Anne’s Reading Notes for Ecological Expression [1], Spring 2014
Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2002.
Introduction: environmental justice initiatives specifically attempt to redress the disproportionate incidence of environmental contamination in communities of the poor and/or communities of color...and to afford equal access to natural resources that sustain life and culture....illuminated hte crucial intersections between ecological an dsocial justice concerns (4).
Environmental justice movements call attention to the ways disparate distribution of wealth and power often leads to correlative social upheaval and the unequal distribution of enviornmental degradation and/or toxicity (5).
an expansion of the canon of environmental literature by focusing upon texts that incorporate racial, ethnic, class, and sexual differnces, and that emphasize intersections between social oppressions and envirionmental issues (9).
* Reed, T.V.,"Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism":
the field of ecocriticsm..has not often dealt seriously with questions of race and class....
June Jordan, "Poem About my Rghts":
I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thining about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence;
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
* Sze, Julie, "From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice":
Environmental justice is...a cultural movement interested in issues of ideology and representation....challenges the mainstream definition of environment and nature based on a wilderness/preservationist frame by foregrounding race and labor in its definition of what constitutes "'nature" (163).
Karen Tei Yamshita's novel Tropic of Orange...highlights the global geography of neoliberlism in the built and natural environment, including that of human labor (164).
Environmental justice defines the environment as a site where people live, work, and play...rejects hte mainstream representation of the enviornment--as green empty space--as ahistorical, classist and antiurban (165).
The setting of Tropic of Orange is the ultimate anti-"nature" locale--the streets and highways of Los Angeles..this novel traces the geography of...free trade...organized around international movement of goods and peoples...race and class conflict at thecneter....a city of domination and unequal power relations (167).
the "right" to the free movement of goods...is accompanied by the restricted movement of people, and xenophobia....The era of free trade has thrown traditional notions of place haywire (169).
The destabilization of what is real in the text is an escape of...a realist and singular interpretation of time, events, and peoples...the rejection of strict realism and temporality....The distinction beween the real or the metaphoric is negligible for Yamashita, who suggests that this boundary between real and unreal is somewhat arbitrary and limiting in its worldview (170).
This jumping between time periods enables the reader to understand the contemporary politics around free trade and globalzation in an ideological and historical context. The relationship of contemporary corporate domination cannot be seaprated from historical colonialism (171).
by rejecting a linear narrative of "development," El Gran Mojado shows what links the "archaic" and the "modern": the processes of commodification of land, labor, and life (172).
Yamashita paints a picture of life as a series of patterns and connections, of layers and linkages, connecting the weather with race: "Life is the prehistoric grid of plant and fauna and human beavior....the historic grid of land usage and property, the great overlays of transport...a thousand natural and man-made divisions, variations both dynamic and stagnant, patterns and connections by every conceivable defintion from the distribution of wealth to race,f rom patterns of climate to the curious blueprint of the skies"....
Yamashita is arguing against the idea that the expansion of corporate capitalism enables human freedom...the hyper-commodification of natural resources, land, and labor leads to chaos and destruction (174).
* Evans, Mei Mei, "Nature" and Environmental Justice:
a distinction between...nature--the entire realm of the actual living world--and Western cultural conceptions of (a mostly nonhuman) Nature...'nature' when referring to the great amorphous mass of otherness that encloaks the planet, and...'nature' when referring specifically to the sysem or model of nature which arose in the West several centuries ago (182).
When it is said that women are "by nature" maternal, that people of color are "naturally" more in tune with nature, or that it is "unnatural" for people of the same gneder to be sexually attracted to one another, what role is being assigned to nature? What is the work of culture, of human-constructed relations, that nature is being asked to perform in these equations? ....Evelyn White interrogates and complicates this conflation in her essay "Black Women and the Wilderness" (184).
Eddy Harris...as a black man seeking to enact a culturally sanctioned rite-of-passage for men in nature...encounters the same kinds of obstacles....[In] Mississipi Solo--A River Quest..."Jim" finally achieves narrative voice (187).
Complicating the ideas of nature-as-proving ground for U.S. American masculinity [is] William Haywood Henderson's 1993 novel Native ... founded on the premise that gay men in rural Wynoming risk both social ostracism and violence to their persons (189).
the hegemonic conept of Nature [is] a masculinist social constrction...racist and heterosexist as well....U.S. Nature is assumed to be a location removed from culture, a space that is open to alll, but one has only to look at what happens to those who are nto male, not white, and/or not straight when they attempt a transformative experience in nature to see what they risk....ask ourselves who gets to go there (191).
* Stein, Rachel, “Gender and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Barbara Neely’s Blanche Cleans Up (pp. 194-212).
Giovanna Di Chiro, “Sustaining the ‘Urban Forest’ and Creating Landscapes of Hope: An Interview with Cinder Hypki and Bryant ‘Spoon’ Smith (pp. 284-307):
What counts as “green”? Where is the “environment” located, and what does it contain? What are we trying to “sustain,” and for whom?
there can't be any broader structural change unless you have individual people who are able to have oportunites for..."self-development"...unless individals are self-confident enogh, unless they are literate in many different ways, uhless they have their basic needs met....I don't think we can transform broad political systems until we know we can transform a lttle bit of our own neighborhod....
* Chase, Steve, "Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies: Teaching Environmental Justice to 'Mainstream' Students." 350-367:
"we have focused on the symptoms, not the causes of biotic impoverishment. The former have to do with the vital signs of the planet. The latter have to do with the distribution of wealth, land ownership, greed, the organization of power, and the conduct of public business." (David Orr)
the professor suggested that the environmental movement is best understood as a continuing argument between...the romantic wilderness preservationism championed by Muir and...the pragmatic, professional approach to natural resource management supported by Pinchot.....I mentioned Mothers of East Los Angeles, a grassroots Chicana group that had successfuly blocked the construction of a giant incinerator project in their already polluted neighborhood....the professor said, "That's not an environmental group"....he dismissed the legitimacy of the enviormental justice movement...environmental problems were all too often discussed as if the human community were uniform...without differences in power or access to material influence (351-2).
seven key educational principles:
Principle 1: Start from Reality--all learning must be based on the needs, interests, experiences, and problems of the participants.
Principle 2: Activity--learning must be active
principle 3: Horizontal communication--dialogue, mutual respect
principle 4: Developing the ability to be critical
Principle 5: Promoting the development and expression of feelings
Principel 6: Promoting participation
Principle 7: Integration (of head, body and heart)
Baumgarten, Lothar. “The Origin of the Night: Amazon Cosmos [2]'' (1973-1977).
Beck, Ulrich. "The Cosmopolitan Manifesto [3]." The New Statesman. March 20, 1998.
a basis for a world citizenship places globality @ the heart of political imagination, action and organization
Brin, David. Earth. 1990.
Huge sci-fi novel set in 2038: an artificially created black hole has been lost in the Earth's interior;
large cast of characters; attempts to recover it before it destroys the planet.....
Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. 1968; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1979.
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury....He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight...."
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books, 1993.
"A sower went out to sow his seed...
We are Earthseed/The life that perceives itself/Changing."
Callenbach, Ernest. Ecotopia. 1975; rpt. Berkeley: Heyday, 2004.
ECO- from the Greek oikos (household or home)
-TOPIA from the Greek topos (place)
In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced. Barry Commoner.
People seem to be very loose and playful with each other, as if they had endless time on their hands to explore whatever possibilities might come up….there’s an awful lot of strong emotion, willfully expressed! (10).
