the Dust to leak out of them, which harms all of nature in every world. So Will unknowingly brings bad into the world, and good out of the world, and civilization hurts nature in this case as well.

Finally, there is the quandary of the armored bears. As in the Arctic of 2008, the polar ice caps are melting, and the armored (polar) bears’ environment is deteriorating. “Since the catastrophe that had burst the worlds open, all the Arctic ice had begun to melt…. Since the bears depended on ice and on the creatures who lived in the cold sea, they could see that they would soon starve if they stayed where they were; and being rational they decided how they should respond” (630). As Iorek remarks, due to environmental degradation, food and shelter are scarce. Because civilization caused nature’s bears to have to struggle too much for survival, Iorek leads them south, to live in the mountains that he had heard about from Lee Scoresby. “Since the vast disturbances in the Arctic, the ice had begun to disappear, and Iorek knew that he had to find an icebound fastness for his kin, or they would perish” (577-78). Once Iorek has sailed his fellow bears south to the tall, snowy mountains, however, it turns out that it was a false hope. He discovers that it is not easier to hunt there, and there is not that much snow; so he begins the trek back to the North, not knowing if his species is going to survive much longer. Of course, had he been in Mary and Will’s world, he could have petitioned to be on the endangered species list. At least after killing off nature until there are only ten specimens left alive of a species, they can then be on the endangered species list before they become extinct.            

Through the mulefa, wheel-pod trees, Mary, Father Gomez, Dust, Iorek and the armored bears, Pullman critiques civilization’s conquering of nature. He shows that the ultimate scenario for both sides is death, since Dust is affected and nature dies, which in turn causes mulefa and even humans to die. Pullman asserts that the ideal relationship between nature and civilization is not a constant battle, but a mutual symbiosis, perhaps. After all, each side of the dichotomy has elements of the other. This is what Will and the angels closing the portals, and feeling optimistic achieve at the end of the book. For once, civilization helps nature, rather than trying to conquer it, and the result is the salvation of nature and, ultimately, of the earth as we know it.