Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields

ECOCRITICAL EXPLORATIONS in LITERARY and CULTURAL STUDIES Fences, Boundaries, and Fields

PATRICK D. MURPHY

Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies

Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies Fences, Boundaries, and Fields

Patrick D. Murphy

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books Excerpts from pages 73 and 141 of The Woman Who Married a Bear and from pages 110 and 117 of The Curious Eat Themselves, copyright © 1992, 1993, respectively, courtesy of Soho Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Gary Snyder copyright © 2000 by Gary Snyder from The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murphy, Patrick D., 1951– Ecocritical explorations in literary and cultural studies : fences, boundaries, and fields / Patrick D. Murphy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3173-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3175-6 (electronic) 1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. Ecocriticism. 3. Ecology in literature. 4. Philosophy of nature in literature. I. Title. PS169.E25M87 2009 810.9'355—dc22 2008055644 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The Four Elements and the Recovery of Referentiality in Ecocriticism

1

PART I CLIMBING THROUGH CONCEPTUAL FENCES 1

The Complexity of Simplicity

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2

Difference and Responsibility in Literary Alternatives to the Nation-State

33

Paradise or a Pair of Dice: Contradictions and Contingencies in Real and Virtual Terrains for Tomorrow’s College Students

47

Toward Transnational Ecocritical Theory: The Example of Hwa Yol Jung

63

3 4

PART II SURVEYING THE BOUNDARIES OF GENRE 5

Nature in the Contemporary American Novel

79

6

The Non-alibi of Alien Scapes: Science Fiction and Ecocriticism

89

7 8

The Non-alibi of Pragmatic Utopianism and Wild Variability; or, Optimistic Variations on a Science Fiction Theme

109

Mysteries of Nature and Environmental Justice

119

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PART III CULTURALLY CROSSING THE FIELD 9 10 11

12

Nature-Nurturing Fathers in a World Beyond Our Control

147

Scenarios of Disaster: Crying Wolf, Scaring Away the Elephants, and Heading ’Em off at the Pass

163

Hurricanes and Hubris: American Responses in Literature and Culture to Natural Weather Extremes and Their Human-Driven Intensifications

173

Ranging Widely in the Classroom

185

Bibliography

193

Index

209

About the Author

217

Preface

This volume represents the culmination of five years of ecocritical explorations picking up, after a brief hiatus as a department chair, where I left off in Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature and continuing to reflect some of the same concerns first elaborated in Literature, Nature, and Other. Like those books, this one contains attention to theoretical and conceptual issues, in particular referentiality and the non-alibi of being. It also includes attention to issues of genre, specifically in terms of the appearance of, and potential for, ecocritical and nature-oriented content in the genre of the novel and the popular subgenres of mystery and science fiction. In the latter few chapters I intensify the cultural studies dimension of my concerns treating fathers, disasters, and hurricanes, a coincidental but perhaps not entirely gratuitous grouping. And, in addition to referencing the classroom in various chapters, I conclude with a discussion of some of the kinds of courses that I have taught with a nature-oriented or environmental justice component or with a focus on nature-oriented literature. These widely ranging explorations stem from a unified set of concerns and ethical pivots. Every individual’s actions matter and count. The United States is rapidly moving toward what are now being referred to in the media as tipping points. Moments of crises are fraught with dangers and with potential. Promoting nature-oriented literature cannot afford to be a disengaged form of intellectual recreation. Rather, it can and must contribute to larger cultural swirls, intellectual trends, and popular dialogues. My concerns with referentiality and the non-alibi certainly develop out of that belief and the belief that literature, defined as loosely and broadly as possible, can both reflect and contribute to cultural opinions and changes in perception.

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At the same time, the moment of crisis—what James Howard Kunstler calls “the long emergency” and Richard Heinberg labels “the century of declines”—will extend over decades and the exposure to a particular idea about destructive human behavior, ecosystem health, what-if scenario about nature nurturing alternatives, or visions of the world’s future can produce results years after an individual has first encountered the idea, image, allegory, or analogy. For that reason, I have sought to include attention here both to quite timely issues, such as hurricanes and the human intensification of natural disasters, and more long range ones, such as alternatives to the nationstate. Also, some of the ideas and approaches to environmental issues in literature and in community activism are limited, slightly off the mark, and occasionally completely wrongheaded. Therefore, the encouraging of people to read, study, critique, and teach texts, movements, and cultural characteristics must include setting the works in dialogue with each other and setting the readers in dialogue with the works. With that recognition and in the spirit of dialogue, I invite readers to take up this book and enter into a discussion with the ideas presented here. In the first section, “Climbing through Conceptual Fences” I focus on theoretical issues. The introduction situates ecocritical theory in terms of referentiality and a nonfoundational orientation relying on nonfiction for its literary examples. I emphasize that with referentiality comes responsibility and the need for both diversity in method and diversity in intellectual resources. Chapter 1 takes the concept of referentiality as its starting point to discuss how theory can help articulate both what people are already doing and what they ought to be doing from an ecocritical perspective. Here I look specifically at the issue of simplicity as depicted in literary nonfiction devoted both to retreats from urban society and specific lifetime economic commitments. Chapter 2 extends the theoretical discussions initiated in chapter 1 by taking up issues in ecopolitical critical theory and integrating them by means of literary representations of alternatives to the modern nation-state, both in terms of significations (concepts) and referentialities (practices). Unlike the first two chapters, which relied on literary nonfiction, this chapter mixes fiction and nonfiction, especially written by poets, to demonstrate the theoretical argument. In the third chapter, I move from the terrain of the nation-state to the real and virtual terrains to be traversed by tomorrow’s college students, an area hotly debated in ecocritical and educational fields. The chapter begins with a look at students’ intermodal reading practices, their increasing distances from physical terrains and increasing proximity to virtual terrains making use of observations of the experience of my at-the-time fifteen-year-old daughter. I then consider the potential for gaming-shaped responsiveness and digital literacy to contribute to heightened environmental consciousness, particularly