We…must acknowledge all costs. Otherwise we could not hope to achieve the stable-state life systems which are our fundamental ecological and political goal (18).
…what matters most is the aspiration to live in balance with nature, “walk lightly on the land,” treat the earth as mother. No surprise that to such a morality most industrial processes, work schedules, and products are suspect! Who would use an earth-mover on his own mother? (29)
Ecotopians…have a secure sense of themselves as animals….they lie about utterly relaxed….almost like a bunch of cats. They….just seem to enjoy their bodies tremendously….I find myself envying them this comfortableness in their biological beings (30).
“Our system meanders on its peaceful way…like a meadow in the sun. There’s a lot of change going on….But the meadow sustains itself on a steady-state basis--unless men come along and mess it up (31).
“…we try to arrange it so we are not lonely very often. That keeps us from making a lot of emotional mistakes. We don’t think commitment is something you go off and do by yourselves...It has to have a structure, social surroundings you can rely on Human beings…need lots of contact” (32).
What was at stake…was nothing less than the revision of the Protestant work ethic…the profoundest implications of the decreased work week were philosophical and ecological: mankind…was not meant for production….humans were meant to take their modest place in a seamless, stable-state web of living organisms, disturbing that web as little as possible….The deadly novelty…was..that economic disaster was not identical with survival disaster for persons….a catastropic decline in the GNP (which was…largely composed of wasteful activity anyway) might prove politically useful. (43-44).
Cage, John. "Overpopulation and Art." Composed in America. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman. The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
abOut 1948 or 50 the number of people
liVing
all at oncE
equaled the numbeR who had ever lived at any time all added together
the Present as far as numbers
gO
became equal to the Past
we are now in the fUture.....
the deAd
are iN the minority
they are outnumbereD by us who're living
whAt does this do to
ouR
way of communicaTing....
our problems
are not Various
thEy
aRe identical
the Purifying
Of water'n'air
the Provision
of noUrishing food
the deLivery of it to
plAces where
iT
Is needed
Or just desired
the providiNg of shelter
the Availability
of ENergy
wherever it is neeDed
we hAve
these pRoblems in common
we can solve Them all best
withOut thinking
of the diVision
of thE
woRld
into 153 seParate powers
mortally destrUctive....
the planet has becOme
a single Person....
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Prologue: In Medias Res:
"The Imam and the Indian," an autobiographical tale by Amitav Ghosh, is a parable for many problems I grapple with in this book. It tells of the encounter between an ethnographic fieldworker and some disconcerting inhabitants of an Egyptian village.
"When I first came to that quiet corner of the Nile Delta I had expected to find on that most ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn't have been more wrong. The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers ina transit lounge. Many of them had worked and traveled in the shiekdoms of the Persian Gulf, others had been in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, others to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of them had passprots so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas....
And none of this was new: their grandparents and ancestors and relatives had travelled and migrated too, in much the same way as mine had, in the Indian subcontinent--because of wars, or for money and jobs, or perhaps simply because they got tired of living always in one place....The waderlust of its founders had been ploughed into the soil of the village: itseemed to me sometimes that every man in it was a traveler...."
Everyone's on the move and has been for centuries; dwelling-in-travel.
Routes begins with this assumption of movement....The general topic...is a view of humn location as constituted by displacement as much as by stasis....[In] many common assumptions about culture...authentic social existence is...centered in circumscribed places....Dwelling was understood to be the local ground of collective life, travel a supplemt; roots always precede routes. But...practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings....Intercultural connection...has long been the norm....dwelling demands explication. Why, with what degrees of freedom, so people stay home?
Devi, Mahasweta. Imaginary Maps. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge, 1995.
"For all the indigeous peoples of the world."
The Author in Conversation:
History and fact first.
The tribal population of India is about one-sixth of the total population fo the country...India belonged to these tribals long before the incursions of the Aryan-speaking peoples. The Ramayana...seems to contian evidence of how they were oppressed, evicted from their homeland, and then forced to occupy the lower reaches of the mainstream culture. Bits of their old culture can still be glimpsed....
The modern tribal does not know the word "orphan," because it is their communal obligation to bring up a child....They had no sense of property. There was communal land holding because...they...believed that land and forest and river belong to everyone....
So "Pterodactyl" wants to show what has been done to the entire tribal world of India....it was like a continent. We did not try to know it....what potential has survived in them through all these centuries....In their blood there is so much patience, it is like nature. Patience of the hills, of the rivers, the tribal contains everything....
The pterodactyl is prehistoric. Modern man...does not know anything about it. There is no point of communication with the pterodactyl. The pterodactyl cannot say what message it has brought....
Our double task is to resist "development" acively and to learn to love.
Translator's Preface:
when we engage profoundly with one person, the responses come from both sides: this is responsibility and accountability. We also know that in such engagements we want to reveal and reveal, conceal nothing. Yet on both sides there is always a sense that something has not got across....In this sense the effort of "ethical singularity" may be called a "secret encoutner"....this encounter can only happen when the respondents inhabit something like normality....This is why ethics is the experience of the impossible...For a collective struggle supplemented by the impossiblity of full ethical engagement...in this..sense of the impossiblity of "love" in the one-on-one way for each human being--the future is always around the corner....
When the subaltern "speaks"...and gets into the structure of responsible (responding and being responded to ) resistance, he or she is or is on the way to becoming an organic intellectual....
"Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," pp. 95-196:
What does it want to tell? We are extinct by the inevitable natural geological evolution. You too are endangered. You too will become extinct....The collective being of the ancient nations is crushed. Like nature, like the sustaining earth....Have you come up from the past to warn us...it is a crime to take away the forest and make the forest-dwelling peoples naked and endangered?....It wants to say something, to give some news, Puran does not understand. No point of communication. Nothing can be said or written (57-158).
Afterword:
"If read carefully," Mahasweta says in conversation, "'Pterodactyl' will communicate the agony of the tribals...."[Mahasweta] leaves too much unsaid. Not everyone can understand her point of view"....the colloquial language takes away the project of an intellectual....What Mahasweta asks for is [attention, concentration] on our part, of the First Nation....an attentive reading of her texts permits us to imagine an...undivided world....such a permission can be earned only by way of attention to the specificity of these writings....I have...attempted to open...remote and secrete encouters with singular figures; to bear witnes to the specificity....
the stories in this volume are not only linked by the common thread of profound ecological loss, the loss of the forest as foundation of life, but also of the complicity...of the power lines of local developers with the forces of global capital....
large-scale mind change is hardly every possible on grounds of reason alone....What we are dreaming of here is...how to construct a sense of sacred Nature which can help mobilize a general ecological mind-set beyond the reasonable and self-interested grounds of long-term global survival.
The pterodactyl is not only the ungraspable other but also the ghost of the ancestors that haunts our present and our future. We must learn "love" (a simple name for ethical responsibility-in-singualrity), as Puran does in "Pterodactyl," in view of the impossibility of communication...
the inter-nationality of ecologiical justice...cannot be reached by invoking any of the so-called 'great" religions of the world, because the history of their "greatness" is too deeply imbricated in the narrative of the ebb-and-fow of power....we must learn to learn from the original practical ecological philosophers of the world, through the slow, attentive, mind-changing (on both sides), ethical singularity that deserves the name of "ove"...this relationship, a witnessing love and a supplementing collective struggle, is the relationship between..."literary" writing and...."activism"....One filling the other's gap....
