“We Have Very Primitive Emotions”: Cognitive Biases and Environmental Crises in Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa

ABSTRACT

In this essay I argue that Hemingway’s much-discussed inner conflicts and self-contradictions on display in Green Hills of Africa (GHoA) are symptoms of his struggling with cognitive dissonance in view of his active contribution to the demise of the natural world he claimed to love. In this, Hemingway’s predicament mirrors that of the humankind as a whole in the age of anthropogenic environmental change. Through exploration of selected passages from GHoA and of the way they exemplify specific cognitive biases that influence the way humans interpret and respond to global warming, biodiversity loss, and other environmental crises, I demonstrate the utility of cognitive ecocriticism for illuminating individual and social (in)action on these challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• cognitive biases
• ecocriticism
• environmental crises
• Hemingway

In his “Author’s Note” to Green Hills of Africa (GHoA), Ernest Hemingway made his goal clear from the outset:

Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary … . The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.¹

Inspired by Hemingway’s 1933–34 safari, GHoA is a first-hand account of East African landscapes and wildlife, as well as of their exploitation. In the opening chapter Hemingway makes an “opaque”² comment on not being able to read Henry David Thoreau and goes on to say: “I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary” (16). His views on nature writing can be traced back to his childhood and a dispute among the American intellectual and political elite over the right approach to depicting wildlife; young Hemingway, like his father, “favor[ed] science over sentiment” and this has informed his subsequent attitude towards accurate observations and honest reporting of the natural world to the extent that he would “use the nouns ‘naturalist’ and ‘writer’ interchangeably to refer to his profession”.³ Many critics have moved on from treating the natural world in Hemingway’s writing as raw material for exploring human nature (and specifically male psychology) towards treating it directly.⁴ In my view, these two strands of Hemingway scholarship aren’t at variance, much less in competition, with each other: GHoA provides an opportunity to explore the interplay between human nature and the natural world even as Hemingway responds to environmental pressures he witnesses and worsens. Crucially, his responses don’t need to be “absolutely true” in the sense of being honest in order to be “extremely accurate” in the sense of revealing a deeper truth of the ways in which an individual specimen of Homo sapiens can navigate their beliefs and behaviours in the age of a looming environmental collapse.

GHoA is uniquely challenging, both interpretively and ethically, among Hemingway’s animal writing,⁵ with contradictions and conflicts of one kind or other repeatedly analysed and critiqued. Carey Voeller describes Hemingway as quite eloquently voicing contradictions by defying and questioning what he supposedly represents and embodies.⁶ Glen Love remarks that the great power of much of Hemingway’s work comes from tensions “between the competing pulls of defiant individualism and the abiding earth”.⁷ Charlene Murphy notes “a dichotomy” between reverence and sensitivity in Hemingway’s writing on one hand and “the undeniable part” of him as “the exuberant big-game hunter” on the other.⁸ Daniel Newman investigates “the problem of representation and the various ironies that attend distinctions between” author, narrating-I, and narrated-I (which he calls Hemingway, the narrator, and Ernest, respectively).⁹ Ann Putnam observes how his fiction “is always divided against itself”, with the “pastoral impulse to merge with nature” at odds with “the “tragic” impulse to master it”.¹⁰ Lisa Tyler distinguishes between Hemingway the narrator who “acknowledges that he is complicit in causing environmental damage” and Hemingway the character who “nevertheless resists that horrifying and uncomfortable knowledge”.¹¹ Louise Westling points out how Hemingway’s “love and admiration” for the landscape and wildlife rub shoulders with displays of “the crass competitiveness of his hunting ethos”.¹² I could go on.

At the end of GHoA, having been beaten in a competition over trophies by another hunter, Hemingway “was bitter all night long” (200). The very next morning, while exchanging remarks on the outcome of the hunt and the passions triggered by it, Pop, his hunting guide and companion, ventures the following proposition: “We have very primitive emotions”, and goes on to opine: “It’s impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though” (200). I take Hemingway’s psychological discomfort to be but one manifestation of a broad range of human cognitive phenomena that tend to engender suboptimal behaviours and decisions. It is uncontroversial to say that “humans do make errors in thinking, judgment, and memory”¹³ and these cognitive errors/biases/illusions manifest themselves as “cases in which human cognition reliably produces representations that are systematically distorted compared to some aspect of objective reality”.¹⁴ That doesn’t mean such biases are detrimental in and of themselves. Indeed, operating as mental shortcuts, they are an “invaluable tool when dealing with simple day-to-day decisions”; however, they can “generate serious systematic errors when applied to complex decision-making”.¹⁵ While they may have promoted survival throughout the course of human evolution, in the modern world, with populations and technologies nothing like when those heuristics first developed, they may induce humans to “downplay the probability and danger of environmental change” as well as their own role in it,¹⁶ with climate change in particular struggling to “overcome numerous biases against threats that appear to be distant in time and place”.¹⁷

I see GHoA’s Hemingway as an individual riven by an inner conflict between what he thinks and what he does and torn by an internal struggle of the way he acts with the way he feels. In less poetic terms, he suffers from a severe case of cognitive dissonance, that is, an uncomfortable discrepancy between thoughts, which motivates him to dispel the resulting tension by any means, “including changing beliefs or behaviors in order to appear consistent”.¹⁸ An individual experiencing cognitive dissonance “tends to select, organise or distort conflicting information so that it matches [their] preferred or pre-existing beliefs”.¹⁹ Hemingway’s much-discussed contradictions, dichotomies, and inconsistencies may reflect his repeated attempts at resolving his cognitive dissonance.

In this, Hemingway’s emotional and intellectual predicament arising from his implication in despoiling Africa resembles the humankind’s predicament in the face of its implication in climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental crises. In everyday decision-making human patterns of cognition often constrain available responses generally²⁰, and in relation to environmental issues specifically²¹, complicating meaningful action. The results may be tragic and/or unknowable, as Hemingway himself observes in GHoA: “The earth gets tired of being exploited … . We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined [a country] but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are” (194–95).

And even if “we” do know, we are prone to act as if we did not. Social circumstances and interaction engage in “the active production of cultures of emotion and talk regarding climate change”²², generating multiple feedbacks with cognitive features that defy reductive interpretations and put up “what seem to be impenetrable walls of psychological backlash and indifference” against climate messaging.²³ Climate change already “provides an urgent reference point for the ecocritical scholarship”²⁴ and all signs point to this urgency only growing in the foreseeable future, as severity of this and other environmental predicaments becomes more salient, and as the fact that “the current environmental crisis is the troubling material expression of modern culture’s philosophical assumptions, epistemological convictions, aesthetic principles, and ethical imperatives”²⁵ no longer goes unheeded. In the face of mounting environmental problems – from climate change to biodiversity loss to resource depletion – it’s important to recognise that as these problems “have been caused by human behaviors, beliefs, decisions, and values, psychology is crucial for finding solutions to them”.²⁶ Therefore this paper attempts to contribute to this goal by exploring a literary work that provides a rich portrayal of the entanglements between the human and the other-than-human with the toolkit developed by cognitive ecocriticism.

