which hosts biennial meetings for scholars who deal with environmental
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Ecological humanities
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The ecological humanities (also, environmental humanities)
are an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many
environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over
the past several decades (in particular environmental philosophy,
environmental history and environmental anthropology).
The ecological humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between
the sciences and the humanities, and
between Western, Eastern and Indigenous ways of knowing the natural
.world and the place of humans in it (Rose 2004)
The ecological humanities are characterised by a connectivity
ontology and a commitment to two fundamental axioms relating to the
need to submit to ecological laws and to see humanity as part of a larger
.living system
Connectivity ontology
One of the fundamental ontological presuppositions of ecological
humanities is that the organic world and its inorganic parts are seen as a
single system whereby each part is linked to each other part. This world
view in turn shares an intimate connection with Lotka's physiological
philosophy and the associated concept of the "World Engine".[1] When we
see everything as connected, then the traditional questions of the
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about the West," a session that, unfortunately, was left without time for
discussion at the end. As people were gathering up their belongings and
streaming toward the doors, an older gentleman, still in his seat, clearly
befuddled, tried to raise his voice above the haste: "But what IS
ecocriticism?" It seems that few people heard him but those who did
recognized a voice crying out in the wilderness. O'Grady and Branch
immediately exchanged looks of: "Hey, that fellow deserves an answer-"!we all do
And thus was born the idea for the session at the 1994 WLA meeting
in Salt Lake City, "Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice." Gathered here
are one-page position papers by sixteen "younger" scholars, all of whom
are pondering the question posed by the good man in Wichita: "What is
ecocriticism?" Rather than provide the definitive answer, the point of
these papers is to foster an awareness of the varied uses (or non-uses!) to
which scholars are putting the term. In addition, the writers were asked to
consider how our present understanding might lead to future
developments, both in scholarship and in pedagogy. Please use this
material as a working document, a point of departure from which to
".ponder your own stance toward "ecocriticism
Michael P. Branch, Florida International University [now at the
University of Nevada, Reno]
Sean O'Grady, Boise State University
Position Papers
Ralph W. Black, What We Talk About When We Talk About
Ecocriticism
?Christopher Cokinos, What Is Ecocriticism
?Nancy Cook, What Is Ecocriticism
?Harry Crockett, What Is Ecocriticism
?Thomas K. Dean, What Is Eco-Criticism
?Cheryll Glotfelty, What Is Ecocriticism
Ian Marshall, The Ecocritical Heritage
?Kent Ryden, What Is Ecocriticism
?Stephanie Sarver, What Is Ecocriticism
Don Scheese, Some Principles of Ecocriticism
Mark Schlenz, Survival Stories: Toward an Ecology of Literary Criticism
Scott Slovic, Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact
Stan Tag, Four Ways of Looking at Ecocriticism
?David Taylor, What Is Ecocriticism
?David W. Teague, What Is Ecocriticism
?Allison B. Wallace, What Is Ecocriticism
http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/
WHAT IS ECOCRITICISM?
by Cheryll Glotfelty
Simply defined, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between
literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism
examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective,
and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and
economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earthcentered approach to literary studies.
Ecocritics and theorists ask questions like the following: How is
nature represented in this sonnet? What role does the physical setting
play in the plot of this novel? Are the values expressed in this play
consistent with ecological wisdom? How do our metaphors of the land
influence the way we treat it? How can we characterize nature writing as a
genre? In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new
critical category? Do men write about nature differently than women do?
In what ways has literacy itself affected humankind's relationship to the
natural world? How has the concept of wilderness changed over time? In
what ways and to what effect is the environmental crisis seeping into
contemporary literature and popular culture? What view of nature informs
U.S. government reports, and what rhetoric enforces this view? What
bearing might the science of ecology have on literary studies? How is
science itself open to literary analysis? What cross-fertilization is possible
between literary studies and environmental discourse in related
disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and
ethics?
Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and
the environment. Various schools of literary criticism examine language
and literature from specific perspectives. Feminist criticism, for instance,
examines literature from the perspective of feminine gender, whereas
Marxist criticism examines literature from the standpoint of class structure
and production. Ecocriticism looks at literature from the perspective of the
.ecology
It is believed that William Rueckert was the first to use the term
ecocriticism. Rueckert published an essay in 1978 entitled "Literature
and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism." This essay offered an outline
for the new discipline: "the application of ecology and ecological concepts
".to the study of literature
While environmentalism became a popular issue in the late 1960s
and 1970s, ecocriticism was not established as a genre until the mid1980s. This initiative was actualized through the work of the Western
Literature Association. In 1990, Cheryll Glotfelty of the University of
Nevada in Reno was the first to assume an academic position as professor
of Literature and the Environment. This institution is still considered the
.primary bastion for ecocritical thought
Ecocriticism is represented in the United States by the Association
for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). This organization
holds biennial meetings for ecocritics. The official journal of the ASLE,
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), represents
the latest in scholarship on ecocritism. As an ecocritic or theorist reads
particular texts, he or she will think about specific issues relating to the
ecology. Questions will arise: How is nature expressed in this piece? How
important is physical plant to the plot? Are the values represented in the
text consonant with "green" thinking? Do literary metaphors for land have
an impact on how we treat the land? What constitutes nature writing? If
class, race and gender are critical categories, shall place become another
such category? Are there differences in the way men and women write
about nature? Has literacy changed man's bond to nature? Is the crisis
with the environment represented in literature, and how has this affected
man's relationship to the ecology? Are United States government reports
influenced by a particular ecological view? How has ecology impacted the
?study of literature
Though these questions hint at a very wide area of inquiry on
different levels, there is a single basic premise in ecological criticism: that
all of human culture is linked to the physical world and is affected by and
has an effect on the natural world. The ecocritic's job is to negotiate
.between that which is human and that which is nonhuman
Another way to understand ecocriticism is by comparing it to other
literary criticism. Literary criticism looks at the relationships among
authors, writings and the world. The literary critic takes "the world" to
mean "society." Ecocritics expand on this notion so that "the world" comes
Overview
Overview
Overview
Joseph Carroll.
Routledge, 2004
Librarians tip: Chap. 8 "Ecocriticism, Cognitive Ethology, and the
Environments of Victorian Fiction"
Read preview
Overview
Overview
Overview
Overview
Interdisciplinarity
Joe Moran.
Routledge, 2001
Librarians tip: "Ecocriticism and Science" begins on p. 170
Read preview
Overview
Overview
http://www.questia.com/library/literature/literary-theory/ecocriticism
as many critics have shown, their writings are imbued with a poetic spirit
that makes their ideas accessible to lay readers. The two great nineteenth
century American naturalists, most critics agree, are John Burroughs and
John Muir. Burroughs's early work was influenced by Whitman, particularly
the essays collected in Wake Robin (1871) and Birds and Poets. (1877).