Inside the frame is a story of funeral rites....For the modern tribal Indian the pterodactyl is the soul of the ancestors....This burial...situated in a community of longing....Puran...steps away from the narrative of this tale, but into action within the post-colonila new nation. "A truck comes by. Puran raises his hand, steps up."
Dixon, Terrell F, Ed. City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2002.
Introduction: Gary Snyder observes that "wildness" is not limited to the 2 percent of U.S .territory that has been set aside as formal wilderness areas. "Shifting scales," he argues, "it is everywhere....deer mice on the back porch, deer bounding across the freeway, pigeons in the park, spiders in the corners...."
urban nature has figured most often as an...oxymoron...discussions about urban nature have most often had a narrow focus on human health....We continue to act as if...urban ills can be seen as existing apart from our disregard of urban nature (xi).
the dominant tradition in American nature writing...inherited a distatste fo thte city from European romanticism....attempts to improve our cities...do not..counter the traditional belief that real nature stops at the city limits sign....Urban land has monetary value...the pressure to commodiy and develop any "empty," i.e., natural, space also grows (xii).
With more than 80 percent of Americans now living in cities, it has become increasingly clear that any viable future environmentalism will need to be fostered within urban areas....our cities are place-based....the varied locals...not only shape them differently but also provide different kinds of weather, flora, and fauna (xiii).
urban nature is more broadly accessible than rural nature and wilderness areas...and often exists on a much smaller scale....urban nature writing also seems to generate humor and comic awareness more frequently than its wilderness coutnerparts....there is also often less focus on the new and more focus on...repeated acquaintance and familiarity....The emphasis is less on self-reliance...there is instead often an awareness of mutuality and interdependence. Solitude is also a less common feature....urban nature...connects to a sense of community such a working with neighbors in a community garden (xiv).
* Cisneros, Sandra, “The Monkey Garden,” The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage, 1989. pp.94-98 (rpted pp. 164-167).
the garden began to take over itself...Things had a way of disappearing in the garden
….we went there. far away from where our mothers could find us....
We liked to think the garden could hide things for a thousand years....
I wanted to be dead, to turn into the rain, my eyes melt into the ground like two black snails.
The garden that had been such a good place to play didn’t seem mine either.
* Deming, Alison Hawthorne, "Claiming the Yard":
A yard, anywhere, is an expression of one's relationship with nature, a curious border zone between the wild and the domestic in which we invite nature to come close, but not too close. Nature does not belong in he house. We buy chemical products to keep our space clear of fungi, molds, bacilli, mites, and fleas. Plants can come inside, if they are content to live in pots. We seal basement windows and crawl spaces....And, when a crusty cockroach or lacy newt crawls out of the drain into our kitchen sink, we are shocked at its lack of respect of the border we've drawn. The shaping and ordering of the yard is a warning to nature: here dwells human will (p. 246).
I'm among the first to claim our species would be better off if we had a closer relationship with nature--one of understanding rather than exploitation. But...there are limits to the claim. We may need to be close to the sustaining power of the land...But we need also to distance ourselves from nature--from the random forces that would wreck our health and homes; from the microbial upstarts that would colonize our blood; and from certain tendencies of mind, which are only natural, such as the lust for killing....Indeed it seems that the three things most troubling to us--violence, sex, and death--all speak of our (248)
struggle with our animal nature. Our relationship with nature, both inside our bodies and outside in our yards, is as complicated as our intimate tangles with one another. I guess that's why we like to tame nature by thinking of it as something out there that we can vist on the weekend to improve our frame of mind.
Time to cut back the overgrowth again, to stake my claim for order and beauty against the chaos of nature's profusion. While I'm out there whacking and hoeing, puling up and pruning, cutting down one plant so another will thrive, I'll remember how good that work feels. I get a little crazy when my hands are out of dirt for too long, like my house cats, who climb the windows and walls if I don't let them out to do some killing (249).
* Pyle, Robert Michael, "The Extinction of Experience":
Protection almost always focuses on rarity as the criterion for attention...[but] local extinctions matter....the loss of neighborhood species endangers our experience of nature....one of the greatest causes of the ecological crisis is the state of personal alienation from nature in which many people live (261).
When streams are rescued from the storm drains, they are said (delightfully) to be "daylighted" (263).
But nature reserves and formal greenways...invite a measured, restricted kind of contact....There need to be places that are not kid-proofed, where children can do damage....we all need spots near home where we can wander off...where no interpretive signs intrude....For these purposes, nothing serves better than the hand-me-down habitats that lie somewhere between formal protection and development. Throwaway landscapes...the "unofficial countryside"...those ignominious, degraded, forgotten places that we have discarded, which serve nonetheless as habitats for a broad array of adaptable plants and animals...the secondhand lands....Organisms inhabiting such Cinderella sites are surprisingly varied, interesting, and numerous. They are the survivors, the colonizers, the generalists--the so-called weedy species...What, to a curious kid, is less vacant than a vacant lot? Less wasted than waste ground? (264).
If the penalty of an ecological education is to live in a world of wounds, as Also Leopold said, then green spaces like these are the bandages and the balm. And if the penalty of ecological ignorance is still more wounds, then the unschooled need them even more (267).
* Wicinas, David, "The Dark Constable":
I have always loved a natural disaser...the world spins on, unhindered by human delusions (274).
In olden days the owl was sometimes dubbed "the constable from the dark land" because...it called for souls (275).
...when it comes to Nature, I don't set hte agenda...The Earth has just told me, "I am not your therapist."
Natue isn't here t help us or to hinder us. Natue just is.
Thinking Nature can heal me probably shows as much folly on my part as the structural engineer who proclaims a building to be "earthquake safe"....ultimately we are merely tenants on this planet...Nature is not here to serve us. The system spins along with a momentum far beyond human...consciousness (276).
* Dick, Leslie, "Nature Near":
The Strathmore apartments of Richard Neutra were very beautiful....But the desert dweller had been in her bathroom, it was in her house....(278, 285).
Neutra believed in undoing the architectural dichotomy between inside and outside. He thought the home and the garden should interpenetrate, he thought nature should be near, nature should enter the domestic space.
Nature entered with a vengeance, rupturing the surface of her body, learing a gaping wound, an opening to the outside. The damage ot her body was catastrophic....She understood the dark logic of Los Angeles architecture, its misleading, deceptive promise of sunshine and health. Earthquakes and the desert: Natura's houses are flexible, they give when there's a quake....She understood Los Angeles: under the surface it was malevolent desert and terrifying earthquakes, it was lethal. She understood it in a way she wouldn't have without the gift of the Neutra house, the dark secret of the brown recluse (286).
Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, Eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996.
* Campbell, SueEllen. "The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet."124-136.
...the most comprehensive and most important shared premise of post-structuralist and ecological theory. Both criticize the traditional sense of a separate, independent, authoritative center of value or meaning; both substitute the idea of networks.
One often-cited source for this idea is the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Suassure, who argued that meaning in language is created by relationship (by similarity, continguity, difference, and so on), rather than by a direct connection between a word and what it means. Theory takes this argument and broadens it to apply to all kinds of structures and meanngs....the concept of intertexuality also depends on the sense of networks....no text contains all of its own meaning.
With the questioning of stable centers in physics, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and literary criticism, not surprisingly, we also find theory re-examining the idea of the human being as a coherent and self-contained self....Here Frued is important...and Marx...and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan....
In ecology, the replacement of centers with networks is closely connected with...the complicity of the human observer...As Arne Naess says, "Organisms are knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations"....