Cognitive ecocriticism “incorporat[es] neuroscientific perspectives on mind and ecology” and recent developments in this specialism offer “encouraging prospects for the study of perception, emotion, and feeling within and outside environmental narratives”.²⁷ While the term itself was initially proposed by Nancy Easterlin, who argued that “literary works that explore the mind’s positive and troubled relationships with nonhuman nature importantly illuminate the conditions that shape human attitudes … toward the environment”²⁸, the earlier and seminal formulation of ecocriticism by Cheryll Glotfelty as a field already anticipated that development in asking: “What cross-fertilization is possible between literary studies and environmental discourse in related disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology [my emphasis], art history, and ethics?”.²⁹

Yet, a “replication crisis” has recently cast doubt on a slew of findings in psychological studies.³⁰ Worse still, samples of experimental participants have been shown to be massively biased, with 96 percent of them undergraduates from Western societies (including about 70 percent American undergraduates), giving rise to dubbing the populations commonly used in psychological and behavioural experiments as “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic), since in cross-cultural studies they tend to register at the extreme end of the distribution.³¹ Results obtained in this fashion could hardly be claimed to reliably generalise to other populations, let alone to humankind as a whole.³² However, given that it’s the Western industrialised societies and the so-called Western lifestyle that have been responsible for the vast majority of environmental disruption in the modern era, findings from WEIRD studies remain relevant nonetheless for cognitive ecocritical analysis of GHoA and its WEIRD narrator/protagonist.

“I Could Remember Except One Time”

Throughout GHoA Hemingway makes clear that his actions are as meaningful as they are pleasurable. This refers both to hunting and to writing; as Robert E. Fleming put it, Hemingway was “a hunter, fisherman, and naturalist who smelled of libraries”.³³ Killing wildlife is for Hemingway more than simply a means of obtaining sustenance (although that too); it is a way of life. So is story-telling, and Hemingway reveals as much in his conversation with Kandisky, an Austrian he happens to meet:

“I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life”.

“And what do you want?”

“To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life”.

“Hunting kudu?”

“Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things”.

“What other things?”

“Plenty of other things”.

“And you know what you want?”

“Yes”.

“You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?”

“Just as much as I like to be in the Prado”. (19)

Intertwined and interrelated, hunting and writing (as well as the outdoors and the arts more broadly) take up so much of Hemingway’s attention that when “not concerned with affirming his masculinity and prowess through the trophy hunt, he obsesses over the demands of his life as a professional writer”.³⁴ But this very attitude, in which two pursuits that Hemingway considers central to his life intersect in a work of literature tasked with achieving a specific goal, exposes Hemingway to severe cognitive pressures. Exacerbating all that is the small matter of accurate memory recall. In his introduction to GHoA, Seán Hemingway reveals that his grandfather “did not generally take notes during the safari” as he “had an exceptionally fine memory”, and instead used the safari journal kept by his wife Pauline as a reference.³⁵ Whatever credence we may want to give to a grandson’s recollection of his Noble Prize-winning relative’s powers of recall, decades of research have shown memories to be “fragmentary and temporary mental constructions” that are “highly prone to error and falsity” and “never full recollections of an experience”.³⁶ Combine it with narrative fallacy – which Nassim Taleb links to “our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths”³⁷ – that is automatically deployed when a recalled memory needs to fit a larger whole, and it is no wonder that Hemingway’s non-fiction form is repeatedly pushed “back toward fiction or narrative”.³⁸ In case hard evidence was needed, it is Pauline’s journal that “reveals how much Hemingway reshaped the events of the safari into a narrative that does not follow a strictly chronological order”.³⁹ For all its non-fiction credentials, GHoA is “a carefully imagined narrative about one individual’s effort to discover “shape” and “pattern” in the relationship between his life and his physical environment”⁴⁰ and the protagonist himself is “a carefully constructed persona”.⁴¹ None of the characters or incidents may have been “imaginary” in the sense of being made up, but the process of writing was a (largely subconscious) negotiation that required a compromise between events as they happened, as they were remembered, as they were recorded, and as they were expected to help shape the narrative arc.

This is what makes the very idea of writing “an absolutely true book” with an explicitly assigned purpose of finding out whether truth can compete with imagination so fraught. While “Author’s Note” ostensibly leaves the matter open – the “attempt to see whether … ” might suggest an objective inquiry – what can be discerned between the lines is that Hemingway wants his literary experiment to indeed confirm that “the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can [my emphasis], if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination”. This might help explain why GHoA’s lukewarm reception and modest sales (despite Hemingway’s conviction that “it was his best work yet”)⁴² resulted in his dismay at the book being supposedly “ruined” and the critics “ganging up” on it in retaliation for his challenging them.⁴³

One way of illuminating Hemingway’s state of mind here is by exploring the influence of two cognitive phenomena: motivated reasoning and its relative, confirmation bias. The latter involves looking for information that confirms one’s pre-existent beliefs⁴⁴ while the former builds on this to help humans “reason their way to conclusions they favor, with their preferences influencing the way evidence is gathered, arguments are processed, and memories of past experience are recalled” while their motivations subtly affect these processes, “leading to biased beliefs that feel objective”.⁴⁵

I argue that it is motivated reasoning that underlies specific choices Hemingway makes in how he presents the story of his safari and how he justifies his actions and decisions. This is not to say that he deliberately deceives his readers (although this cannot be absolutely ruled out); in fact, he is deceived as well. The seemingly coherent narrative that cognitive biases enable constructing helps him resolve his inner conflict caused by cognitive dissonance. With the benefit of hindsight and a desire (conscious or not) to fit everything into the logic of the story he believes is there, random events take on a larger, even cosmic meaning. See the way Hemingway deals with his guilt – or lack thereof – about killing sentient creatures:

I could remember except one time in a hospital with my right arm broken off short between the elbow and the shoulder, the back of the hand having hung down against my back, the points of the bone having cut up the flesh of the biceps until it finally rotted, swelled, burst, and sloughed off in pus. Alone with the pain in the night in the fifth week of not sleeping I thought suddenly how a bull elk must feel if you break a shoulder and he gets away and in that night I lay and felt it all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of the bullet to the end of the business and, being a little out of my head, thought perhaps what I was going through was a punishment for all hunters. Then, getting well, decided if it was a punishment I had paid it and at least I knew what I was doing. I did nothing that had not been done to me. (101)

Having thus combined his hospitalisation and his – first half-hallucinated and then fully embraced – sense of being punished into an ostensibly coherent whole, it all falls into place for Hemingway. Not only is this scene “comically egocentric”, as Voeller puts it, with Hemingway fantasising himself to be “a Christ-figure, suffering for the sins of hunters everywhere”⁴⁶, but also his being a victim is presented as a license to victimise other sentient beings. Within a rationale that Newman calls “less compassionate than vengeful”⁴⁷, experiencing pain justifies inflicting pain. While logic and facts behind that are doubtful at best, logic and facts are not what makes this story convincing, particularly for the one who stands to benefit from it being perceived to be convincing, i.e., Hemingway himself as an avid hunter who needs a way of resolving his cognitive dissonance. What matters is the story itself and whether it maintains its narrative fidelity, that is, whether it’s successful in “seeking what is most narratively satisfying, not what’s most important or truthful” – in this way, it becomes a fact in its own right⁴⁸, imbued with its own logic. Hemingway seeks vindication and the story he constructs conveniently provides it.

“I Had No Guilty Feeling at All”

Hemingway goes on to use his avowed familiarity with and acceptance of pain to make a solemn pledge:

I expected, always, to be killed by one thing or another and I, truly, did not mind that any more. Since I still loved to hunt I resolved that I would only shoot as long as I could kill cleanly and as soon as I lost that ability I would stop. (101)

For humans to declare a target that involves meaningful action only some time in the future, so that they can maintain an appearance of taking certain measures while not having to engage in any actual action just yet, is a phenomenon all too well known in the area of CO₂ emissions reduction by governments.⁴⁹ Here it is compounded by the so-called single action bias, attested in the context of climate change, whereby people “adopt a single simple action as a token of their concern and then go no further”.⁵⁰ Hemingway announces he will stop killing animals at some later date dependent on vaguely defined factors he can neither control nor foresee, which allows him to profess concern while not having to change anything.

He goes even further later in GHoA, coming up with yet another way to let himself off the hook:

I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no guilty feeling at all. (186–87)

Hemingway considers his ““minute” destruction legitimised by an inevitable, natural order”.⁵¹ The logic applied here is well-subscribed in our own age of environmental crisis. Rationalisations claiming that individual initiatives are negligible in the grand scheme of things, even on the part of people exceptionally knowledgeable about the scale of climate change⁵², are one factor behind the reluctance of large sectors of society to engage in meaningful environmental action. More than that, realising the extent of one’s contribution to a harm can result in a sense of moral discomfort that generates a pre-emptive effort to actively avoid “learning about it or accepting that it exists”.⁵³ The way in which Hemingway insists he “had no guilty feeling at all” (emphasis mine) appears to mask his underlying discomfort that comes to the surface only if the killing is not “clean”, that is, if the animal is not shot dead on the spot, and the suffering inflicted on it cannot be ignored: “I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him and not killed him” (186).

Hemingway’s conviction that his interference is “very minute” and the bias resulting from it are also on display elsewhere in the story:

Pop was puzzled why the rhino were all gone. Each day we had seen less and we discussed whether it could be the full moon, that they fed out at night and were back in the forest in the morning before it was light, or that they winded us, or heard the men, and were simply shy and kept in the forest, or what was it? Me putting out the theories, Pop pricking them with his wit, sometimes considering them from politeness, sometimes with interest, like the one about the moon. (52)

It is striking that not one of Hemingway’s theories considers the impact of hunting itself on the rhino populations, which would seem at the very least worth bringing up. When the next day a single rhino appears, Hemingway is “very excited at seeing him” and promptly decides to “bust the son of a bitch” (53), which he duly carries out. The coveted game in sight and within range, any puzzlement “why the rhino were all gone” is itself gone. And yet elsewhere in GHoA Hemingway is clearly aware of the impact of hunting on animal populations:

I never liked that camp, nor the guides, nor the country. It had that picked-over, shot-out feeling. We knew there were kudu there and the Prince of Wales had killed his kudu from that camp, but there had been three other parties in that season, and the natives were hunting, supposedly defending their crops from baboons, but on meeting a native with a brass-bound musket it seemed odd that he should follow the baboons ten miles away from his shamba [plantation – DBJ] up into the kudu hills to have a shot at them, and I was all for pulling out and trying the new country toward Handeni where none of us had ever been. (98)

The correlation between the intensity of hunting (by foreign as well as native hunters) is obvious enough to Hemingway, who calls the country⁵⁴ “shot-out”, leaving no doubt about the reason for the shortage of game. His focus is on hunting with guns as the cause, and his suggested solution is to move to a “new country”, that is, an area that has seen less hunting activity. But he stops short of reaching a meaningful conclusion. In a book that calls attention to the concept of pursuit in its chapter headings, “the hunters are chasing animals that are increasingly difficult to find”⁵⁵ and yet fail to catch sight of their own complicity.

Hemingway similarly stops midway through when Pop explains the large size of elephants in an inaccessible area:

For a long time, while the sun rose and the day became hot we drove through what Pop had described, when I asked him what the country was like to the south, as a million miles of bloody Africa, bush close to the road that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.

“There are very big elephant in there”, Pop said, “But it’s impossible to hunt them. That’s why they’re very big. Simple, isn’t it?” (109)

Elephants that are large owe their size to not being hunted, says Pop. This dovetails with the supposition offered by Richard Dawkins that the apparently shrinking size of elephant tusks, compared to their typical size in the past, may well be due to the pressure exerted by poachers and hunters, who disproportionately target larger-tusked individuals and thus put them at a disadvantage.⁵⁶ Here Pop makes basically the same claim as the prominent evolutionary biologist: it is the pattern of target selection by hunters that reduces the relative size of animals, therefore those in undisturbed populations remain “very big”. But no self-critical conclusion is forthcoming. And although Hemingway himself “chose not to hunt elephants” as he apparently identified with them on a personal level⁵⁷, he did quip or perhaps brag: “I’d kill a big enough one” (8).

