Milton's "Eco-Eden": Place and notions of the "Green" in Pradise Lost

Other descriptions of the physical demeanor of Eden contribute to the poem's pastoral character and will in certain ways help to locate Milton's Eden in its ecological contexts. Geographically, according to Milton's vision of the Christian mythic world, Eden lies at the Earth's equator. The Garden sits eastward in Eden atop "a Rock/Of alablaster, pil'd up to the Clouds/ .... The rest was craggie cliff, that overhung / Still as it rose, impossible to climb" (4.443-- 449). The "steep" sides of the mountain of Paradise sustain a "wilderness, whose hairie sides / With thicket overgrown, grottesque and wild / Access deni'd" (4.135-137) to all but Adam and Eve and their fellow creatures. Thus, in terms of J.B. Jackson's landscape paradigm, which distinguishes between the significations of "wilderness" and "landscape," Milton's Eden spans two categories of earthly terrain: the Garden plateau qualifies as "middle landscape" or "soft pastoral"; while the sides of the Edenic mountain qualify as true "wilderness" or "hard pastoral." The climate of Eden, where the seasons run concurrently and are bounded together, supports an "ecosystem" of endless harvests where all creatures can live harmoniously together in a non-- predatory environment. "The climate is so nearly perfect," Roy Flannagan writes, "that all vegetation or all animal life can exist happily in the same place" (1998, 449). As a result of this ideally and flawlessly designed universe and nature, Adam and Eve, though they still must care for the Garden in other ways, are essentially freed from cultivating the Earth for sustenance or doing any real hard labor (another common characteristic of the Arcadian world).

By virtue of intent, there are going to be fantastic attributes ascribed to any pastoral Arcadia: the thornless roses of Milton's Eden, the perfectly synchronous climate, the absence of predation among animal life, freedom from human labor, and seamless social harmony between humans and other forms of life and non-life. But fantastic attributes notwithstanding, Milton's Edenic Earth, in its essential qualities and inherent values, can be seen as not too unlike Earth proper. For instance, Eden is a world of fertility and abundance, a world where nature is "perpetually sexual and fecund" (Flannagan 1998, 484)-conditions that are not unlike those of any real, unspoiled, life-sustaining ecosystem on Earth. Comparing Paradise Lost and Greek pastoral epic, Stella Revard notes that "Milton's Eden, like Vergil's Italy of Georgics 2, is a place of beauty, variety, and abundance" (1986, 264)-again, qualities of any relatively healthy, uncorrupted natural environment. Viewed from an ecological perspective, "variety" must be considered an inherent condition and necessity of nature: in a healthy ecosytem, a variety of species usually inhabits an area that possesses a variety of geological features and that is in some way connected to the variety of other ecosystems of the planet.