Perhaps the most important idea that follows from this premise is that human beings are no longer the center of value or meaning...."From the biosphere's perspective, the whole point of Homo sapiens is their armpits, aswarm with 24.1 billion bacteria"...
...ecology insist that we pay attention not to the way things have meaning for us, but to the way the rest of the world--the nonhuman part--exists apart from us and our languages. It's central to this insistence that we remember..."that the world is much greater and older than normal human perception of it....that the human is a participant as well as a perceiver in the ancient continuum of bears and forests." The systems of meaning that matter are ecosystems....
theory is right...that what we are depends on all kinds of influences outside ourselves, that we are part of vast networks, texts written by larger and stronger forces. But surely one of the most important of these forces is the rest of the natural world....
According to theory...we begin to experience ourselves as separate...from our mothers' bodies..at the moment we enter into the network of language....At the core of our sense of self, then, is our feeling of loss.and the desire for unity that is born of loss....Ecologists also see an experience of lost unity and a desire to regain it as central to our human nature. They are more likely, though, to see it as coming from our separation from the natural world....Desire, for ecology, goes beyond the human.
....theory helps me to step back from myself, to think about desire...But it is in nature writing--perhaps almost as much as in the wilderness itself--that I learn to recognize the shape and force of my own desire to be at home on the earth.
* Slovic, Scott. "Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology: The Interiority of Outdoor Experience." 351-370.
"'...to write about nature is to write about how the mind sees nature, and sometimes about how the mind sees itself'....[nature writers] are students of the human mind, literary psychologists. And their chief preoccupation...is with the psychological phenomenon of 'awareness'....By confronting 'face to face' the separate realm of nature, by becoming aware of its 'otherness,' the writer implicitly becomes more deeply aware of his or her own dimensions and limitations of form and understanding, and processes of grappling with the unknown....The facile sense of harmony, even identity, with one's csurroundings....would fail to produce self-awarenss of any depth of vividness. It is only by testing the boundaries of self against an outside medium....that many nature writers manage ro realize who they are and what's what in the world....Geoffrey Hartman [says]..."'The elemnet of obscurity, related to nature's self-concealment, is necessary to the soul's cpacity for growth, for it vexes the latter toward self-dependence'....the very mysteriousness of nature contributes to the independence and ,presumably, the self-awareness of the observer....One of the major issues of [Thoreau's Journal]...is whether there is...a 'correspondence' between the inner self and the outer world, between the mind and nature....Although we may generally feel certainty when we perceive external reality, we are actually making...'best guesses'.....[some nature writers] tend to place special emphasis on the startling, sometimes ever desperate, unpredictability of the natural world.....'If we are to devise an enlightened plan for human activity...we need a more particularized understanding of the land itself....The goal of the writer...is to nourish the reader's awareness of the world'....awareness is a condition which helps us to act responsibly and respectfully....elevation of consciousness may lead to wholesome political change...but literature is also concerned...with interior landscapes, with the mind itself."
Gowdy, Barbara. The White Bone. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998.
narrated from the perspective of elephants (who are very human, in naming one another, etc.)
"The Links may well be infinite" (visionary sees he can't see them all...)
Guha, Ramchandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman, 2000.
"...in India I had imagined environmentalism to be principally a question of social justice, of allowing the poor to have as much claim on the fruits of nature as the powerful. But ...the United States...shifted attention away from humans towards the rights of plants, animals and wild habitats" (x).
"Back-to-the-land, scientific conservation and the wilderness idea constitute three generic modes of envionmentalism" (6).
"....industrialization as the generator of environmentalism" (7).
"Deep Ecologists'...critics accuse it of misanthropy and of a peculiar blindness of its own, which ignores environmental degradaiton outside the wild and the human suffering that is its consequence. Deep Ecologists are charged...for ignoring the problems of social inequality....The critics of Deep Ecology draw attention to...the environmental justice movement. Where the nerve-centers of Deep Ecology are in the wild, environmental justice is firmly rooted in human habitations" (87).
Haupt, Lyana Lynn. Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.
Crows and Kairos:
We all experience such times--don't we?--when our guarded separateness breaks down....my ongoing education in the close-to-home wild....such work does not have to be dour...or accomplihsed only out of morla imperative...or fear....Our actions can rise instead from a sense of rootedness, connectedness, creativity, and delight. But how are we to attain such intimacy, living at a remove from "nature," as most of us do...?...pay loving attention to the places we live, to understand their intricate net of connecitons with the wider earth....wilderness experiences are both restorative and essential....But...it is in our everyday lives...that we eat, consume energy, run the faucet, compost, flush, learn and live. It is here, in our lives, that we must come to know our essential connection to the wilder earth, because it is here, in the activity of our daily lives that we most surely affect this earth....no matter where we dwell, or how, our lives are implicted in, and informed by, all of wilder life.....The spread of human-made habitations...has pressed humans an dcrows into unprecedented nearness.....The conspicuous presence of a native wild animal...can lend a great deal to our biological education.....Crows are wild beings in our midst, evn as they point to the wildness that we cannot see and have lost....
1) Getting Up: A Reluctant Crow Watcher
there is no place...that humans have left untouched; and there is no place that the wild does not, in some samll way, proclaim itself....We are, at all times, both at once.
2) Preparing: A Crash Course for the Urban Naturalist
I want to cocreate and inhabit a nation of watchers, of naturalists-in-progress...all sharing in the effort of watching, knowing, understanding, protecting, and living well alongside the wild life with whom we share...our earth.
3) Reading: Crow Stories and Animal Alphabets
4) Walking: The Wildness of Home
if we want to know the earth....walking is a necessary practice.
5) Dwelling: How We Nest
6) Helping: An Uncertain Grace
7) Seeing: The Monk, the Professor, and the Sense of Wonder
8) Coexisting: Finding our Place in the Zoopolis
9) Dying: Crows of Death and Life
10) Flying: Wings, Reality, Hope
Hogan, Linda. Power. New York: Norton, 1998.
I wonder why it is the animals and birds show us an mercy at all, why I have ever felt safe from them. I wonder, too, why they stay near or help us….the animals used to help the humans…they would teach them the plants that were healing, sing songs for them to learn….would show the people the way to renew the broken world (28-29).
I hear only the roaring voice of the storm. All nature is against us. It falls down on us. It throws itself at us. And I say, “God!” calling out to what has never heard me before, because through the dark air of this storm, [the ancient tree] Methuselah falls and I hear nothing but only see that what has lasted this long is being taken down now as if it were nothing, as if it had never been anything that counted. This tree planted by the Spanish, conceived on another continent….And then, after what seems like days, after the muddy, racing water, after the roaring voice of the storm has spoken, passed judgment, it turns and runs away, the wind lets up and the ground breathes a sigh of relief that the storm is ending….(37-38).
I feel watched. By nature, I think now. It’s what I felt watching me, all along. It knows us. It watches us. The animals have eyes that see us. The birds, the trees, everything knows what we do (59).
One moment I think she is a stranger…I don’t know her anymore. She is a stranger to her own self, too….Then we are again in the thick trees, in deep, ragged cover, fireflies clustered in the brush and the blackness. Their lights are beautiful and summoning, calling us forward into near silence, into what looks like a starred universe in movement that is not orderly (61).
What once seemed solid looks like nothing more than broken toothpicks. Human creations don’t hold a candle to wind. That’s how I now something is greater than human will. …I feel better seeing how small we are. I makes me think that all our crimes against the world will be undone in just one rage of wind or flood (99-100).
it seemed the world was turned over…the world does things on its own. It kills them…Every last thing. It creates destruction so that it can go on….the very earth had slipped on its side (126).