It’s not only Africa that supplies Hemingway with plentiful data on human-animal interactions. While contemplating the “pocket” mentioned above, Hemingway reminisces on America:

“It’s just like when we were kids and we heard about a river no one had ever fished out on the huckleberry plains beyond the Sturgeon and the Pigeon … there was a deep pool and a long straight stretch and the water so cold you couldn’t keep your hand in it and I threw a cigarette butt in and a big trout hit it and they kept snapping it up and spitting it out as it floated until it went to pieces”.

“Big trout?”

“The biggest kind”. (144–45)

Again, it is clear that Hemingway realises how “taking” (an industry term) fish and game puts downward pressure on the size of populations and specimens. Yet when it comes to the strange shortage of rhinos, he does not entertain this proposition, nor does he admit that his contribution to this state of affairs, which is distressing to him, is anything but “very minute”. Faced with the moral challenge of deriving meaning and pleasure from a destructive activity, Hemingway looks the other way, by blaming nameless and faceless others and staking his claim of innocence on his purportedly negligible impact. In fact, there isn’t a strong case to be made for a negligible impact of hunting on animal populations even in our hunter-gatherer past⁵⁸, and in the world of GHoA, with its global human population already exceeding two billion⁵⁹ and major advancements in infrastructure, transportation, and technology (including weapons) that allowed Hemingway, and many others like him, to go on a motorcar safari, such a case is even weaker. His reasoning can serve as a stark reminder of the “well-ingrained set of defense mechanisms”⁶⁰ that allow an individual to play down their own specific impact and continue with an activity that in its aggregate of numerous “very minute” interferences amounts to a disastrous interference overall.

“None of Us Had Ever Seen”

While Hemingway laments how the country has become “shot-out” and “picked-over”, he appears to have become accustomed to the need for carrying out extensive surveys to find unspoiled landscapes and treats that as a necessary fact of life. What we have here is another problem of human cognition, both individually and socially: The way changes in reference points can be accustomed to and thus rendered functionally invisible. In the context of climate, it appears that each successive extreme weather event modifies the view of status quo and establishes a new baseline to measure subsequent events against; as a result, the longer trend fails to be noticed.⁶¹ With nature more generally, over time humans get accustomed to the diminished circumstances as the new normal and are unable to appreciate the magnitude of overall change, in what Lawrence Buell calls “eco-generational amnesia”.⁶² This is the so-called shifting baseline syndrome, a “psychological and sociological phenomenon” that stands in the way of addressing environmental issues, and “involves a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory, and/or knowledge of its past condition”.⁶³

There are two issues at play here. On one level Hemingway clearly has sufficient understanding of what the landscape used to be to infuse GHoA with a sense of nostalgia for the vanishing world. But even as someone who grew up seeing the “last great frontiers” disappear,⁶⁴ on another level he has adapted to this new condition and acts accordingly. Back to the narrative bias: we may hold information “in the form of data and figures”, but what we believe and how we make sense of it “is held entirely in the form of stories”.⁶⁵ Being knowledgeable about a given problem does not necessarily mean doing anything about it if the story we tell ourselves does not inspire us to. Thus Hemingway, equipped with and invested in a compelling story of his interaction with the natural world, seems to have made the best out of a bad situation. He repeatedly complains about “riding in cars” (40) that are dismissed as “damned” throughout GHoA (42, 103, 139) for interfering with his experience of authenticity and for allowing hunters to “shoot the country out” (193), but motor vehicles were just one of the many modern conveniences that allowed him to undertake his “relatively luxurious” safari⁶⁶ in the first place. It is these very “damned cars”, as well as steamships, trains, and airplanes, that his “reputation as a big-game hunter” in Africa relied upon.⁶⁷ Even though modern industry they symbolised created a fracture “between humans and the natural world”, Hemingway “does not acknowledge the role that trophy hunting plays in normalizing and exacerbating this fracture”.⁶⁸ Victimising the environment as he is, he claims he is the victim, cars being just one instrument of his torment. He takes their utility for granted, while reframing them as a “damned” obstacle to overcome, and therefore an additional challenge that makes him feel he earned it when finally an “un-hunted pocket” is found:

Then the plain was behind us and ahead there were big trees and we were entering a country the loveliest that I had seen in Africa … . there, standing in an open space between the trees, his head up, staring at us, the bristles on his back erect, long, thick, white tusks up-curving, his eyes showing bright, was a very large wart-hog boar watching us from less than twenty yards. … None of us had ever seen a wart-hog that would not bolt off, fast-trotting, tail in air. This was a virgin country, an un-hunted pocket in the million miles of bloody Africa. (150–52)

The shifting baseline syndrome is entangled here with confirmation bias and those two psychological phenomena interact synergistically. Upon finding “such wonderful country” (151) that retains environmental qualities of the past, Hemingway experiences reconnecting with “virgin” nature, and the realisation that it is still out there, to be found, enjoyed, and exploited, provides him with all the confirmation he craves. In that, his sense of things being right in the world is restored, even as the fact that this world now exists only in remote pockets belies that very sense, and the activity of exploiting these rare vestiges as if they were unlimited brings about their further demise.

Less than a decade after Hemingway’s death, the ecologist Garrett Hardin published his highly influential (and controversial) paper on the so-called tragedy of the commons whose “grim logic” is said to govern many problems we face in terms of common resources that are “threatened by selfish individuals and nations taking what they can, even though they know the resource will be wiped out if everyone does the same”.⁶⁹ While the original Hardin’s formulation, whereby the only way out of this predicament is state coercion, is certainly overstated, climate change and biodiversity loss are only two of the problems that exemplify the menace of the tragedy of the commons within the dominant extractivist paradigm. The urge to exploit a common resource often seems too deeply ingrained, and the self-serving narratives mobilised to justify partaking in a harmful environmental activity resemble those used by addicts: “I need to do this, I’m not hurting anyone, everyone else does it, I’ve worked for it, I can stop anytime, other people are far worse”.⁷⁰ In this regard, Hemingway is addicted to – or perhaps dependent on – a certain way of life, even as it is ultimately self-harming and self-defeating. Still, his eye is as keen as ever:

seeing two kudu cows and a calf feed out from the timber, moving with the quickly browsing, then head lifted, long staring vigilance of all browsing animals in a forest. Animals on a plain can see so far that they have confidence and feed very differently from animals in the woods. (117)

The almost off-hand description of the scene masks its significance. What we have here is the “landscape of fear”, a concept adopted by modern ecologists to “describe the spatial variation in predation risk as perceived by prey across their foraging or home range”.⁷¹ Hemingway seems to have instinctively grasped the way a landscape of fear operates but failed to dwell on it long enough to even begin to suspect his potential involvement. Increased risk of predation in overgrown areas drives medium-sized herbivores to open habitat, while large herbivores (such as rhinoceros) being less vulnerable to predation move freely between habitats; this dynamic affects the patterns of dung deposition across the landscape, and when large herbivores are eliminated, the result is a more patchy deposition that leads to a landscape transformation, as dung plays a key role in plant growth.⁷² Describing what seemed to him a timeless dynamic, Hemingway, a rhino hunter with a supposedly “very minute” impact, was already shifting the baseline.