After reading Charles Darwin and John Fiske, Burroughs turned to scientific
speculation about nature and then later in life took a more spiritual view.
Muir, a native of Scotland, traveled extensively around the United States
and documented his observations in hundreds of articles and ten major
books. He also worked to prevent the destruction of the environment, and
he is credited with being primarily responsible for preserving the Yosemite
Valley in California, which became the second national park in the United
.States
In Britain, in the nineteenth century, the Romantic poets reacted
strongly against the eighteenth century emphasis on reason and sought
new ways of expressing their thoughts and feelings. William Wordsworth,
considered by many to be the spokesman of the movement, celebrates
the beauty and mystery of nature in some of his most famous lyrics,
including Michael (1800), which portrays a simple shepherd who is
deeply attached to the natural world around him. Wordsworth's
autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850) records the poet's evolving
understanding of nature, and The Excursion (1814) is a long philosophical
reflection on the relationship of humanity and nature. The poetry of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley also
Frederick Douglass
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
(autobiography) 1845
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature (nonfiction) 1836
The Young American (lecture) 1844
Thomas Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd (novel) 1874
The Return of the Native (novel) 1878
The Mayor of Casterbridge (novel) 1886
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (novel) 1891
Jude the Obscure (novel) 1891
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter (novel) 1850
The Blithedale Romance (novel) 1852
John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (poem) 1816
Ode to Autumn (poem) 1820
Ode to a Nightingale (poem) 1820
Clarence King
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (nonfiction) 1872
John Muir
The Mountains of California (nonfiction) 1894
James Kirke Paulding
The Backwoodsman (novel) 1818
John Ruskin
Modern Painters (criticism) 1843
The Eagle's Nest: Ten Lectures on Natural Science to Art: Given at Oxford
in 1872 (lectures) 1872
The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (nonfiction) 1884
Percy Shelley
Alastor (poem) 1816
Mont Blanc (poem) 1817
Lines Written among the Euganean Hills (poem) 1818
Ode to the West Wind (poem) 1819
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In Memoriam (poetry) 1850
Henry David Thoreau
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (nonfiction) 1849
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (nonfiction) 1854
The Maine Woods (nonfiction) 1864
Journals (journals) 1881 92
Mark Twain
Roughing It (novel) 1872
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (novel) 1885
Gilbert White
Natural History of Selborne (nonfiction) 1789
Walt Whitman
Specimen Days (nonfiction) 1882
Alexander Wilson
American Ornithology; or The Natural History of Birds of the United
States. 9 vols. (nonfiction) 1808 14
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads (poetry) 1798
The Excursion (poetry) 1814
The Prelude (poetry) 1850
Criticism: Overviews
Karl Kroeber (essay date 1994)
Scott Russell Sanders (essay date 1996)
David Mazel (essay date 2001)
Criticism: American Literature: Romantics And Realists
James Russell Lowell (essay date 1865)
http://www.enotes.com/topics/ecocriticism-and-nineteenth-centuryliterature
WHAT IS ECO-CRITICISM?
by Thomas K. Dean
Eco-criticism is a study of culture and cultural products (art works,
writings, scientific theories, etc.) that is in some way connected with the
human relationship to the natural world. Eco-criticism is also a response to
needs, problems, or crises, depending on one's perception of urgency.
First, eco-criticism is a response to the need for humanistic understanding
of our relationships with the natural world in an age of environmental
destruction. In large part, environmental crises are a result of humanity's
disconnection from the natural world, brought about not only by
increasing technology but also by particularization; that is, a mentality of
specialization that fails to recognize the interconnectedness of all things.
In terms of the academy, eco-criticism is thus a response to scholarly
specialization that has gone out of control; eco-criticism seeks to reattach
scholars to each other and scholarship to the real concerns of the world.
Inherently, then, eco-criticism is interdisciplinary. In order to
understand the connectedness of all things--including the life of the mind
and the life of the earth--one must reconnect the disciplines that have
become sundered through over-specialization. Inherent in the idea of
interdisciplinarity is the wholistic ideal. Therefore, eco-criticism must
remain "a big tent"--comprehensiveness of perspectives must be
encouraged and honored. All eco-critical efforts are pieces of a
comprehensive continuum. Eco-critical approaches, thus, can be
theoretical, historical, pedagogical, analytical, psychological, rhetorical,
and on and on, including combinations of the above.
Ecocriticism
Introduction
Ecocriticism, also known as ecological or environmental literary
criticism, is an emerging subfield of English literature with American
origins. It is a diverse, interdisciplinary field, drawing on disciplines such
as environmental studies, ecology and biology, philosophy, history,
sociology, and cultural studies. Although most other humanities began to
develop environmental subfields in the 1970s, ecocriticism did not
become a recognized field until the 1990s.
Despite ecocriticisms relatively late establishment, literary scholars
have long maintained an interest in nature. Early work now associated
with ecocriticism was initially categorized under headings such as
American studies, regionalism, pastoralism, the frontier, human ecology,
science and literature, and landscape in literature (Glotfelty, 1996). Early
critics were generally unaware of others working on similar topics and
created their own environmental approaches to the study of literature
(Glotfelty, 1996). However, in 1989, Alicia Nitecki founded the American
Nature Writing Newsletter, an initial effort to unite the field (Glotfelty,
1996). University English departments soon began to offer programs in
environmental literature, and in 1990, the first academic position in
literature and the environment was created at the University of Nevada,
Reno (Glotfelty, 1996). In 1992, the Association for the Study of Literature
and Environment (ASLE) was founded, with Scott Slovic as its first
What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel?
How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?
(Glotfelty, 1996, p. xviii-xix)
:And more environmentally-focused questions such as
http://ecolit.pbworks.com/w/page/18498891/Development%20and
%20Trends
Websites
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
/http://www.asle.umn.edu
Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada
/http://www.alecc.ca
etc: Ecocriticism (Centenary College, Lousiana)
http://www.centenary.edu/etc/ecocriticism
Planetary: Teaching the Environmental Humanities
/http://planetaryblog.wordpress.com
Books
General Ecocriticism
LC sections: PN98, PR143, PR468, PS163, PS169
Coming into contact : explorations in ecocritical theory and
practice PS169 .E25 C66 2007X
-Ingram, Annie Merrill, 1961
LC sections: PS153
Ecocriticism : creating self and place in environmental and
American Indian literatures PS153 .I52 D74 2002
-Dreese, Donelle N. (Donelle Nicole), 1968
American Indian literature, environmental justice, and
ecocriticism : the middle place PS153 .I52 A33 2001X
-Adamson, Joni, 1958
British Literature and Ecocriticism
LC sections: PR275, PR3039
Greenery : ecocritical readings of late medieval English
literature PR275 .N3 R83 2007
Rudd, Gillian
Green Shakespeare : from ecopolitics to ecocriticism PR3039
.E35 2006
.Egan, Gabriel
Earlier Works (published before 2000)
LC sections: P48, PN81, PS163
Westernisation, that form the forest have rendered Ocol ineffective. The
poetry approves of forests only as life-giving natural forms that sustain
human development and liberation, not as a place of hiding from reality.
