Surviving in "a world of wounds": environmental ethics in David Greig's outlying islands

Abstract

David Greig, one of the pioneering playwrights of the contemporary Scottish theater, deals with such issues as Scottish identity, globalization, war, and the environment in his plays. His play Outlying Islands mobilizes these issues together to question the ethics of the human-nature relationship. It demonstrates humanity’s adverse impact on nature through a military anthrax test to be conducted on an island before the WWII. The aim of this paper is to display the stances of the characters in terms of environmental ethics by using Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ and Arne Naess’ deep ecological thought as a theoretical framework. Their notions provide a convenient perspective for the exegesis of the play, for they deny the image of humanity as independent of nature. Within this framework, this paper discusses whether the characters adopt an intrinsic value system for the nonhuman beings, and the role of science and religion in the formation of their value systems is demonstrated.