Whether Hemingway fully or partly realises the inevitable end point of all the exploitation he witnesses and engages in, he carries on. While stumbling upon a “miracle of elephant tracks”, he makes the following observation:

Looking at the way the tracks graded down through the pleasant forest I thought that we had the mammoths too, a long time ago, and when they travelled through the hills in southern Illinois they made these same tracks. It was just that we were an older country in America and the biggest game was gone. (172)

The obvious conclusion – that the African game is on the same trajectory as the American one – is not spelled out and the narrator immediately moves on to describing the landscape in idyllic terms. While Tyler suggests that the phrase “an older country” in the passage is used “presumably in the sense that it has been developed longer”,⁷³ one of GHoA’s deleted passages reveals what Hemingway means by its opposite: “It is a new country if there is no literature. If there is nothing old for you to take over, when there are more animals than people” (259). Such jarring colonial overtones depend on Hemingway’s notion of Africa as a “blank, empty space into which he asserts himself”, as Toni Morrison put it.⁷⁴ In his attitude towards African animals Hemingway appears to be bent on doing his best to hasten turning this so-called “new” country into an “old” one, but ultimately it’s more than just about animals: as a specimen of popular trophy hunting narratives, GHoA has been accused of displaying “colonial arrogance”⁷⁵ and sharing with preceding safari texts a common agenda, whereby “beast, land, and ultimately people all fall prey to the colonial gaze”.⁷⁶ These are serious charges, and GHoA doesn’t offer much by way of rebuttal.

“Their Teeth Were White and Good”

Hemingway’s inner conflict in his dealings with African wildlife is mirrored by his inner conflict in his dealings with African people. While individual natives provide him with assistance, companionship, and a source of anecdotes, he yearns for the ideal native as a means of reconnecting with a certain vision of a “primitive” world. As “broad and slippery term” as it is, the primitive was a major force and factor in Hemingway’s life and career, and his interactions with its “many different forms and manifestations”⁷⁷ had a fluid, or perhaps even “broad and slippery” quality to them as well. And so early on in GHoA Hemingway is explicit, even ostentatious in the way he ignores any discussion of African culture:

“Why are you not more interested in the natives?”

“We are”, my wife assured him [Kandisky – DBJ].

“They are really interesting. Listen –” Kandisky said, and he spoke on to her.

“The hell of it is”, I said to Pop, “when I’m in the hills I’m sure the bastards are down there on the salt”. (12)

By “the bastards” Hemingway here means the kudu antelope that persistently refuse to provide an easy target for him, which is the topic of the conversation he carries on with Pop, ignoring the parallel conversation on the natives between his wife and Kandisky. The real easy target here is Kandisky himself, whose interest in the natives Hemingway observes with an ironic distance:

“When you come back another time we must take a safari to study the natives. And shoot nothing, or only to eat. Look, I will show you a dance and sing a song”.

Crouched, elbows lifting and falling, knees humping, he shuffled around the table, singing. Undoubtedly it was very fine. (23)

Undoubtedly it was not on Hemingway’s list of priorities to go on that kind of safari any time soon. And yet, later in the story, shortly after chancing upon “a virgin country, an un-hunted pocket in the million miles of bloody Africa” he encounters his dream natives in the form of the “good Masai”, native hunters he can claim kin with.

It was a very large village and out of it came running long-legged, brown, smooth-moving men … . They came up to the car and surrounded it, all laughing and smiling and talking. They all were tall, their teeth were white and good, and their hair was stained a red brown and arranged in a looped fringe on their foreheads. They carried spears and they were very handsome and extremely jolly, not sullen, nor contemptuous like the northern Masai … . They were the tallest, best-built, handsomest people I had ever seen and the first truly light-hearted happy people I had seen in Africa … . They had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it. (152–53)

Hemingway doesn’t discuss why these Masai, living in the “un-hunted pocket” far removed from game reserves and plantations, are “not sullen, not contemptuous” like the Masai elsewhere, just as earlier in the story he doesn’t discuss the reasons for famine and migration of natives. He doesn’t reflect on how his hunting is bound to irrevocably change the “un-hunted pocket” into a hunted one, just as he doesn’t reflect on how his arrival may contribute to the demise of the natives’ impressive but “ignorant” way of life; all he does is note it won’t survive. Having made that blunt observation, he simply moves on, seemingly satisfied to have had the pleasant opportunity of encountering “nobility” while it lasts, his belief that there are still untouched areas he can explore confirmed.

His sense of things being right is put to the test not much further on, when instead of another stockaded village of the “good Masai” hunters, his party encounters a decidedly less charismatic scene:

I was feeling fairly depressed. Here we had come through a beautiful country of virgin timber where kudu had been seen walking along the trail to end up stuck on the bank of a little creek in some one’s cornfield. I had not expected any cornfield and I resented it. (155)

His illusion of a virgin country dispelled by an unwelcome intrusion of a prosaic patch of farmland, Hemingway is rather painfully reminded of the mismatch between his expectations and reality. Only a subsequent hunt, a ferocious and frantic affair that engages him on multiple levels, helps to put things right again, if not for long. By the time the narrative is drawing to a close, Hemingway attempts to make peace with his inner conflict that by now is too obvious to ignore. There is no hiding the fact that things are far from perfect. But yet again cognitive biases help to cushion the blow:

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can’t reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia. (194–95)

Romanticising the natives who “live in harmony” with a continent reanimates the worn-out trope of the noble savage as Hemingway puts all the blame squarely on modern farming practices and savours his idealised vision of harmonious human-nature coexistence made possible presumably by living off hunting – his beloved pastime. While Elizabeth Kolbert offers a sombre reminder of the way in which human communities have always put pressure on environments they lived in – “Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did”⁷⁸ – it is indeed the case that until historical times extinction rates in sub-Saharan Africa were lower than elsewhere, which probably occurred “because of long-term, gradual hominin–megafauna coevolution”.⁷⁹ In light of widespread megafauna extinctions elsewhere, any universalising narrative of the man-nature relationship is problematic, and in certain circumstances the feel-good sense of timeless peaceful coexistence may well be driven by a combination of shifting baseline syndrome and confirmation bias. In any case, whatever “harmony” might have been there came under ruthless assault starting in the late nineteenth century. It was then that the arrival of Western settlers, increased colonial presence, availability of modern firearms, persecution of predators as vermin, and facilitated spread of epizootic diseases took a heavy toll not only on animal populations, but also on species genetic diversity, diminishing their resilience to “impacts of a changing climate” and other unpredictable future events.⁸⁰ In these circumstances, what Susan Beegel calls “the elegiac tone of Hemingway’s nature writing”⁸¹ couldn’t be more fitting.

