Ideology at the Beach

July 23, 2014

I am visiting my parents this summer at their house in Ogunquit, Maine, which has a very beautiful beach and, as you move closer to that beach, incredibly high property values. Part of the beach is a long walkway through a natural rocky shoreline connecting Ogunquit Beach to Perkin’s Cove, where lobstermen go out and do most of their haul in the town’s secondary industry (after tourism).

That’s where I saw a few copies of this sign. The sign indicates that piling rocks on top of each other is a ‘natural disturbance.’ The signs are funded by the ‘Center for Outdoor Ethics,’ which implies that stacking rocks on top of one another is a disturbing, unethical practice which is harmful to nature.

This sign is, paradoxically, posted directly across from the construction of a new home, which, in keeping with the surrounding property values, should sell for close enough to a million dollars. Given the interest the Center for Outdoor Ethics has for the disturbing effects of piling rocks on top of one another, you’d imagine they’d have another sign in front of the construction of a new home, which is, when you think about, only a slight variation on the rock tower that is being targeted in this sign.

A quick Google search for the ethical consequences of piling rocks on top of one another reveals basically nothing. As my friend put it, “Why is it unethical to put rocks on top of one another, but completely ethical to place them next to each other?” One answer — which is an effect at nearby Acadia National Park — suggests that it leads to soil erosion. But on Marginal way, piling small rocks on one another on top of large rocks is unlikely to have that effect; the beach, itself, is made of rocks already.

The answer is that there is actually no harm done to the environment by building a small tower of rocks. Instead, the Marginal Way Committee, lead by some local wealthy folks, simply don’t like them, calling them a visual blight. In this article from Downeast Magazine,  a retired professor complains that the rock cairns distract people from the tour he likes to give, in which he points out rock formations on the beach. This professor is also a member of the Marginal Way Committee which voted to construct the signs, apparently believing that ugly signs demanding compliance to authority over a common expressive behavior at the beach are preferable to looking at small rock piles. Which distract people from… enjoying the rocks.

This factor of rocks distracting people from enjoying rocks is one given in the article. The other, from the chairperson of the Marginal Way committee, is this:

“The magic of Marginal Way is that our visitors see that it is cared for, and they respect it in turn. They are not looking to do harm,” she says. “But I thoroughly believe that you get more of what you ignore, and we apply that to Marginal Way. If everyone gave into the compulsion to mark where they’ve been, it wouldn’t be enjoyable at all.”

While this is clearly empty PR speech, the interesting note is that ‘if everyone gave into the compulsion to mark’ — that is, if everyone desired to stack stones as a relaxing way of enjoying nature — then ‘it wouldn’t be enjoyable at all.’ The question of whom she is speaking about is left unstated, one of those nifty tricks of empty PR talk. But the statement suggests that the people coming to the beach and building cairns are not people worth considering in the decision. They also don’t exist in the article — two people speak out against the cairns, both from the Marginal Way committee, but nobody speaks in favor.

How Ideology Circulates

While I’m sure the Marginal Way Committee means well and does plenty of good stuff for the town, it’s an interesting metaphor for embedding power and control into ‘common sense.’ Of course, there is a class issue here — the Marginal Way Committee is made up primarily of people who can afford to live on Marginal Way, and does not represent the people who can merely afford the $25 parking fee. However, the beach is public land; interactions with the beach are open to everyone (in theory).

So while the Marginal Way committee has no ability to exercise legal control over the shore-side area next to their property, they do have the ability to circulate ‘common sense’ values of ethics amongst the visitors to the rocky shore.

This is what leads to the sign. The sign, first off, appears to be a legal restriction: The all-caps writing, the cairn with the ‘forbidden’ circle crossing it out, all suggest the power of an authority which, in this case, does not actually exist. Instead, it’s an ideological fabrication: Simply by pretending to have this authority, they obtain it.

Last year, before the false authority of the signposts, cairns were piled across many sections of Marginal Way. This year, with the signs declaring their rules of order, the cairns are completely absent. Save one.