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in relation to a contingency-based approach to problem solving. Literary examples are drawn from contemporary fiction, including popular genres. In chapter 4 I turn from the broad scope of the previous essays to consider how ecocritics can develop a transnational ecocritical theory, one that cuts across national literatures and cultural gestalts to synthesize an evolving theory adequate to the literary and cultural concerns ecocritics are trying to address. The ability to develop such a theory is demonstrated through a detailed survey of the published writings of an individual thinker, Professor Hwa Yol Jung of Moravian College. In the course of this review the theoretical issues are explored through reference to a multicultural collection of contemporary American fiction and nonfiction. In the next section of the book, “Surveying the Boundaries of Genre,” my attention turns from more abstract and cultural theoretical concerns to genre theory and its implications for ecocritical literary analysis. Chapter 5 offers a broad survey of contemporary nature-oriented American novels. It also orients readers toward the other three chapters in this section by addressing the place and value of popular, genre-based novels. Chapter 6 grounds its analysis of science fiction in a key concept developed in the early writings of dialogical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the “non-alibi.” It then takes up particular types of science fiction, such as extrapolations and cautionary tales, which will link it with the chapters on disasters and hurricanes in the next section. It includes discussion of novels that address global warming, population, cloning, and terraforming. Chapter 7 continues the theoretical orientation of the previous one with its emphasis on the “non-alibi” but also addresses the ethics of utopian thinking. Here I consider novels and graphic novels that address nanotechnology, post-ecological collapse rebuilding, and young adult battles against alien conquest. The eighth chapter explores another popular genre, the mystery, and looks at ones that could be considered fictional nature writing and others that clearly rely on themes of environmental justice. I evaluate novels set in Florida, Alaska, the Southwest, and numerous national parks. As with chapter 7, the examples in this chapter will provide connections with the chapters in the following section. In the third section, “Culturally Crossing the Field,” the chapters focus explicitly on American cultural values and responses to natural disasters. Chapter 9 addresses the question: what is the role of fathers as nurturers in environmentally responsible cultural change. My concerns here build on my own experience as a father, linking this chapter particularly with chapter 3 in that regard. Examples are developed from fiction and nonfiction, supported by sociological studies and personal experience, including an appendix written by my daughter. Chapter 10 takes off from the late Michael Crichton’s misguided efforts to dismiss global warming as a genuine cause

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for environmental concern and to lump it with other allegedly false alarms of environmental or military destruction. In response, I discuss literature and science on the population problem, the threat of nuclear war, and global warming. The eleventh chapter builds on the previous one by looking at a single scenario of disaster, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, to explore literature about, and American cultural attitudes toward, hurricanes and natural disasters. In particular, I review some of the cautionary tales about hurricanes published in preceding years and critique American arrogance and willful ignorance in the face of powerful natural forces. Believing that the non-alibi for ecological responsibility does not extend only to what an academic writes but also to what he or she teaches, I end with a survey of courses incorporating environmental writing that I have designed and taught over the years. I demonstrate the ability to develop composition courses themed to topics such as pollution and global warming, as well as environmental literature courses that include transnational and multicultural orientations.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of many of these chapters appeared in previous publications, both journals and books, with many of them being published outside of the United States. All of them have been revised, some substantially, for inclusion in this book. “The Complexity of Simplicity,” “Paradise or a Pair of Dice: Contradictions and Contingencies in Real and Virtual Terrains for Tomorrow’s College Students,” “The Non-alibi of Pragmatic Utopianism and Wild Variability,” and “Scenarios of Disaster” originally appeared in Tamkang Review (Taiwan) and are reprinted here with permission of the editor. “The Four Elements” first appeared in Studies in the Humanities 29, no. 1 (2002) and is reprinted here with permission of the editor. “Difference and Responsibility in Literary Alternatives to the Nation-State” originally appeared as “Grounding Anotherness and Answerability through Allonational Ecoliterature Formations” in Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Catrin Gersdorf (2006, pp. 414–35) and is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Rodopi of Amsterdam. “The Non-alibi of Alien Scapes” appeared in Beyond Nature Writing (2001, pp. 263–78), edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace, and “Nature Nurturing Fathers in a World Beyond Our Control” appeared in Eco-Man (2004, pp. 196–210), edited by Mark Allister, and both are reprinted here by permission of the University of Virginia Press. “Toward Transnational Ecocritical Theory: The Example of Hwa Yol Jung” also appears with a different emphasis as “The Confluence of Hwa Yol Jung’s Ethics and North American Environmental Literature” in Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Hwa Yol Jung, edited by Jin Young Park, also published by Lexington Books. “Ranging Widely to Find Home” originally appeared in AEQ: Academic Exchange Quarterly 7, no. 4 (2003): 53–57. xi