While Love notes that Hemingway “does not exclude himself from the pioneering exploiters of nature” and “claims the privilege of ruining new lands just as his white forebears had ruined ours”,⁸² Ryan Hediger draws attention to how the “first person plural (‘we come’) self-consciously position[s] Hemingway squarely and self-consciously within the colonialist behavior he challenges and justif[ies] his unease about participating in the trophy-hunting safari”. Calling the passage a “searing comment”, he goes on to claim that Hemingway’s subsequent insistence that he would return to Africa and his assertion that “we always had a right to go somewhere else” (Hediger’s emphasis) show how such contradictions present Hemingway as “at least partly coming to terms with the system he inhabits, experiencing an uneasiness, a kind of cramp of ethical feeling”.⁸³ In my own reading, what Hemingway does in this passage is hide behind the multiple “we” pronouns and the generic “foreigner”, without specifying who that might in fact be, which helps him reap the rewards of a seemingly open-minded and philosophically-inclined self-criticism, while simultaneously keeping enough distance not to subject himself to personal responsibility for the assault on nature underway. In environmental discourse, the use of this specific “slippery we”, as George Marshall calls it, is problematic in that, among others, it is used to “create a false social norm of inaction” that permits one to conveniently feel resigned in one’s inability to challenge the supposed norm; a similar justification can be achieved by pointing at other people.⁸⁴ What does one individual count for in the face of the overwhelming “us” and “them”, after all? The problem with responding to current environmental emergencies in general and to climate change in particular is that we “allow just enough history to make it seem familiar but not enough to create a responsibility for our past emissions”⁸⁵ and keep our rational and emotional brains “sufficiently detached” to avoid dealing with the issue unless compelled.⁸⁶ Tyler asserts that Hemingway “reiterates over and over that he is directly and personally responsible for Africa’s environmental damage”,⁸⁷ but thanks to this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, any self-criticism costs Hemingway precisely nothing.

In another passage, upon discovering an area where game is abundant and not afraid of humans, Hemingway muses: “there must be pockets like this all over, that no one knows of, that the cars pass all along the road. They all hunt the same places” (193). “Hunting the same places” is offered as an obvious explanation for the apparent shortage of game there, but it is faceless and nameless “they” riding around in cars who are to blame. While this rhetorical detachment flies in the face of facts – after all, Hemingway hunts the same places as well and it’s through effort and luck that he can access new areas, with the help of a car, no less – it provides a way for him to distance himself from those who essentially engage in the same pursuit he does, and by so doing helps resolve his cognitive dissonance. By analogy to “high-carbon societies, [where] everyone contributes to the emissions that cause the problem”, every hunter is strongly inclined to ignore their individual contribution to the demise of wildlife populations or “write their own alibi”.⁸⁸ In GHoA, Hemingway does both.

“That Stream Will Flow, as It Has Flowed”

Unspoken conclusions and unconvincing rationalisations mask an undeniable discomfort with which Hemingway approaches his hunting exploits. On some level he is well aware of the impact of hunting (and other means of exploitation) on the natural world, which distresses him. On another level, cognitive biases provide him with just enough cover to be able to justify and defend the way he fulfils his desire to hunt. His cognitive dissonance – his inner conflict – is thus resolved, but this resolution is provisional and open to recurring challenges. The necessity to repeatedly resort to defensive narratives generated by cognitive biases raises the prospect of eventually reaching a tipping point, beyond which a stable resolution will be arrived at: either an outright denial of any involvement whatsoever, or its full acknowledgement. Needless to say, reaching that point doesn’t come easy.

While acknowledgements of “guilt, sadness, and disgust with hunting and killing [that] complicate Hemingway’s persona” in GHoA⁸⁹ allow for intellectually stimulating arguments in favour of the author’s environmentalist credentials, and while his own grandson asserts about the 1933–34 safari that “[a]s there was an abundance of game, their quota of trophies … did not unfavorably impact the sustainability of wildlife”,⁹⁰ Love is uncompromising in stating that Hemingway’s “body-count against the earth, both in fiction and life, is startlingly high”.⁹¹ As tempting as it may be to use Hemingway’s sorrow and dismay about the worsening state of the environment to qualify his actual impact on this very environment, his “astonishing hunt totals demonstrate that we cannot in good conscience argue that he was an “environmentalist” if the word is to retain its usual meaning”.⁹² This is not to hold him accountable to the ecological standards of our time, which would be “unfair”,⁹³ but simply to state the facts.

Even after descriptions of the “shot-out” country, as well as all the lofty talk of “continents aging quickly” on account of anonymous foreigners, Hemingway nevertheless asserts his inalienable right as he proclaims: “I loved this country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go” (194). In one evocative passage he fantasises about coming back to Africa:

I’d see the buffalo feeding where they lived, and when the elephants came through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not have to shoot, and I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed out and never fire a shot unless I saw a better head than this one in back, and instead of trailing that sable bull, gut-shot to hell, all day, I’d lie behind a rock and watch them on the hillside and see them long enough so they belonged to me forever. (193)

Voeller offers that “after the many scenes of grown men competing for trophies, for the largest set of horns”, it is a “warm, resonant moment” in which Hemingway “lingers peacefully, without the guns, bragging, killing, and skinning”.⁹⁴ Alas, Hemingway makes his renunciation of hunting conditional on not seeing “a better head” than the one he already has; otherwise “the guns, bragging, killing, and skinning” will inevitably ensue. The option of violently ending animal lives to impress others – as well as to feed oneself – is always at hand and needs only the simplest of justifications. All this despite the fact that Hemingway is clear about human impact:

I would come back to Africa but not to make a living from it. I could do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But I would come back to where it pleased me to live; to really live. Not just let my life pass. Our people went to America because that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a bloody mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. Let the others come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had seen it at its best and fought for it when it was well worth fighting for. Now I would go somewhere else. We always went in the old days and there were still good places to go. (195)

As he makes it clear that he understands the environmental cost of the human-caused “bloody mess”, he yet again fails to make a meaningful connection to his own activity. This allows him to engage in a fantasy of always being able to stay away from the destruction brought on by civilisation:

I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. (195)

This “good country” is such only because no other hunters exploited it before Hemingway happens to find it. Given his hunting excursions into what he himself considers virgin landscapes, he is an advance party and a harbinger of things to come, but preserving some of that “good country” for the benefit of future hunters, let alone the natives, is not what he cares about doing. This may seem counter-intuitive at first; even if Hemingway did not care about the natives and other hunters, wouldn’t he like to help preserve the landscape and wildlife so his own progeny could enjoy hunting “in the Edenic paradise of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa”⁹⁵? As it turned out, his sons, “whom he had carefully instructed in hunting and fishing”, were ultimately unable to “follow these pursuits on their father’s terms”.⁹⁶ Hemingway supposedly “lived in fear that soon there would be no more animals left to hunt”,⁹⁷ and yet in GHoA the thought of such a state of affairs eventually coming to pass with his active participation does not spur him on to undertake countermeasures; in fact, while he abides by his hunting quotas (generous as they were), he seems contemptuous of or at least indifferent to protection measures:

they had found not a leopard but a marvellous lion, a huge, black-maned lion that did not want to leave, on the rhino carcass when they had gone there the next morning and could not shoot him because he was in some sort of forest reserve.

“That’s rotten”, I said and I tried to feel bad about it but I was still feeling much too good to appreciate any one else’s gloom and Pop and I sat, tired through to our bones, drinking whiskey and soda and talking. (87)

Hemingway’s satisfaction comes not from the fact that a marvellous lion survived due to an effective forest reserve programme, but from his own recent hunting successes. Interests of future generations, whether inclined to hunt or not, do not seem to enter his calculations. This is in line with research on responses to climate change, according to which “people who have children are no more concerned about climate change than anyone else” – in fact, they are reported to be consistently less likely to believe it’s a serious threat, probably due to the fact that having a child “will mobilise the full tool kit of biases and avoidance strategies” that serve to supress unwelcome knowledge.⁹⁸ Hemingway, at the time of the safari already a father, had yet another reason to look away.

Or perhaps to look far ahead, beyond the point of no return. It has often been noted that “death is central to Hemingway writing” and if indeed each one of his “character’s identity is defined by how he or she faces it”,⁹⁹ then perhaps Hemingway’s persona in GHoA need to be defined in light of the final story at work here – the one about an ecocatastrophe of one kind or other already being a foregone conclusion, meaning that the only thing left to do is to utter profound and poignant pronouncements while enjoying the last vestiges of a doomed world. Another cognitive defence mechanism, it leaves aside the issue of moral responsibility for the unhappy end, “as though we have moved from a bedside vigil to bereavement counselling without actually experiencing the death itself”.¹⁰⁰

But there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an inconsistency here. For all his talk about not minding being “killed by one thing or another”, Hemingway seems to crave at least some hope that the world he knows will outlive him. Seeking what Bill McKibben calls the “comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world”, we can’t quite believe that what we grew up with and have come to take for granted may change faster than we expect, let alone end.¹⁰¹ In a passage discussed earlier, Hemingway predicts that “after we are dead we may have ruined” a country, thus conveniently pushing the spectre of the ultimate end of the sort of world he cares about just beyond his own end. This allows him to shield himself from disastrous outcomes of the current harmful course of action, and to continue with this very action, safe in the assumption that he will not suffer its ultimate consequences. This is uncannily similar to the well attested phenomenon whereby people “can avoid the fear of climate change by placing its impacts beyond [their] own life span”¹⁰² – or by denying any lasting impacts at all. Nowhere is this attitude clearer in GHoA than in this meandering metaphorical passage about the Gulf Stream – Hemingway’s “preferred wilderness”¹⁰³ – that:

has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-coloured, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water … the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing – the stream. (102)

If only. Philip Armstrong undermines Hemingway’s metaphor of the Gulf Stream as “the timeless processes of nature itself, within which human history comprises merely transient pollution” by pointing out how human-induced climate change could shut the Gulf Stream down.¹⁰⁴ Similarly Hediger notes how with the ongoing climate disruption, “massive forces like ocean currents are also exposed to radical change”.¹⁰⁵ Things indeed “going well in La Habana” and elsewhere for many decades now, it’s no longer tenable to claim that pollution (plastics, fertiliser runoff, oil spills, etc.) has “no significance”. But isn’t it pretty to think so? And so Hemingway luxuriates in the vision of invincible nature that the “very minute” human impact leaves “unimpressed” – at least until he is no longer there to witness the impression.

At the same time, Hemingway’s ominous Mongolian prophecies bring to mind his acceptance of Stephen Crane’s fate from GHoA’s opening chapter: “He died. That’s simple. He was dying from the start” (17). So was Africa, and America before it, and that’s the way it has to be, Hemingway seems to be saying. After all, his continuing contribution to the demise of African wildlife and landscape, in full view of precedents and consequences, is proudly recorded in his self-proclaimed “best work yet”. Yes, cognitive biases do serve to obscure this “full view”, but at the same time they conveniently allow to go on doing whatever one is doing. Falling for those biases, or allowing oneself to fall for them, makes for an easier life – even in the face of death.

Conclusion

With time, Hemingway began expressing a different attitude towards animals, as a number of studies have concluded.¹⁰⁶ Newman notes that GHoA is “typically deemed the worst offender” in terms of Hemingway’s treatment of animals, with later works “more sympathetic”.¹⁰⁷ Voeller is helpfully specific in charting this progression: GHoA “makes a rather bold, blatant display of killing and trophy-collecting” alongside marginal admissions of sadness and guilt, which gives way to “increasing empathy with the hunted” in the 1938 story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that is centred around a (senseless) hunt for a (humanised) lion, then to a further shift away from boastful trophy hunting in posthumously published “An African Story” (part of The Garden of Eden) with its “hatred of killing” and contempt for a hunter-figure, and finally to True at First Light, where “the swashbuckling, bragging” persona of Hemingway is replaced by a “serious, dutiful, utilitarian” one that leaves his trophy hunting days behind and engages in legitimate and beneficial animal control.¹⁰⁸ Love sees the same evolution in the way Hemingway’s sensibility changed around the time of the writing of The Old Man and the Sea, when he both publicly and privately revealed his sense of guilt at killing non-dangerous game animals (except for meat) and called it “a sin”. It was also in those later years that, faced with diminishing fish sizes, Hemingway was seen returning a marlin to the sea for the first time,¹⁰⁹⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣ his belief in the timeless force of the Gulf Stream diminishing as well, perhaps.¹¹⁰