Literary studies are experiencing a crisis because of a "forest" of
theories that obscure human values. Then, wouldn't we be worsening the
situation by proposing eco-criticism, yet another theory among many
others, for the study of African literature? Yes, like "John" in Wakimbizi's
song and Ocol in p'Bitek's Song of Lawino, the African elite seize the
slightest opportunity to bolt to the forest, away from the realities of their
African surroundings. To echo the words of poet Miriam Were, critics want
to "run out of mud" and station themselves in sophisticated academic
spaces where they can theorise and abstract issues from reality.
Critics now hide in a forest of theories which, through very difficult
language, de-emphasise the link between art and the environment, thus
claiming that literature reflects itself as opposed to holding a mirror to the
world. While current theories would have us believe that the world is a
social construct that is primarily mediated through language, and that
everything is all but a fictional construct, eco-critics maintain the
environmentalist ethical emphasis on a world beyond the text and beyond
the reader.
In a word, Wangari Maathai's recognition by the world for her
environmentalist efforts gives African eco-criticism a much-needed shot in
the arm.
http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/nobel/
.controversy
So I claim that ecocriticism is not immune from the contemporary
arguments about culture. I gloss ethical inquiry with the work of Geoffrey
Galt Harpham.6 Ethics does not give answers easily, as Harpham points
out; we must build an ethical criticism as a site where we think. "Ethics is,
rather, the point at which literature intersects with theory, the point at
would put it. Mind you, this trajectory may or may not be the true path of
history! My point is that it is an influential position within ecocriticism. To
dismiss it as declensionist or apocalyptic may be simplistic, given the
state of the world. Ecocriticism certainly sings something like the blues:
"... "My baby left me and run all over town ... Oh come back please
Glen Love's reminiscence reveals a major challenge for ecocriticism,
its ability to adhere to a social and political program while accepting
a critique of the way it structures ethical issues. A point I take from his
recognition of the importance of Marx is the simultaneity of the
appearance of modern (even if nostalgic) preservation proposals, for wild
and/or pastoral landscapes, with critiques of the ideologies behind these
proposals, and vice-versa. Within this structure of proposal and critique
one could pair Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild with William
Cronon's "The Trouble With Wilderness," and Simon Schama's Landscape
and Memory with Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination. More
recently, Dana Phillips's The Truth of Ecology offers a panoramic critique
of ecology and criticism.14
In all disciplines, positions emerge in quasi-dialectical ways. Here,
an expression of the need for social action is met at inception by critique,
suggesting that ecocriticism must expect collisions of positions and
prepare to critique its own critical methodology and program, while not
paralyzing its own "real work."15
and findings; as I shall argue, these problems are only partially clarified by
historical studies and critiques of concepts of ecologyscientific and
popular.24
Initially, ecocritics focused on "nature writing," in specifically
"environmental texts." Lawrence Buell's interest in "the nature of
environmental representation," allows him to set out a "checklist" of four
:points that characterize an "environmentally oriented work." They are
The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing
device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is
.implicated in natural history
The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate
.interest
Human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical
.orientation
Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a
constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.25
Collecting Nature Writing in Anthologies
BUELL'S DESCRIPTION of the "environmental text" reveals the kinds
of questions the ecocritic wants to ask and also the roots of ecocriticism,
which sought its origins first among authors who were heirs to American
Romanticism and its tradition: Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John
does, some believe all texts can be read as environmental texts, and
some take an intermediate position. The length of the ecocritical reach
depends, in individual cases, on certainty of critical approach, but even
more on certainty of the sources of authority. Hence the importance of the
"eco": By positing connection and relationship, it permits interdisciplinary
work to gain authority and analytic power from disciplines outside one's
own. At bottom, ecocriticism needs to import scientific authority in order
to combat two positions, 1) that culture can be a refuge from nature, and
.2) that nature is merely a cultural construction
Power and authority account for part of what ecocritics mean when
they invoke "interdisciplinary." There is also a real hope that a concerted
multidisciplinary effort can avert environmental disaster. How does one
become interdisciplinary? Because ecocriticism is interested in ecology
and other environmental sciences, it must cross disciplinary boundaries
and use the methods and findings of other disciplines when it asks, "What
is environment?" or "Why think in ecological or evolutionary ways about
"?it
Like history, ecocriticism asks, "How shall scholars deal with
continuities and discontinuities found in environmental history, social
history, and cultural history?" These questions are universal, raisedto
use two disparate examplesby ecologist Daniel Botkin in Discordant
Harmonies and by historian Patricia Nelson Limerick in The Legacy of
Conquest.34
one paradox is that the shape of Cronon's prose finally follows the position
.of Leo Marx, while borrowing from the language of Carson
So why is this kind of reading important or useful to historians? First,
literary critics believe the mode of articulation matters: It is a part, if not
the central part, of how texts mean. Style is a part of the cultural work.
Ecocritics believe that part of the problems of or trouble with the
wilderness, is a result of language and rhetoric. There may or may not be
such a thing as wilderness, but it is certainly constructed with words in
essays. Second, literary critics remind us that we are part of a tradition of
discourse that itself has a history. Third, and not least, literary critics
remind us that we should write well and with good effect, while knowing
.as writers that our language reveals our times
How Ecocritics Write
A DESIRE to integrate personal narrative and critical analysis has led
to such publications as John Elder's Reading the Mountains of Home,
William L. Fox's The Void, The Grid, & The Sign, and Playa Works, Ian
Marshall's Story Line and Peak Experiences, and Rebecca Solnit's Savage
Dreams and Wanderlust. (And perhaps, in the dark abysm of time, my own
The Pathless Way.)49 The form of these books insists that field study is
integral and essential to understanding literary and aesthetic
representations of landscape. They also establish a trend that has
generated more sophisticated techniques for teaching field studies
premise allows Elder to "identify with the losses and recoveries, the
migrations and returns, that are the living circulation of our family's place
on earth."52
In a forthcoming work focusing on the ideas of George Perkins
Marsh, Elder does not look for cultural difference in the definitions of such
key ideas as "restoration," in the way environmental historians like Marcus
Hall do.53 He prefers not to see the history of forests as contested terrains
the way environmental historians see them, and he does not distinguish
European and American ideologies on conservation as split at the root.
.Instead, Elder wishes to draw communal threads together
In style, much so-called "narrative scholarship" is not sharply
analytical but gracefully meditative; in homage to Thoreau, perhaps, it
includes the first person. Narrative scholars look at landscapes not as
fields for argument, but as scenes for reconciliationof the wilderness
ethic with the stewardship ethic, of nature with culture. Such lyrical,
nearly religious work approaches a timeless harmony, and seems to be
beyond rational scrutiny.54
The praise-song school also sees nature writing as a progressive
historical tradition, seminal writers of the past leading to our
contemporary ways of thinking. In the hands of critics like Elder, the
progressive view of literary history"This is where we have been going all
along"uses the standard list of popular modern nature writers to create
a parable of the development of finer environmental consciousness.