Their lives are too narrow and brief for her…She has rarely been in the bleached and tamed confines of their world…. I think of everything I have learned so far in my life. I’ve learned time, history, division and subtraction, sentences and documents that were lies. That I have learned the wrong things settles down beside me and I want to weep. I think of the direction of the past. The records and histories that dwell in roads made of fossils. The past is distinct here. It has left traces everywhere. It’s beneath us, a shadow, and its direction leads down…with the unwatched beginnings of life. What do these people call life and what can I tell them…that in the swamps that surround them, their houses, their children, an older world exists…? (130-131).
…one day Ama said to me, “See this earth here, this ground here? See those flat yellow rocks? Those are teeth of a larger thing. We live in the mouth of something,” she said, “I don’t know what it is. All I know is we’re small as weevils” (135-136).
Story, I think. It’s all any of them want, the court, my friends, as if there’s a part in it they need or have to have (147).
Back in the days of the first people, the beginning of the wind was the first breathing of one of the turbulent Gods, they say. This God’s name was Oni….Oni, first and foremost, is the word for wind and air. It is a power every bit as strong as gravity as strong as a sun you can’t look at but know is there. It tells a story. Through air, words and voices are carried. Usually, it is invisible. Only today I can see it. It is moving shadows. Its hands are laid down on every living thing….In the presence of air, every living thing is moved…it is everywhere at once…It is a breathing, ceaseless God, a power known and watched over….it passes through us, breathed and spoken and immortal. It is what brings us to life…Because of this, there is no such thing as emptiness in our world, only the fullness of the unseen. It is the sea of creation we live inside (178).
…the laws of nature were in place from the beginning of earth, before the first breathing and stirring of people….There were certain powers, customs, and ways that humans were meant to live by. There was an order…a mystery of how every single thing worked together with the rest, merged and fitted like it was all one great body….Rules obeyed even by stars and sun….our every act, word, and thought is of great significance in the round shape of this world and there are consequences for each….we do not have the right to live in any way we desire; our ways was made for us out of clay (183).
Ama…believes….that animals are the pathway between humans and gods. They are one step closer to the true than we are. She says skin was never a boundary to be kept or held to; there are no limits between one thing and another, one time and another. The old stories live in the present….For Ama the other world is visible. It lives beside us in trees and stones…time is not a straight line (188-189).
it must be hard for [Mama] to bear, that I am becoming so fully another person, that my skin, made of her skin, is a boundary that closes her out and now she wants in (211).
All along I’ve lived in their world with order and cleanliness and the many other instruments of despair…And now I want no share in it. I have just been born (212).
Ama calls it time sickness, a disease of this time and world. Everyone missing life in their hurrying. But maybe the world exists in layers and all time is here at once (215).
It is true that I’m an unknown. Like in algebra, I am the x to be determined in the formula, and I…wish…that I’d only imagined all of the things that have happened…lives lived to the precise line of what a person is supposed to do (216-217).
…this earth, the swamp, it’s the same thing as grace, full of …intelligent souls….I am stronger in nature. There is something alive here and generous….A presence, peaceful and strong. Naked and revealing….I’ve lived a narrow life so far, I’ve lived by fear and the loss of what was beautiful and strong. But at the end of the road is a different story (231).
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937; rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1978.
The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light....They sat in compnay with the others...their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God...the wind and water had given life to lots of things that folks think of as dead and given death to so much that had been living things (236).
Kerridge, Richard and Neil Sammells, Eds. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. London: Zed Books, 1998.
Introduction: The environmental crisis is elusive....Much of it is solidly quantified....Environmental questions are large-scale and long-term....Environmentalism seems to be about contemplating the vast and infinite....Environmental issues take on the role of a 'repressed', which is frequently pushed out of sight and which always returns. Deferment alternates with occasional rushes of panic. Slavoj Zizeck...gives a pschoanalytical account of our difficulty in placing these issues...."the crisis is radical not only because of its effective danger...What is at stake is our most unquestionable presuppostions,...our everyday understanding of 'nature' as a regular, rhythmic process....Hence our...disavowal..."I'm not really prepared to integrate it into my symbolic universe....."
two other common responses. One is obsessional...the committed activist, incessantly driven by the senses of crisis...
The third reaction...is to interpret...ecological disaster...[as] a punishment for human transgression; the necessary consequence of going too far....
Zizak: "the only proper attitude is that which fully assumes..the irreducible gap separating the real from its modes of symbolizaion"...By 'the real',Zizek means that which defies, and is not contained by, representation...that which disrupts representation...the radioactive particles released byt he Chernobyl explosion...symbolize the whole ecological crisis....
The real, material ecological crisis...is also a crisis of representation. The inability of political cultures to address environmentalism is in part a failure of narrative....Writing the Environment...sets out to examine this diversity...to explore the pleausres of a cultural environmentalism which not only encompasses restrictions and limits, but also desire, sensation, release....
The challenge environmentalism poses to literature is this: show how it feels, here and now. Dramatize the occurrence of large events in individual lives. Make contact bwteen the public and the personal....
Green politics cannot easily be, like feminism, a politics of personal liberation and empowerment. Often it seems to be the reverse: a politics insisting on restrain and self-denial, the curbing of consumption and pleasure....
"the 'green tradition ...ambiguous ...environmentalism has had fascist and colonialist forms, as well as radical and humanitarian....But most urgenty...the claim of contemporary environmentalism is that the present crisis is different, unprecedented....the contemporary movement...expresses a new perception of the relationship between human practices and the material world.
An ecological perspective strives to see how all things are interdependent, even those apparently most separate. Nothing may be discarded or buried without consequences....local ecosystems...all are subject to the global ecosystem, a totality which excludes nothign and can be rid of nothing. This makes environmentalism a vital testing-ground for relations between post-colonial pluralism and new 'globalization'. In some of its versions, environmentlaism is undoubtedly in conflict with postmodernism's hostility to grand narratives and insistence on pluralism, irony and the autonomy of small narratives....
a British perspective has to accomodate...the identificaiton of rural life with feudalist traditions and hierarchies, in opposition to urban capitalism and its forms of social mobility....
I. Ecocritical Theory
* Campbell, SueEllen, "Magpie" (pp. 13-26):
magpies...make their living as generalists.They forage, hunt and gather; they are opportunists and scavengers....Magpies, I think, make good role-models for critics, teachers and students in the ways they embody the advantages of being inquisitive, of foraging, of building something new out of apparently unrelated scraps. They may make particularly good models for ecological writers and critics. Seeking to inhabit similarly marginal spaces between human and wild, in our explorations of new critical territory we too might well thrive on an eclectic and improvisatory appetite. Magpies, we might say, ask lot of questions....In my classes, we keep our questions focused ont he material we've all read. Alone, I forage much further....I try to keep my peripheral vision sharp, since it's usually the glint of what I'm not looking for that raises the best questions, and I guard my status as amateur and sampler....
[cf. Tim Burke's site, "Easily Distracted": http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/ !... ask students to select a model of themselves as eco-critics,
and put it up on Serendip as their avatar...by semester's end, they can add to/vary it, by also selecting a banner to "represent" their portfolio = accumulated habits of mind]
* Head, Dominic, "The (Im)possibility of Ecocriticism" (pp. 27-39):
the rejection of metanarrative and grand theory in postmodernist expression is accompanied by a more egalitarian combination of discourses, a mode of expression which creates the possiblity of grass-roots micropolitics in which previously marginalized voices can be heard.....prescriptions for the best action, from an ecological perspective, are necessarily provisional, continually refashioned...The Green movement in general is predicated on a typically postmodernist deprivileging of the human subject.