I pointed this out to my friend, remarking with a snark I’d only use in private conversation, “Someone better call the police, there’s an unethical ecological disaster underway!” I was overheard by a bearded guy who turned around and, detecting my cynicism, defensively remarked that the cairns were ‘bad for the landscape.’ I was a bit embarrassed to be caught in such a sarcastic mode, and walked away, but I’m also interested in his logic: That the visual environment is worth preserving, even at the expense of one’s right to actually engage in harmless activities within the physical environment.

This is a great example of ‘common sense’ being circulated among people and enforced among people. Nevermind that the sign has no authority; nevermind that any leap of logic would tell you that, while certain kinds of rock cairns can harm certain kinds of environments, these rock cairns cannot possible harm this environment. Instead, aesthetic pleasure has replaced environmentalism altogether. This masks the fact that many people enjoy building the cairns, and a small handful of people resent looking at them. They are using the common sense idea (and yes, ideology) of environmentalism to advance a form of control which restricts a pleasurable activity for others.

So, the signs exercise this control by proxy, and already, the idea of the environment as being primarily used for aesthetic pleasure is privileged by the sign. As we can see by the angry response to my sarcasm, this idea is circulated by the signs and now people are equating rock cairn building with the absence of environmental ethics. One can imagine a cairn-builder being chastised by angry passer-by who, informed by nothing but the sign’s empty authority, seek to enforce the orders to the Marginal Way committee by warning the cairn-builder that he is harming the environment. What then?

Could the cairn builder defend himself, pointing out that there is no logical harm in building a tower of stones on a stone surface which itself is covered in stones? He could try, but most likely he would be directed to the sign as the final authority: “Big Other said so!” And so the sign fulfills a weird kind of prophecy: Because the sign implies that the cairn builder is unethical, his defense is already discounted. If he wanted to get along with the neighbors, so to speak, he would follow the same ‘rules’ the neighbors follow, the ‘rules’ indicated by the signs. The sign issues an order; everyone is confused and defers to the sign out of a desire to err on the side of ethics. Obeying the sign shows a solidarity with an environmental ethos. Therefore, the sign has created a division between the well-meaning environmentalist and the harmlessly environment-enjoying cairn builder. The cairn builder, by engaging in a harmless relaxation at the beach, is now framed as anti-social, anti-environment, and unethical. And of course, all of this is a fantasy conjured up by rich people with money to spend on a sign or two.

Sterilization

Unfortunately, the Marginal Way committee sign is all about favoring a very American view of the natural world, as one of visual and aesthetic pleasure, and not as an environment. This view of environmentalism is actually nothing but natural aestheticism: The idea that children, for example, should not play in dirt. It is an extremist form of extremism of the ‘Leave only footprints, take only photographs’  motto of my Boy Scout days. I’m sympathetic to this view: I don’t want rubbish strung about, campfires left unattended, or animals hunted to extinction. This is ‘common sense.’ My frustration is with the Marginal Way committee seeking to piggy back its ideology into this ‘common sense’ idea.

But as Zizek writes, “Ideology consists in the very fact that the people ‘do not know what they are really doing,’ that they have a false representation of the social reality to which they belong” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 27). How do people do anything they don’t know how to do? In this case, by relying on the Big Other, the external authority of the sign. The well-meaning, environmentally friendly, otherwise sympathetic character will rely on the sign to indicate that there is some problem, and his empathy for environmental causes is then channeled as a tool for keeping the beach ‘visually appealing’ to the wealthy people who couldn’t persuade the police department to enforce a no-cairn law. Now the well-meaning environmentalist is essentially doing voluntary labor of cleaning up the Marginal Way committee’s yards. This is social control, and the signs are a brilliant example of how this is exercised.

I see that in initial discussions of the Marginal Way committee, they initially considered a very different wording, one which simply asked cairn-builders to dismantle their towers when they’re finished. This view, which was honest in its motivation — “some of us think they are ugly” — was rejected, and I am curious as to why. But I would suggest that it is because that sign — one which reflects the reality of the situation — would have been nowhere as effective as the current incarnation.

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Written by E. Posted in Ideology, North America Tagged with environmentalism, zizek