Sometimes these critics write as if they return to timeless values, yet they
neglect discussion of the principles of inclusion in and/or exclusion of
.writers in the canon
Early writers are imaginedas Roderick Nash imagined Aldo Leopold
as "prophets." Major voices like Gary Snyder often are treated as gurus
or icons rather than as writers. Local writers are praised for their
provinciality under a claim for their "deep roots," thus further confusing
.life, genealogy, and literature
Narrative scholarship is fraught with dangers. These include: 1)
Such books are always turning into travelogue.55 2) Discussions of
environmental topics like fast food and organic farming are based more on
journalistic accounts than on rigorous scholarship, and are in danger of
being clichd. 3) Critical prose sometimes shifts to lessons on "the kind of
life worth living" that are testimonial, as when Elder takes Frost to be such
a model. Certainly historians, even Cronon, are not immune to this third
problem in narrative scholarship: "I think of a November evening long ago
when I found myself on a Wisconsin hilltop in rain and dense fog, only to
have the setting sun break through the clouds to cast an otherworldly
golden light on the misty farms and woodlands below, a scene so
unexpected and joyous that I lingered past dusk so as not to miss any part
of the gift that had come my way."56 There is always a danger of such
.prose seeming like sermonizing
science in a way not unlike Cronon's Changes in the Land, and it will
include critique of global paradigmsscientific and culturalas they fit in
.discussions of local place and possible future environmental outcomes
Ecocriticism must question more closely the nature of environmental
narrative, not simply praise it, as it has too frequently.61 Maybe it is
unreasonable to expect ecocritics to begin to treat historical narrative or
place as the poststructuralists like Hillis Miller or Stephen Greenblatt
do.62 Because of resistance to post-structural theory, ecocritical work is
more likely to look like Cronon's "A Place for Stories," but hopefully it will
reach beyond Cronon's strictly Aristotelian rationalism in the treatment of
narrative structure.63 Two examples of recent sophisticated theoretical
work are David Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism(2000), and
Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World (1996).64
Critiques and Controversies from Within ASLE
FOR SOME YEARS, ASLE has not been just about the discourse of
American wilderness, but there are still traces of these roots, as in ASLE's
motto, "I'd rather be hiking." The inclusion of people who would rather not
be hiking, but whose concerns ought to be the concerns of ASLE
precipitated a crisis in 1999. As a result, ASLE scholars are spending more
effort not simply on the literary language established by the wilderness
culture but also on the public language and discourse of environmental
issues as they appear in institutional contexts.65
and rural inequalities into conversation, and asks about the directions of
the causality of injustice. In one conversation, Terrell Dixon says, "I
emphasize that what we can call the toxicity chain is not only physical,
that the way we have degraded our environment, our own bodies and
those of other citizens, also creates a web of mistrust [and] deep divisions
along lines of class, ethnicity and gender."70 A good deal of ecocritical
work on so-called "urban nature" has as a result acquired clearer
focus.71 While not attempting a comprehensive view of globalization, these
critics speak of "proactive scholarship" that will empower those who are
.being affected by it
Among young scholars one sees special interest in these kinds of
cultural studies. As an example, Erica Valsecchi, of Italy, a graduate
student at the University of Nevada, Reno, focused for her M.A.
examinations on "Social Struggles in Nature: Exploring The Connections
between Environmental Justice and Environmental Literature:" "The link is
oftentimes obscured or understated on both sides by activists, engaged in
diverse environmental policies and campaigns, and by literary scholars,
involved in the reformulation of concepts of nature and redefinition of the
role of literary study in envisioning a responsible commitment towards the
environment." Valsecchi is keen to critique environmentalism from the
margin: "Stemming from marginalized cultures and traditions in the
United States and elsewhere, alternative views to typical
environmentalism are often labeled either as essentialist, 'feminine' and
environmental crisis. The crisis was and is real, and ecocritics proposed to
meet that crisis, using the skills that literary studies possess. At that
moment, simple and straightforward positions and strategies seemed
possible. Since then, the perceived dimensions of environmental crisis
have enlarged and spread from local to global. Scientists have responded
with ideas like island biogeography, terms like biodiversity, and disciplines
like conservation biology. Social activists have also responded with terms
like environmental justice, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. Using such
.terms puts critics inside specific arguments
I have said in years past that, "by definition,
ecological literary criticism must be engaged. It wants to know but also
wants to do. ... Ecocriticism needs to inform personal and political actions,
in the same way that feminist criticism was able to do only a few decades
ago."78 I have not changed this view, but have come to see its
.complications
One purpose of environmental literature, as literature, is to express
not just the joy of the wide-open spaces, but also what it feels like to be
"nuked" in southern Utah, be a victim of toxics, be deprived of an
ancestral place in the sun. The responsibility of ecocritics includes valuing
these experiences when they become literature. But literature also must
.bear scrutiny and make sense under the lens of interdisciplinary study
I have come to recognize more acutely the degree to which
informed political action requires taking advice from others with greater
lands and biological diversity. I consider that much of this work falls
almost exactly midway between environmental history and ecocriticism,
and I consider this a productive place for both literary scholars and
environmental historians to work. Of one thing I am certain: Good writing
is more effective and important for these purposes than bad writing, but
what is good is not such a simple matter. Books are tools for seeing the
world: Which tools help perception is a question to be answered partly by
.those who specialize in the literary structure of books
One begins literary analysis by decomposing texts into their
constituent parts. What goes into green writing that is indispensable? Part
of the goal is to recompose the writing. How can these elements be
composed more successfully, made more powerful, for the purposes of
making a better world? The role of the ecocritic is not only to celebrate,
but it is also not only to disassemble. The goal is to facilitate clearer
thinking about human transactions with environments, and to facilitate
better nature writing in the future. This role seems remarkably congruent
.with the role of environmental history
Perhaps Robert Johnson didn't have to sell his soul to the devil at the
crossroads to learn how to play that mean guitar. "Poor Bob," as Johnson
called himself in his song, went home and practiced. Ecocritical practice
will not be as enjoyable as we had once hoped, but it will determine what
.kind of music we make
Michael P. Cohen's books are The Pathless Way: John Muir and
American Wilderness (1984), The History of the Sierra Club 1892
1970 (1988), and A Garden of Bristlecone Pines: Tales of Change in the
Great Basin (1998). More recently he has embarked on a study of the
groundings of ecocriticism in the historically changing ideas of ecology,
evolutionary theory, and the politics of wilderness. He is a visiting
.professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno
Notes
.ASEH News 12 (Summer 2001): 2.1
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol .2
and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); William
H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in
the Winning of the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966);
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn.:
.Yale University Press, 1967)
Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience .3
and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North
.Carolina Press, 1975)
David Damrosch, Meetings of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton .4
.University Press, 2000), 126
Francisco: North Point Press, 1990) uses the language of Thoreau to place
.itself within a tradition
.See Kolodny, The Lay of the Land .13
Snyder, The Practice of the Wild; William Cronon, "The Trouble .14
with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1995), 6990; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Dana Phillips, The Truth of
Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (New York: Oxford
.University Press, 2003)
I discuss this issue in "Resistance to Wilderness,"Environmental .15
History 1 (1996): 3342. The term "real work" is used by Gary Snyder in
the poem "I Went Into The Maverick Bar," Turtle Island (New York: New
.Directions, 1974), 9
Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, .16
Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Harvard
.University Press, 2001), 129
See Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, "Introduction," in The .17
ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 19932003, ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott
Slovic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), xiiixxiii; and the ASLE
./website: http://www.asle.umn.edu
Lawrence Buell, "Letter," PMLA 114 (October 1999) 10901. This .32
and other letters are collected under the title "Forum on Literatures of the
.Environment," PMLA 114 (October 1999), 10891104
.Ursula K. Heise, "Letter," PMLA 114 (October 1999): 10967 .33
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken .34
Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987). One also could
include Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Ecological Expansion of
Europe, 9001900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and
many other historical and scientific studies to show the ubiquity of this
.kind of question
Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmodes, and John Toobey, The .35
Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture
(New York: Oxford 1992), 3148; Steven Pinker, Blank Slate: The Modern
Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002); Joseph Carroll, Evolution
and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1995); Robert
Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal; On the Biogenic Foundations of
Literary Representation (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
.1996)
George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in .36
Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Gillian Beer,
Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983); Raymond Williams,
The Country and the City (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Terry
Press, 2003); Corey Lewis, "'Reading the Trail,' Exploring the Literature of
.the Pacific Crest" (Ph.D. diss., University of Nevada, Reno, 2003)
Scott Slovic, "Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, .51
Contact," (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western
Literature Association, Salt Lake City, Utah, 58 October 1994), discussed
in Marshall, Story Line, 78. When asked, one literary-critic colleague at
".the University of Nevada will say, "All criticism is narrative
.Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home, 26, 237 .52
John Elder, Vallombrosa: Pilgrimage to Stewardship (Cambridge: .53
.Harvard University Press, forthcoming)
Richard White warned against this problem, that a vision of .54
"transcendent nature" might "wash away the boundaries that time
creates" in imagining "a universal language shared by author and
subject." "American Environmental History: The Development of a New
.Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review, 54 (1985): 297304
See the review of Peter Matthiessen's The Birds of Heaven: .55
Travels with Cranes: Richard White, "The Natures of Nature Writing,"
.Raritan 22 (Fall 2002): 14561
Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 86. I will spare the reader .56
.my own indulgences into this kind of narrative voice
Valsecchi's reading list and proposed questions for her M.A. .72
examination at the University of Nevada, Reno, included Adamson, Evans,
and Stein, The Environmental Justice Reader; Devon Pena, ed. Chicano
Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1998); Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and
Environmental Quality (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1990); Cronon,
Uncommon Ground; Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo: Chronicle of an
Acequia in Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1993); Jose Rivera, Acequia Culture: Water, Land, Community in the
Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Jimmie
M. Killingsworth and Jaqueline S. Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and
Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1992); Kerridge and Sammels, Writing The Environment; Gloria
Anzaldua, BorderlandLa Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt
Lute, 1987); Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek And Other Stories
(New York: Random House, 1991); and Val Plumwood, Environmental
.Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002)
.Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 138 .73
.Ibid., 185239 .74
Within evolutionary studies, Daniel Dennett, Consciousness .75
Explained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1995) have
gained some influence. Francisco J. Varella, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor
Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 241. John P. O'Grady, review of The .79
Truth of Ecology, ISLE 10 (Summer 2003): 2789; Scott Slovic, review of
.The Truth of Ecology, Orion 22 (September/October 2003): 756
Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," in Vincent B. Leitch, et .80
al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (1711, reprint; New
.York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), 442
See Donald Worster et al., "A Roundtable: Environmental .81
.History" Journal of American History 76 (March 1990), 10871147
http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/blues2/
Armbruster so aptly put it, "the time has come for ecocritics to review the
field critically and ask what directions it might best take in the future."[4]
.It is report card time
Ecocritical Ethics
In The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as
"the study of the relationship between literature and the physical
environment" (xviii)[5] and compares it with other activist methodologies
such as Marxist and feminist criticisms. The Ecocriticism Reader was the
first of its kind--an anthology of ecocritical essays devoted
to organizing an area of study whose efforts had, until the early 1990s,
not been "recognized as belonging to a distinct critical school or
movement" (xvi-xvii). Rather, as Glotfelty points out in the introduction,
many of the twenty-five essays collected in the reader had appeared
under headings as varied "as American Studies, regionalism, pastoralism,
the frontier, human ecology, science and literature, nature in literature,
landscape in literature" (xvii), and so on. Implied throughout the
introduction, and whispering behind almost every essay in the collection,
is the idea that "literary studies in an age of environmental crisis" (xv)
conceivably may do some good, may in some way ameliorate the crisis.
William Rueckert's essay, for example, compares biological and literary
activities, suggesting that poems, like plants, store energy from their
respective communities and that this energy can be used in the world
outside of where it is stored. The problem, in Rueckert's opinion, is in
figuring out how to turn the stored energy of literature into effective
political action in the real world. Sueellen Campbell's piece in the
collection is also concerned with effective and direct action, and her
identification of important similarities and differences between
poststructuralism and deep ecology argues that "both [literary] theorists
and ecologists ... are at core revolutionary" (127).[6]
In the same year that Glotfelty's collection came out, Lawrence Buell
published The Environmental Imagination, where he defines "'ecocriticism'
as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment
conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis" (430
n.20). Buell acknowledges that there is some uncertainty about what the
term exactly covers but argues that
if one thinks of it ... as a multiform inquiry extending to a variety of
environmentally focused perspectives more expressive of concern to
explore environmental issues searchingly than of fixed dogmas about
political solutions, then the neologism becomes a useful omnibus term for
subsuming a large and growing scholarly field. (430 n.20)
Buell's definition is valid, as far as it goes, and it continues both in
the increasingly interdisciplinary tradition of inclusiveness and making
.connections and in maintaining an ethical stand for effecting change
The 1998 collection entitled Reading the Earth goes a bit further and
is more specific in the matter of ethical commitment. As Michael P. Branch
,et al explain
Implicit (and often explicit) in much of this new criticism is a call for
cultural change. Ecocriticism is not just a means of analyzing nature in
literature; it implies a move toward a more biocentric world-view, an
extension of ethics, a broadening of humans' conception of global
community to include nonhuman life forms and the physical environment.