The first...of Buell's checklist of the ingredients of 'an environmentally oriented work'...is that 'the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framng device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.' One can think of very few novels in which this principle is sustained throughout....it is hard to conceive of the novel as a genre reinventing itself in this way.
* Murphy, Patrick D. "Anotherness and inhabitation in recent multicultural American literature" (pp. 40-52):
The concept of the...Absolute 'Other', founded upon notions of permanent incompleteness and prematurity, communicative incomensurability and binary constructs is...largely an illusion And its continued acceptance is a dangerous reification that protects much of the Western dominant hierarchical power relations that its use has been designed to dismantle. Ecology and ecocriticism indicate that it is time to move towards a relational model of 'anotherness' and the conceptualization of difference in terms of 'I' and 'another', 'one' and 'another', and 'I-as-another'....What we find repeatedly is the construct of alientated Other being used to repress or supress the relationship, the anotehrness, between groups in order to objectify an didstance one group...from another in the service of some form of domination.
Bakhtin claims that 'an indifferent or hostile reaction is always a reaction that impoverishes and decomposes its object; it seeks to pass over the object in all its manifoldness, to ignore or to overcome it'....In opposition to...Freudian psychoanalysis...Bakhtin presents dialogical conceptions of the self, the psyche and the 'content of consciousness'....the recognition of the individual as a social/self construct developing within given social, economic, political, historical and environmental parameters of space and time, who does not create his or her own 'self' ex nihilo....I participate in the formation of my self and others through...multiple subject positions...."outside society...there is no such thing as a human being"...."our humanity is...'in' our world dialogue"...in order to be fully human, we need to have a healthy geopsyche..."There is an interaction between the people's inner and outer realities that comes into play as we live in a place for an extended time. Our physical make-up and the nature of our psyche are formed in direct ways by the distinct climate, soil, geography, and living things of a place"....
A dialogical orientation...would require a rethinking of the concepts of 'other' and 'otherness'. If the possibility of the condition of 'anotherness', being another for others, is recognized, then the ecological processes of interanimation...develop[ing]...through mutually influencing each other day to day--can be emphasized....Inhabitation...might...be emphasized over travelling through....Anotherness...would..provide the basis for thorough critique of the mystique of the non-participant observer.....My main concern is to argue...for the utility [of 'anotherness'] in facilitating the generation of a different paradigm for conceptualizing environmental writing that focuses on relational inhabitation as a fundamental world-view by which to analyze the efficacy of literary works....the notion of anotherness, with its attendant emphasis on relational difference, provides a significant mechanism for rendering ecocriticsm a much more multicultural enterprise.....anotherness is a position of recognition and responsibility....
Most contemporary nature writing can easily be identified as depending on the myth of an original union with nature. The production and consumption of writing about nature, in fact, depends on this very thing: nostalgia for a better-than-present world, a looking backward to a place and time not spoiled or polluted or industrialized. Most American nature writing serves to strengthen boundaries between nature and culture, the self and the non-self....In addition, most American nature writing simply is not self-conscious of body politics....I argue that Mar Oliver, Joy Harjo and Lucille Cliton can be read as cyborg writers...a mode of resistance...on the basis of seizing the tools...that marked them as other"....nature becomes itself clearly marked as non-innocent, as politically and historically determined, as a contested idea.
*Bate, Jonathan. "Poetry and Biodiversity" (pp. 53-70):
dwelling is the term [Heidegger] used in his later philosophy for that authentic form of Being which he set agianst...the false ontologies of Cartesian dualism and subjective idealism. We achieve Being not when we represent the world, not in Vorstellung, but when we stand in a site, open to its Being, when we are thrown or called; the site is then gathered into a whole for which we take on an insistent care (Besorgung): "Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build...." For Heidegger poetry is the original admission of dwelling because it is a presencing not a representation, a form of being not of mapping....
Home and dwelling matter to humans because we also know homelessness and alienation. Other species dwell perpetually, are always at home in their ecosystem, their territory; those which migrate do not, as far as we are aware, have any consciousness of estrangement from their other home.....
There is no such thing as property in nature. A species inhabits its ecosystem, it does not possess it. Dwelling is not owning....a landed interest is not natural: ecosystems thrive on competition, but they do not have interests....Rousseau...was nearer the truth on this matter, with his argument in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that the innovation of property marked the exact moment at which humankind ceased to live according to the economy of nature....biodiversity is the principle according to which nature is ordered...There is no place in this vision for the nation-state....the literary tradition in our language needs to be opened up to regional diversity....
there is a case for viewing [Les Murray] as the major ecological poet currently writing in the English language....Murray hears the undersound of ecosystems....These are lines which wonderfully combine biological accuracy with a joyfulness that glories in all creation. Mosquito and human share the same dance....the major statement of his recent work, Presence: Translations from the Natural World (1992), is a series of dreamings of a huge diversity of living things....
* Legler, Gretchen. "Body politics in American nature writing. 'Who may contest for what the body of nature wil be?'" (pp. 71-87):
In her cyborg myth, Haraway writes: "The certainty of what counts as nature--a source of insight and a promise of innocence--is undermined, probably fatally." This, she argues, and I agree, is a good thing....if we are to make any progress in understanding 'nature itself' in any other context besides the nostalgic and the romantic, those two nearly useless positions which serve largely to freeze aesthetic and intellectual progress, then we must...instead entertain the idea that nature itself is not only the whole playing field of history and politics, but a player itself....
II. Ecocritical History (the Jeremaid, Crabbe's disorderly nature, Wilde's nature, W.H. Hudson's feathered women)
*Brain, Tracy. "'Or shalI bring you the sound of poison?': Silent Spring and Sylvia Plath (pp. 146-164):
Plath's environmentalist poems see the fragility of the boundaries of the self....the infilttration of bodies by foreign substances...the uncontainability of dangerous substances...poisons are invasive and dangerous...none the less..isolation is impossible and pernicious....the self cannot be held separate from the world. Plath depicts an ecosystem....the body is entered by different substances. No place is inviolate....Nothing is outside...One must accoutn for all waste...Nothing ca be repressed or left behind for long.
III. Contemporary Writing
* Garrard, Greg, "Heidegger, Heaney and the problem of dwelling" (pp. 167-181):
Ecocriticism will not flourish unless it adopts a critical stance....'nature', for analytical purposes, must be regarded as a construct that is under interrogation. I am deeply suspicious of the reterritorizing impulse in the ecological movement, of the dream of dwelling, and I think of the price it may exact, the people it may exclude.
* Kerridge, Richard, "Small rooms and the ecosystem: environmentalism and DeLillo's White Noise" (pp. 182-195):
DeLillo uses the environmental crisis to interrogate postmodernism, but does not offer the reader any route out of postmodernist self-consciousness and irony....White Noise positions its reader outside all the available narratives which could process environmetnal disaster and stabilize it, leaving...a condition of passive waiting. This novel dramatizes...the impasse between environmental consciousness and the inability of a culture to change.