Similarly transformed was Hemingway’s attitude towards native cultures. On his first safari the continent served as a backdrop for his personal exploration and redemption, and African natives were but an “array of enabling black nursemen”.¹¹¹ Two decades later, his second safari displayed “his embrace of the primitive in many respects”, and “compelled in him a deep study of self and re-imagination of identity”.¹¹² During that latter journey that inspired True at First Light, Hemingway “took up his own version of a traditional Masai practice: hunting alone at night, barefoot, head shaved, and carrying only a spear”¹¹³, which couldn’t be more different from the gun-cocking and klaxon-honking exploits of the former safari. Suzanne del Gizzo investigates how Hemingway’s public (a magazine article) versus personal (a memoir) images reveal a dramatic transformation from “America’s great author” captured in photographs intended for nationwide circulation, essentially as “a master intent on sharing Western culture with Africans”, into a private citizen once the cameras (and his wife) are gone, who becomes “a student immersed in the ways of different tribal customs”.¹¹⁴

I emphasise this evolution because there is a larger issue at stake here. One might ask: Had Hemingway’s life and work not been cut short in as dramatic fashion as it indeed was, would he have come to rise above his faults? While in GHoA he tried to resolve his inner conflict by allowing his cognitive biases to rationalise and justify his actions, his later writings suggest he was moving on to resolving it by changing these very actions. If the direction of his evolution continued, he may have been capable of fully acknowledging the fact of his collaboration in the demise of the natural world. The questions is, could that have involved more than just literary exploration of his contrition, but perhaps also full liberation from the shackles of self-destructive cognitive biases, accompanied by a real-world effort to reverse some of the damage and bring back what he helped destroy?

Early on, Hemingway’s “proclaiming of his own uniqueness … necessitated a destruction or diminishment of the natural world which he loved and revered”.¹¹⁵ A similar claim could be made of attitudes and actions of many individuals and communities as regards environmental collapse, from climate change to biodiversity loss and everything in between. If indeed the trajectory of Hemingway’s attitude to the natural world mirrors that of humankind, one should hope that our evolution will not be brought to a tragically premature end by our own hand.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hemingway, 1. I give further references to this work parenthetically in the main text.

2 Grimes, 121.

3 Beegel, “Eye and Heart,” 80.

4 Maier, 10.

5 Newman, 514.

6 Voeller, 75.

7 Love, 210.

8 Murphy quoted in Voeller, 63.

9 Newman, 510. In this essay I refer to this triad as “Hemingway.”

10 Putnam quoted in Voeller, 66.

11 Tyler, “How the Weather Was,” 42.

12 Westling, 99.

13 Pohl, 3.

14 Haselton, Nettle, and Murray, 968.

15 Marshall, 7.

16 Johnson and Levin, 1593.

17 Marshall, 231.

18 Du Nann Winter and Koger, 54.

19 Johnson and Levin, 1597.

20 Kahneman, passim.

21 Marshall, passim.

22 Norgaard, 9.

23 Stoknes, 81.

24 Ryan, 1.

25 Gersdorf and Mayer, 9.

26 Du Nann Winter and Koger, xvii.

27 Ryan, 14.

28 Easterlin, 93.

29 Glotfelty, xix.

30 Lilienfeld, 660.

31 Henrich, xii–xiii.

32 Suedfeld, 60.

33 Fleming quoted in Maier, 10.

34 del Gizzo, “Going Home,” 506.

35 Seán Hemingway, xiv.

36 Conway, Howe, and Knott, sec. 2.

37 Taleb, 63.

38 Hediger, “Cramp of Ethics,” 39.

39 Seán Hemingway, xviii.

40 Bredahl, 77.

41 Voeller, 64.

42 Seán Hemingway, xxi.

43 Trogdon, 1.

44 Du Nann Winter and Koger, 155.

45 Epley and Gilovich, 133.

46 Voeller, 65.

47 Newman, 517.

48 Marshall, 106.

49 Ibid., 66–67.

50 Ibid., 196.

51 Voeller, 66.

52 Marshall, 200.

53 Ibid., 184.

54 In GHoA Hemingway defines “a country” as “an area, a valley or range of hills, a man can hunt in” (43).

55 Tyler, “How the Weather Was,” 44.

56 Dawkins, 111–13.

57 del Gizzo, “Tracking the Elephant,” 179.

58 Kolbert, 229–35.

59 “World population milestones.”

60 Marshall, 227.

61 Ibid., 60.

62 Buell quoted in Ryan, 8.

63 Soga and Gaston, 222.

64 Beegel, “Eye and Heart,” 78.

65 Marshall, 105.

66 del Gizzo, “Going Home,” 505.

67 Hediger, “Animals,” 219.

68 Whittle, 205.

69 Battersby, 7.

70 Marshall, 201.

71 Gaynor et al., 355.

72 le Roux, Kerley, and Cromsigt, 835.

73 Tyler, “How the Weather Was,” 47.

74 Morrison quoted in Hediger, “Cramp of Ethics,” 44.

75 Whittle, 207.

76 Dudley, 21.

77 del Gizzo, “Going Home,” 497.

78 Kolbert, 235.

79 Sandom et al., 3.

80 Dures et al., 877.

81 Beegel, “Eye and Heart,” 78.

82 Love, 203.

83 Hediger, “Cramp of Ethics,” 40–41.

84 Marshall, 31–32.

85 Ibid., 64.

86 Ibid., 51.

87 Tyler, “How the Weather Was,” 46.

88 Marshall, 42.

89 Voeller, 64.

90 Seán Hemingway, xiv.

91 Love, 203.

92 Tyler, “Virgin Forests,” 66.

93 Love, 210.

94 Voeller, 67.

95 Seán Hemingway, xii.

96 Love, 210.

97 Tyler, “How the Weather Was,” 45.

98 Marshall, 189.

99 Stoltzfus, 216.

100 Marshall, 207–08.

101 McKibben quoted in Marshall, 210.

102 Marshall, 209.

103 Beegel, “The Environment,” 241.

104 Armstrong, 162.

105 Hediger, “Becoming with Animals,” 16.

106 Hediger, “Cramp of Ethics,” 36.

107 Newman, 510.

108 Voeller, 72.

109 Love, 208–09.

110 Ibid., 204–05.

111 Toni Morrison quoted in del Gizzo, “Going Home,” 506.

112 del Gizzo, “Going Home,” 509.

113 Hediger, “Cramp of Ethics,” 35.

114 del Gizzo, “Going Home,” 513.

115 Love, 205.