Just as feminist and African American literary criticism call for a change in
culture--that is, they attempt to move the culture toward a broader worldview by exposing an earlier narrowness of view--so too does ecological
literary criticism advocate for cultural change by examining how the
narrowness of our culture's assumptions about the natural world has
limited our ability to envision an ecologically sustainable human society.
(xiii)
In the following year, Michael Cohen asserts that "by definition,
ecological literary criticism must be engaged. It wants to know but also
wants to do. ... Ecocriticism needs to inform personal and political actions,
in the same way that feminist criticism was able to do only a few decades
ago."[7]
Like any recently born thing, ecocriticism is experiencing
tremendous growth and development in these early years of its existence.
In the short time since it first appeared as a movement, some of the initial
concerns that marked its inaugural moments have already been
answered. Given the veritable explosion of interest in the field, Glotfelty's
concern in 1996 with the traditional failure of the literary profession to
address "green" issues, for instance, now seems something of a non-issue.
important questions waiting for our answers about how literary theory
.might cause such changes
"Without Spinning Off": Balancing Theory And Practice
Although, as John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington correctly point
out in Reading Under the Sign of Nature, theory has taken the front seat in
early ecocritical writing (largely because theory, it seems, can authorize
and validate the approach), there are some misgivings about and distrust
of theory among ecocritics. Hence, we hear Tallmadge and Harrington
promising to give adequate theory but "without spinning off into
obscurantism or idiosyncrasy" (xv), and Lawrence Buell pledging to avoid
what he terms "mesmerization by literary theory" (111). Given that
ecocriticism is something that is supposed to change things, a healthy
scepticism toward theory of the sort that spins off madly or that
mesmerizes, theory that would, in a word, neuter ecocriticism, seems
.perfectly valid
Buell's approach, however, is to avoid the complexities of theory
entirely, it seems, and to bridge the gap between what he does, in fact,
acknowledge as a theoretical problem: the relationship between text on
the one hand and world on the other. He calls this bridge an "aesthetics of
dual accountability" (98), which will satisfy "the mind and the ethological
facts" (93). The way to achieve it, he maintains, is through a revival of the
claims of realism. "The claims of realism," he argues, "merit reviving ... so
as to enable one to reimagine textual representations as having a dual
estranged and disaffected subjects are concrete things that we can name
with increasing confidence, things that walk among (often as a threat to)
fully franchised subjects; and second, the terms themselves (by the very
fact that they offer a name) authorize discussion and description of
a recognized topic--"misogyny" is hatred of women; "racism," of racial
difference; "homophobia," of non-procreative sexualities; and "antiSemitism," of Jewishness and Jews. But what should we call a fear and
contempt for the environment? We have terms to describe what we
perceive as hostile geographies--Horace's terras domibus negata
(1.22.22),[17] for instance--but we do not have any terms describing the
mechanism for the fear that produces such environments. We have a
litany of terms to describe socially oppressive systems of thinking and the
social objects of fear and hatred they produce, but when the object is the
natural world, there is no single term with which we can begin an
organized and informed discussion. A term such as "ecophobia"[18] would
allow us to label fear and loathing toward the environment in much the
same way that the term "homophobia" marks fear and loathing toward
gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Admittedly, there is too much jargon
polluting the world of theory, but some kind of terminology and
theorization is necessary; otherwise, ecocriticism risks becoming just an
.empty buzzword
It is probably accurate to claim that no one has done more in
helping ecocriticism onto solid theoretical ground than Patrick D. Murphy,
whether or not we agree with his kind of theory. As Murphy complains, the
investigation.[24] Both often do very much the same work, but they are
not synonymous terms. Why no scholars have taken the time and effort to
explain the differences at length is, perhaps, a matter for some
speculation, but we may be certain that there are very real consequences
that we need to be aware of when we do consider the differences. One of
these consequences is that in drawing a distinction between ecocriticism
and ecofeminism, we immediately seem to establish an agonistic
discourse that sets ecofeminism and ecocriticism against each other as
competing voices, perhaps even as a sort of gender war writ small in the
rarefied airs of competing theoretical discourses. It is not an argument
that I particularly want to develop, since it is far less productive than
building on the strengths of each approach, looking at ways that they
complement each other, and working toward defining more fully what
each approach envisions. Another problem is that differentiating between
ecofeminism and ecocriticism lands us in a bit of a Catch-22: in choosing
ecofeminist approaches, we privilege the social; in choosing ecocritical
approaches, we subordinate feminism and make it a topic for inclusion
rather than a primary topic. Nevertheless, there remain unexamined
.differences between the two approaches
When Ynestra King argues that "in ecofeminism, nature is the
central category of analysis" ("Healing" 117), she is surely mistaken. Mary
Mellor explains that "although ecofeminists may differ in their focus,
sex/gender differences are at the centre of their analysis" (69; emphasis
added). Most ecofeminist scholars agree in the primacy of sex/gender
been done to any great degree relative to the work that has been done on
writing that has "environmentally focused perspectives," is that, from a
theoretical standpoint, the goals and visions of ecocriticism have been
fairly loose and inclusive. I do not mean to imply that this is a bad thing,
and, assuredly, "a vast amount of work," as Cheryll Glotfelty has
remarked, "remains to be done ... theoretical, activist-oriented, AND
thematic."[28] Moreover, examining nature writing is one of the things
ecocriticism does, and does well; but when nature writing constitutes the
sole purview of ecocriticism, the lack of diversity in the theoretical gene
pool, conceptual in-breeding, and a weakening of contacts with the wider
literary world will spell disaster for the approach. Focusing exclusively on
nature writing wrongly suggests an essential link between ecocriticism as
a methodology and nature writing as the object of its inquiry.
Thematicism, though it may provide an important base from which to
begin ecocritical discussions, cannot be the goal of informed ecocriticism.
Thematicism runs against the grain of ecocriticism. It buttresses "nature
studies" and ecological literary criticism, neither of which is, technically
speaking, ecocriticism. This point brings us back to the question: what is
?ecocriticism
Beyond
Images of nature, or aspects of the natural environment, have been
the topic of scores of treatises on such canonical favorites as Shakespeare
and Chaucer, but one might wonder at exactly what point cluster counting
Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum,
1995); Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Theory(New York: Continuum, 1991); and Donna J.
Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991). There is also a growing body of work that looks at
women and geography: Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits
of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land:
Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). A flurry of greatly diversified
discussion has recently appeared linking racism and fear and contempt for
the natural environment; see Buell 53-82; Gretchen Legler; Anna
Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989); Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism:
Lessons from the German Experience (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995); and
Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995). Discussions that draw links between ecophobia (see note 18)
and homophobia, on the other hand, are more difficult to locate; see
Barbara White, "Acts of God: Providence, the Jeremiad and Environmental
Crisis," in Writing the Environment, 91-109; and Greta Gaard, "Toward a
Queer Ecofeminism," Hypatia 12.1 (Winter 1997): 114-37. Links between
geographies of exclusion and dissident sexualities are raised by many of
the essays in David Bell and Gill Valentine, ed. Mapping Desire:
Geographies of Sexualities (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
which such criticism might found itself. The most promising recent gesture
vowing to link ecocritical approaches and Shakespeare texts came in
March 2001 in Toledo, Ohio at the "Ohio Shakespeare Conference." This
conference, entitled "The Nature of Shakespeare," took as its focus the
relationships between "Nature" and Shakespeare and showed a
remarkable openness to discussions that ranged far outside the
.thematicism that has so long dominated other similar discussions
On the very first page of her influential Gender, Race, [30]
Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1989), Loomba promises to talk about the "interlocking of these
various [race, class, and gender] structures of oppression" (emphasis in
original), and it is a promise that the rest of the book largely keeps. Queer
theory complicates the trinity of race, class, and gender by adding
another angle: sexual behaviour/identity. Any serious queer theory will
always look at issues of class or gender or race or all three of them.
Ecocriticism complicates the nexus of race, class, gender, and sexuality by
adding a new angle: views toward the natural world. My point here is a
simple one: oppressive social structures are often dynamically intertwined
with our views about the natural world. We know this intuitively when we
hear men equating women with nonhuman animals (bitch, cow, chick,
bunny, and so on); when we hear environmental behaviour defined in
violent sexual (usually heterosexual) terms (raping the land, ploughing the
virgin field); when we hear anti-Semites calling Shylock a dog, thirty-nine
times; when we hear the urban poor referred to as dirt; and so on. But if
we know these things on a gut level, being able to talk about them on a
.theoretical level is a completely different matter
Chaucer and the politics of nature," in Beyond Nature Writing, " [31]
.41
This essay originally appeared in a special ecocritical issue of
AUMLA: The Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and
Literature Association No. 96 (November 2001): 220-38. For further
information about this issue, please contact the AUMLA editor, Lloyd
Davis, at lloyd.davis@mailbox.uq.edu.au. Posted with permission to the
ASLE Web site. This article may not be published, reposted, or distributed
without permission from AUMLA .
http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocriticallibrary/intro/reportcard/
Nature 101
Gazing at crows, pondering Thoreau, counting the needles ofpines-it's all part of an academic adventure known asenvironmental studies.
by Joan Hamilton
On a balmy September afternoon, about a hundred students at one
of the finest public universities in the nation are gathered under a
sprawling Monterey pine. "What kind of tree is this?" a professor asks.
Silence. "How many of you don't know any more than that it's a tree?"
Most students raise their hands. They can converse knowledgeably about
chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone hole, but most can't tell a pine from a
fir, or even an oak. The professor is perturbed. "I don't think we have a
chance of changing our relationship to the natural world if you don't know
what's around you," he says. "The point is to pay attention."
It's the second week of environmental studies class at theUniversity
of California at Berkeley. In this brief venture outdoors, Professor Robert
Hass is trying to get these brainy kids away from abstractions so they can
really look at their surroundings. "They've read too much systems theory,"
he says. "They've learned to see the environment as diagrams and
feedback loops."
Back in the classroom, though, the genial former U.S. poet laureate
coaches and coaxes, respectfully eliciting student comments, finding
a particle of profundity in each. Hass teaches the literary half of the
course while pony-tailed Professor Greg Gilbert, an expert on forests and
fungi, teaches the science. The reading list includes everything from
fellowship and two National Book Critics Circle awards before he was
named poet laureate in 1995.
The title and the evocative descriptions of the Californialandscape in
Hass's first book, Field Guide, might land the slim volume on the
bookstore nature shelf. But his work encompasses far more than birds and
burnished hillsides. Hass is a "plein air poet" whose natural world includes
food and wine, film and painting, says playwright Brighde Mullins. "He
sharpens our senses on the whetstone of his noticing."
In one of his first lectures, Hass tries to ease the fears of those
unaccustomed to studying literature. Sometimes picking up a book can
feel like coming into a room at a party where you don't understand what
people are talking about, he explains. Knowing a little history can help.
Nature has played a central role in poems and stories spanning all of
human history. Nature was an intrinsic part of ancient Chinese, Japanese,
and Indian literature, as well as Western classics such as Homer's Iliad and
Odyssey, oral epics first written down in the 8th century B.C.
But none of these works is considered "nature writing" today. That
genre developed in the last couple of centuries in Europe and the United
States--an unintended by-product of the Industrial Age. Only when
mechanization began to sever our ties with nature did writers invent new
forms to try to repair the damage.
After Henry David Thoreau graduated from Harvard, he decided to
spend a couple of years in a cabin he built on the outskirts of Concord,
Massachusetts: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
The thoughts Thoreau penned in his journal became Walden, the book that
planted the seeds for the hardy new genre.
"It's hard for us to understand the originality of Walden," Hass says.
Romantic poetry had touched on the same themes of divinity in nature
and mechanization of society. Classic explorations like William Bartram's
1791 Travels (in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina) had cast just as
close an eye on the nonhuman world. But Walden offered a nature essay
that was more intensely personal than anything that had come before.
There are no Thoreaus in this California classroom (at least not yet),
but the students are keeping journals. They are supposed to write in them
every couple of days, to observe as accurately as scientists and as
creatively as poets. Word choice is crucial. A seemingly serviceable phrase
like "the bird sings," Hass explains, masks vast human ignorance about
bird behavior. That so-called singing could mean that humans have
invaded a bird's territory and it would like to peck their eyes out. A starling
sounds like a rusty hinge, but sloppy writers call that "singing" too.
The first week, students pick a plant and observe it for 30 minutes.
They draw the plant and describe it both scientifically and poetically.
Another week, they watch a bird for 5 minutes or so and describe its
doings. A robin reminds one student of a ping pong ball: "It seems to
bounce from one place to another so lightly." Another student spots a
crow: "I saw Corvus americanus perched on the branch of some tree. (Yes,
I don't know which tree! Don't laugh.)"
When he arrives for class with the new look, Hass walks over to admire it.
"My goodness," the poet says appreciatively, while
Professor Gilbert murmurs something about "growing ecological
consciousness." For David, who leads class field trips and writes papers on
fishery decline and the virtues of vegetarianism, environmental studies is
not just a step toward graduation. It's revolution--a way of thinking that
could change the world.
That puts David squarely in the nature-writing tradition. People may
not think of Thoreau as an activist. But "Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir
read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks,"
Hass says. "It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to
percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to
the land, or to beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation."
Sitting next to David in the section is Laura the aesthete, with
dreamy dark eyes and long dark hair. The class gives her inspiring
quotations for her calligraphy. When the students read "Daybreak,"
Galway Kinnell's poem about starfish moving across a muddy shore like
stars traversing the night sky, Laura declares, "That's beautiful!" A stern
English major interrupts: "We can't just say 'that's beautiful,' " she
reminds her.