* Killingsworth, M. Jimmie and Jacqueline S. Palmer, 'Ecopolitics and the literature of the borderlands: the frontiers of environmental justice in Latina and Native American Writing" (pp. 196-207): on Anzaldua, Castillo, Silko, calling to heal the earth and its brown bodies
* Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin, "Children's literature and the environment" (pp. 208-217): concepts of both the child and nature, as 18th c inventions (interdependent in Rousseau's Emile) are camoflaged in children's lit about environmental redemption
* Armbruster, Karla. "Creating the world we must save: the paradox of television nature documentaries" (pp. 218-):
potential problems of advocacy, of the privileged, "speaking for" those who cannot speak for themselves, objectifying and constructing nature:
camera insists on perspective and narrow field; documentary feeds our desire for speed, conflict, drama; distills "someone else's waiting"; specialize in misinformation; selection and editing substittue "a simulacrum of a real environmental experience" for physical embeddedness in nat'l environment; lack of understanding of systems and policies that destroy them; focus on the exotic, the past, and what we can learn/enjoy; focus on our exile from self-contained, self-regulating system; conflicting w/ anthropomorphism; constructed view presented as naturalized; basic contradiction: nature staged as it really is...emphasizing the constructedness of the documentaries would encourage us to see ourselves as participants in this world
Kingsolver, Barbara. Prodigal Summer.
Lappé, Frances Moore. EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, To Create the World We Want. New York: Nation, 2011.
Our Challenge--Developing an EcoMind
the emotional power of our own ideas to trap us or free us...
At their core is the premise of lack, the notion that there just isn't enough--of anything...modern economics...defines itself as the science of allocating scarce goods...even more debilitating ...is a parallel assumption: There isn't enough goodness either....So the worldview we absorb every day is driven by a fear of being without....separateness, scarcity, and stasis. That's our world...
I explore seven widely held environmental ideas...I challenge their limiting premises...and I offer a reframing....even the most commonsense ideas acan be dangerous--if they...evoke fear and despair. Or ignite guilt....
Fortunately, there is another way of seeing now opening to us...through the lens of ecology....an evolving and relational world....everything....co-created moment to moment in relation to all else...not only do we exist in a habitat, we are a habitat. In our mouths alone live more than seven hundred species of bacteria...."most of the cells in our body are not human but bacterial." With an eco-mind, we move from "fixing something" outside ourselves to re-aligning our relationships within our ecological home....A moment of dissonance can be...a liberating whack.
An Invitation--Thinking Like an Ecosystem
Now we are realizing that ecology is not merely a particular field of science; it is a new way of understanding life that frees us from...assumptions of separateness and scarcity...Since ecology is all about interconnection and unending change, creating patterns of causation that shape every organism and phenomenon, "thinking like an ecosystem" for me means living in the perpetual "why"....if we want life to thrive, we keep foremost the question, What conditions enhance life?...the wide and fluid dispersion of power, transparency, and an assumption of mutual accountability--are at least a good part of the answer....Every act has multiple effects....Thinking like an ecosystem shifts our vision from assuming "trade-offs" to searching for synergies....Thinking like an ecosystem means seeing everything in context....a single change can create endless ripples...For the eco-mind, the one thing that should never surprise is surprise....it is not possible to know what's possible.
....from thought traps to thought leaps....
LeGuin, Ursula. The Lathe of Heaven. Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley. 1982.
on "effective dreaming"
..."a great, showy, s"To ask the countries of the South to 'cap' their emissions of CFCs and CO2 is to deny to much of humanitiy the hope of ever possessing well-recognized artefacts of comfort and well-being such as automobiles and refirgerators. In this respect the California housewife and Mexican peasant certainly do not share a common past or present--on what terms can they then come to share a common future? Only in a world where their voices carry equal weight, where there is put in place a genuinely participatory democracy at the global level" (143).hoddy shaft of concrete and glass compting with vegetable obstinacy for light and air with the jungle of similar buildings all around it" (26).
"But in going under a river, something is involved which is, the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back" (36).
"The Willamette was a useful element of hte environment, like a very large, docile draft animal harnessed with straps, chains, shafts, saddles, bits, girths, hobbles" (36).
"He mulled over this a while. He slogged around it, tried to lift it, found it very bulky" (38-9).
"'Now perhaps an excessive dream of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind....Maybe you're afraid of...being close to people, of being touched . So you've found a kind of excuse for keeping reality at a distance" (58).
"...always coming up against the resistance that seemed to him sometimes to be the overliteralness of primary-process thinking, and sometimes to be a positive balkiness in Orr's mind" (59).
"he had been there...had known the world was being remade, and had forgotten it" (63).
"His head was too full, holding the two sets of memories, two full systems of information: one of the real (no longer) world...and one of the real (now) world" (64)."
"Right here, but out of communication. Theat's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone. "The mystery of the individual is strongest in sleep"'" (66).
"'Did you ever happen to think...that...there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality's being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time--only we don't know it?'" (70).
"They had been married seven months. They said nothing of any importance. They washed up the dishes and went to bed. In bed, they made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new” (158).
Lorde, Audre, “Outside [4].” American Poetry Review 6, 1 (January/February 1977).
In the center of a harsh and spectrumed city
all things natural are strange.
I grew up in a genuine confusion
between grass and weeds and flowers
and what coloured meant....
Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise. New York: Vintage, 2003.
Meloy, Ellen. Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild. New York: Vintage, 2006.
[Meloy seeks to mirror the strangeness of the world and of the mind. The very randomness and uncertainty are the point.....Wilderness embodies and welcomes chaos, the chaos that gives rise to imagination and spirit. In the wild, Meloy feels at home in the wildness of her mind.]
Prologue: last day w/ the desert bighorns--"quiet the mind and act like a rock....I then became the first rock in history to be overcome with feeling, a serene aching aimed at nothing in particular...."
The Blue Door Band: "Human beings have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own world, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely....
"I matched my seasonal geography to theirs....I gave the sheep full, held-breath attention....preternaturally attentive...and shamelessly anthropomorphic...Being with these wild animals was like a prayer...I was willing to wait in stillness, to count on nature's rhythms to calm my messy ones....the continent's native fauna on their unstoppable trajectory from bounty to scarcity and even demise....place-faithful to a fault....they were vulnerable to catatrophe...."
The Last Undevoured Riches: "What I fear is acute perception and sensory passion gone bland...the moon cheese, the inevitability of my own biodegradability. The rescue line comes from intimate witness to...the pure facts of the non-human lives that are still possible....The human spirit...yearns for glimpses into the "interiority" of a being that is different, not us, something not quite comprehensible...
The end of the wild world...has arrived....it is the reduction of diverse nature into a simplified biota that is entirely managed and dependent. It is a loss of autonomous beings, the self-willed fauna...that shaped human minds capable of identity with all existence. Sometimes I picture this moment in history...as a gate that we have been closing for some time....The spellbound threshold...is very nearly pulled shut....Soon we shall walk away entirely, place-blind and terribly lonely....
I set the shreds of my imagination to go the distance....Humans are creatures in search of exultation. We crave...the occasions when jolts from the universe fly open. This jolt... is a longing so overwhelming, it can put deep cracks in your heart.
Patchett, Ann. Sense of Wonder
Powers, Richard. Gain. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998.
She vows a consumer boycott, a full spring cleaning. But the house is full of them. It's as if the floor she walks on suddenly liquefies into a sheet of termites. They paper her cabinets. They perch on her microwave, camp out on her stove, hang from her shower head. Clare hiding under the sink, swarming her medicine chest, lining the shelves in the basement, parked out in the garage, piled up in the shed.
Her vow is hopeless. To many to purge them all. Every hour of her life depends on more corporations than she can count. And any spray she might use to bomb the busgs would have to be Clare's, too.
