ABSTRACT
Joseph Campbell perceives, as do such recent writers as William Faulkner and Margaret Atwood, that what was once wilderness has become wasteland. Campbell’s is an ecological imperative that demands not just good intentions and literalistic gestures toward conservation but a total transformation of consciousness. William Faulkner is just such a modem shaman, whose novels and stories—though sometimes filled with references to incest, miscegenation, madness, and murder—convey the very nature and power of myth. To seek other more ecologically dynamic attitudes toward human/ planet relationships, Campbell recalls the religions of primitive hunter and planter societies in which wilderness rituals imparted communion between the social and the natural worlds. The point of organic connection can be fleshed out further by reference to any number of thinkers who share Campbell’s concern with an ecological imperative. Campbell’s ecological imperative, thus, is profoundly conservative.