Nature writing has a happy, wholesome aspect that gives it a bad
name in literature departments more accustomed to neurosis and angst.
The genre displays "a painfully limited set of responses," says novelist and
Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates: "Reverence, awe, piety, mystical
oneness." Hass will agree that there are some treacly and preachy tomes
"that offer moral uplift over science and reason and thought." He'll even
admit that "a lot of nature writing is predictable and not very instructive."
But, he adds, "you could say that about the writing in any genre." Good
nature writers, Hass says, "model whole new ways of seeing," through
meticulous, well-informed descriptions of the world and all its creatures.
Author Gary Nabhan has half-seriously suggested that what we now call
nature writing should simply be called "literature," while all the other
writing in recent decades should be called "urban dysfunctional writing."
By the first week in November, the class has taken two midterms.
On the first, they did better on the science than the literary portions. Hass
is initially gentle: "It takes time to learn what questions to ask when
reading literary texts." But he bristles when he finds that most students
haven't done the reading for the day's lecture. "You are brilliant students
at a great public university," he scolds. "You have got to do the reading.
This stuff is going to be in your hands for the next 50 years."
They had problems on the second test, too. "There were some
especially creative suggestions on the question about who the Secretary
of Interior is," Hass notes. "But I'd like to clarify: The answer is not Bill
Gates, Smokey Bear, or the guy Dave who does the Wendy's commercials.
And it is not Gifford Pinchot. At the moment we don't have a dead
Secretary of Interior . . . though it has been known to happen."
The assigned reading is voluminous and, at times, perplexing. To
help the class read Gary Snyder's Myths and Texts, Hass passes out
several pages of notes and offers this advice: "Don't be uptight about
understanding every little bit of it. Try to get the drift and the feel."
Written half a century ago by a man Hass calls "our best poet of nature,"
Myths and Texts uses techniques drawn from modernist art. There's
sometimes no clear narrative or argument on the page, but rather ideas
scattered like the parts of a collage. "I sit without thoughts by the logroad/ Hatching a new myth/watching the waterdogs/the last truck gone,"
Snyder writes in "first shaman song." In discussions, students seem to
enjoy spinning wild theories about the poet's intent. Snyder's "this poem
is for bear" mentions huckleberries and blackberries. Is the poem about
fertility? Fecundity? Feminism? The students never quite decide, but they
exhibit far more intellectual flexibility than author Jack Kerouac, who
reportedly told Snyder, "I know what all the words mean, but I don't know
what the hell you're saying."
By late November, the students no longer need Hass's help to
understand the conversations at the nature-writing party. With finals
approaching they have begun reading diligently and broadly, sampling
works written over a span of 150 years, including those of Henry David
Thoreau, John Muir, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Wallace
Stegner, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, Ann Zwinger,
Wendell Berry, and Barry Lopez. Finally the class picks up the most recent
work on the reading list, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, published in
1991. Refuge was an "instant classic," Hass says. Its naturalist author has
read all the books the class has read, and builds on them to offer
something new. She tells the story of her mother's struggle with cancer
("one of the most protracted deaths in modern literature," Hass admits) as
well as the tale of the catastrophic flooding of the Bear River Migratory
Bird Refuge in the 1980s. Set in Salt Lake City, the book is a deeply
personal human drama, yet takes nature's struggles personally, too. "It's a
new kind of writing that reflects a broader awareness," Hass says.
The reviews in class are mixed. "I like the autobiographical
approach," says one quiet young woman. "I think this is the most
impressive thing we've read." But some think the story of a drowning
marsh and a heart-warmingly functional Mormon family is too tame. A
young man grouses, "Why do we have to read this boring stuff?"
Hass is philosophical about such comments. "If you teach the
nitrogen cycle, you just expect the kids to know it," he says. "But teaching
literature is like planting seeds deep in the ground. You never know when
your work will bear fruit."
Inevitably, some literature classes turn into lessons on life. Hass
urges his students to build "strong dreams," to make sure their ideals will
stand up to reality. Should they, like Thoreau, build a cabin and live alone?
Shed technology and become hunter-gatherers? Become happy, humble
farmers? "We don't want to tell ourselves sentimental stories, get scar
tissue, and get cynical," he says. He quotes W. B. Yeats on the Irish: "We
had fed the heart on fantasies,/The heart's grown brutal from the fare."
A strong dream for an environmentalist of our era might be different
from the ideals projected in earlier nature writing, Hass suggests. "It
would have something to do with cities. And it would allow for difference-not just the current multiculturalism, which can turn in a second to vicious
ethnic rivalry, but in values that appeal to all different kinds of people."
Nature's Finest
Would you, too, like to study environmental literature? Here are a
dozen classics.
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, 1949
Half a century ago, this book introduced the idea that wolves are good
and a "land ethic" is essential. Its graceful prose still helps crystallize
thoughts for nature lovers today. "I am glad I shall never be young
without wild country to be young in," Leopold says. "Of what avail are
forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"
Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, 1991
A keen-eyed naturalist embraces adversity in this moving account of her
mother's battle with cancer and the Bear River Refuge's struggle against
the rising waters of theGreat Salt Lake. Even after losing what she loves,
Williams writes, "There is no place on earth I would rather be."
Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin, 1903
"To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in
and the procession of the year." A hardy early feminist makes a
harsh landscape on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada come alive
through spare, powerful prose.
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, 1968
With humor, reckless ranting, and loving descriptions of the desert,
"Cactus Ed" chronicles his stint as a seasonal ranger in Arches National
Park and makes a strong case for the preservation of all wild places: "We
have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls,
voiceless or mute, even the earthworms, even the shellfish and the
sponges, for those of us who speak our own language."
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, 1962
This book inspired a U.S. ban on DDT and added pollution to the
environmental agenda. Its lucid scientific lessons on the dangers of
pesticides conclude with a warning worth heeding today: "It is our
alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the
most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the
insects it has also turned them against the earth."
Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder, 1990
With Sierra Nevada dust on his boots, one of America's finest poets of
nature uses the essay form to explore how people learn to feel at home in
the places they inhabit. Though full of wisdom from around the world, the
book is at times as pleasantly personal as a good conversation. "Do you
really believe you are an animal? We are now taught this in school. It is a
wonderful piece of information: I have been enjoying it all my life and I
come back to it over and over again, as something to investigate and
test."
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, 1986
This learned history of the Far North probes the lives of narwhals, belugas,
polar bears, humans, and other life forms that have eked out a living in
this dazzling, difficult land. Of the Eskimos, Lopez says, "They have a
quality of nuannaarpoq, of taking extravagant pleasure in being alive; and
they delight in finding it in other people. Facing as we do our various
Armageddons, they are a good people to know."