Who told them to make all these things? But she knows the anwer to that one. They've counted every receipt, more carefully than she ever has. And wasn't she born wanting what they were born wanting to give her? Every thought, every pleasure, freed up by these little simplicities, the most obvious of them already worlds beyond her competence.
The newspapers, Don, the lawyers: everybody outraged at the offense. As if cancer just blew in through the window. Well, if it did, it was an inside job. Some accomplice, opening the latch for it. She cannot sue the company for raiding her house. She brought them in, by choice, toted them in a shopping bag. And she'd do it all over again, given the choice. Would have to (304).
Price, Jennifer. Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Introduction: "What does nature mean to me?"...my deep uneasiness with entrenched American definitions of nature....Because I defined the Nature I loved as Out There, I saw everything built in the cities...as Nature destroyed....Instead, I...reenvision the spaces we inhabit as places where people must use nature....I have tried to see modern American life as something we literally create...from the nonhuman natural world....Americans' most everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture....many Americans have used a vision of Nature as a not-modern Place Apart powerfully to ...evade the defining hallmarks, troubles and confusions of modern American life....to ignore our ravenous uses of natural resources....hungry in equal measure for Nature as Meaning and nature as resources....we define Nature as a Place Apart but also so obviously and rabidly consume....
1) Missed Connections: The Passenger Pigeon Extinction
Our connections to nature are highly mediated. To recognize one's own involvement in resource-intensive markets, and to make nature meaningful in ways that tell us about these connections, can be difficult....this...is the moral of the pigeon's story: the specific, modern constellation of intensive overuses of nature, urban long-distance connections and strangely unmoored meanings..what really happened was "progress": the transition to a more urban, long-distance, economically expanding high-technology world....shooting the wild pigeons by the millions for profit...also..the removal of the pigeon feet from the pigeon pie. After that happens, how do we know what kind of pie it is?
2) When Women were Women, Men were Men, and Birds were Hats
centering the problem on women and women's sphere...exempted the harvest, manufacture and marketing stages from the heart of the discussion, and from the collective diagram of their connections to the wilder realms of nature...consigned the looming thread of modern consumerism to the sidelines...it left the fast-expanding markets, and people's enjoyment of them, conveniently on the edge of the picture....it set a twentieth-century precedent by which wealthier Americans made nature meanignful and valuable, yet failed to grapple with the vast economic networks by which we transform nature into everyday life....baby boomers...have inherited the modern, convenient failure to make nature meaningful in ways that tell us about nature, and about our own econmic connections to it...
3) A Brief Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo
boundaries...are under intense negotiation. All except one...between Nature and Artifice....the pink flamingo...marks the ur-boundary....brandished as a statement of anti-Nature. At the core of eahc of these flamingos lies the compelling, modern definition of nature as anti-Artifice, not-human, and countermodern....Long-distance economic networks make it easy to lose track of nature--but Nature as a Place Apart actively erases our connections...a definition of nature that sidesteps our complicity in the aggressive and unsustainable uses of natural resources....The symbol of Artifice is actually nature incarnate....."every garden tempts us to live within the illusion...that it is something natural, not the creation of artifice"
4) Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company
Nature is available for purchase above all as what is Real: what is enduring, nonreplicated, non-mss culture, Authentic, non-Artificial and absolute....The Nature Company has both catered and served as monumnet to the no-Artifice definition of Nature as a key to the identity of my generation and class....The Nature Company has ot sold nature....It has sold meanings....the most powerful and overarching has always been that Nature...is unchanging....But at a nature store, the disconnections and constructedness of Nature...all threaten to surface....The Nature Company has positioned hte store as a site for better consumerism....Every "nature-oriented" product...has literally been manufactured from nature.....We've used Nature to circumvent our own complicity in the serious modern problems we critique...the ur-ironies....The Nature Company constittues a store-size contradiciton between how we want to connect ot nature and how we actualy do...."Wow" betrays a certain confusion of intention. It suggests a murkiness of desires. What do I really want?...I want to connect to wild nature, and to understand it, and to not destroy it. I want to counter...my own complicity in economic excesses, in social inequities and in ecological devastations. Yet how much?
5) Roadrunners Can't Read: The Greening of Television in the 1990s
TV allows us to enjoy the real and the unreal at the same time...in this nebulous terrain...most of the dangers and pleasures of a TV eco-trip ultimately lie....Nature is less a set of ecological facts than a mythic narrative power tool...meticulously constructed....[Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, ads, nature shows....] Nature is not a separate place....shouldn't we ask our meanings to help us identify rather than avoid a reckoning of all these connections among people and nature? The real cahlegne is to tell the difference between TV Nature, as an absolute ur-Reality at the edge of modern life, and real nature, as something we can use and change, in all its forms in the late-twentieth century.....Get real.
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Bantam, 1980.
leaves began to gather in the corners....every time a door was opened anywhere in the house there was a sound from all the corners of lifting and alighting....Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather...Thus did [Sylvie] begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvia talked a great deal about houskeeping....Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened doors and windows, though it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open (84-85).
…need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?...to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries (152).
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1990.
...he had also been lost in the city for another two days, taking buses and subways twisting around what seemed to him a dense concrete jungle, no different from the living jungle he had left behind, where the sun barely filters through a tight network of skyscrapers trapping a thick layer of carbon monoxide, electric and telephone wires grasping tenaciously at everything (82).
On the distant horizon, you can see the crumbling remains of once modern high-rises and office buildings, everything covered in rust and mold, twisted and poisonous lianas winding over sinking balconies, trees arching through windows, a cloud of perpetual rain and mist and evasive color hovering over everything. The old forest has returned once again, secreting its digestive juices, slowly breaking everything into edible absorbent components, pursuing the lost perfection of an organism in whih digestion and excretion were once one and the same. But it will never be the same again (212).
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997.
Rafaela Cortes spetn the morning barefoot, sweeping both dead and living things...to the door and off the side of the veranda and into the dark green undergrowth (3).
The freeway was a great root system, an organic living entitty. It was nothing more than a great writhing concrete dinosaur and nothing less than the greatest orchestra on Earth (37).
Manzanar imagined himself a kind of recycler...like the other homeless in the city...a recylcer of the last rung. The homeless were the insects and scavengers of society, feeding on leftovers, living in residue, colleting refuse...who would use the residue of sounds in the city if Manzanar did not? (56).
There are maps and there are maps and there are maps....they began within the very geology of the land, the artesian rivers running beneath the surface, connected and divergent, shifting and swelling. There was the complex and normally silent web of faults--cracking like mud flats baking under a desert sun, like the crevices in aging hands and faces. Yet, below the surface, there was the man-made gird of civil utilities....on the surface...ordinary persons never bother to notice...the prehistoic grid of plant and fauna and human behavior, nor the historic grid of land usage and property...the great overlays of transport....patterns and connections by every conceivable definition ...spreading visible and audible layers (56-57).
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...the net was a big borderless soup and I was cooking (246).
I no longer looked for a resolution to the loose threads hanging off my shorelines….I now knew they were simply the warp and woof of a fraying net of conspiracies in an expanding universe where the holes only seemed to get larger and larger....The picture got larger and larger. I could follow a story or I could abandon it, but I could not stop (248-249).
"The Big Sleep. There's a chauffeur who dies, see....Who killed him? Script continuity, see. Nobody knows....Raymond Chandler..doesn't know either...it's like that. Just cuz you get to the end doesn't mean you know what happened" (252).