Introduction The Four Elements and the Recovery of Referentiality in Ecocriticism

I understand the Four Elements as both an ancient and a contemporary way of thinking about the material world. And I consider ecocriticism a critical method that both evokes the responsibility of the critic and reinstates referentiality as a crucial and primary activity of literature. It is a movement with multiple aspects and theories delimiting it, particularly a drive toward multidisciplinarity that bridges the humanities and the sciences. To achieve its goals and remain honest to the literature it seeks to study, ecocriticism should remain pivotal, rather than foundational, and localist, rather than global, in its grounding orientation. By that I mean that ecocriticism will constantly seek disciplinary contexts and circumstantially appropriate principles for analysis rather than relying exclusively on philosophically universalist concepts. While there are issues requiring a global perspective and there are phenomena truly global in scope, the local and the particular can never be forgotten or ignored. Localist in orientation would mean being always attentive to particular and specific places, entities, and events, even when addressing the global implications of ecological change. For instance, even with global warming, change occurs unevenly and ecological dimensions, and the people within them, are affected differentially by the same general phenomena. Tim Forsyth makes precisely that point repeatedly through a variety of concrete examples in Critical Political Ecology, such as the challenges posed by non-equilibrium ecology, regional deforestation, population changes, and islands of sustainability.

THE FOUR ELEMENTS: THEN AND NOW For many years when scholars in the West would invoke the Four Elements— earth, air, water, and fire—their listeners would usually recognize the invocation 1

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as an allusion to Aristotle and possibly think about notions of balance, unity, and indivisibility. Readers familiar with Aristotle’s lecture notes might also make connections among physics, metaphysics, ethics, and poetics, or recognize the interconnectedness of nature, being and becoming, self-conscious behavior, and literature. Modern listeners and readers, however, when they hear the four elements invoked, might not think of Aristotle. Rather, they might think of pollution and environmental crises. Perhaps not by accident biologist Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997), has titled chapters of her book “earth,” “air,” “water,” and “fire,” even though making no mention of Aristotle. In each chapter she emphasizes different types of human-caused pollutants and their relationship with spiraling rates of cancer, thereby showing the inversions of balance, unity, and indivisibility. In “earth” she emphasizes changes in American agriculture and the exponential growth of synthetic insecticides and herbicides. In the “air” chapter, she focuses on airborne chemicals that respect no national boundaries in their acts of contamination, noting that “[t]he rising and falling movements of global distillation explain why chemicals used in rice paddies and cotton fields eventually end up in the skin of Arctic trees” (Steingraber 1997, 177). In the “water” chapter she focuses not only on the rapid reduction of biological diversity but also on water pollution’s poisoning of the animals that live in rivers and lakes and through biomagnification the people who eat those animals and drink that water. And in the “fire” chapter Steingraber looks at toxic waste incinerators, which burn garbage of all kinds and release toxins into the air and dump their concentrated residues in landfills. As the works of Aristotle are organized today, one can see first of all a linkage among the study of nature and the study of human beings in interdependent relationship with the rest of nature, which means the study of beingin-the-world. Second, one can see an attention to ethics, the character of human behavior while experiencing being-in-the-world, that includes environmental ethics, or the character of human behavior toward the nonhuman aspects of the world, thereby making ethics both human and ecological in character. Third, one can see literature, a type of poetics, in dependent relation on physics, metaphysics, and ethics, as a manifestation and shaping force of human experiential behavior. Steingraber makes explicit the interrelationship of these concerns in Living Downstream by showing the effects of human behavior regarding toxic waste on all aspects of nature. She also shows how research, government investigations, community stories about cancer, and public inequities in environmental cleanups contribute to, and reflect, differences across communities based on social class and private wealth.

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ANY EMBODIMENT OF RESPONSIBILITY INVOKES A RECOGNITION OF REFERENTIALITY Whether speaking of Aristotle or Steingraber, one sees that these authors believed that language embodied referentiality rather than purely self-reflexive communication. That is, words, among other functions, serve to name, identify, depict, and define the material world in which they circulate and from which they arise. Indeed, consciousness itself and human imagination form part of this material world since they depend on electrochemical and biological activity for their existence. Not only do words shape the reality that human beings perceive, but also the experiencing of reality, of corporeal existence, shapes the way that human beings use and understand language in the form of discourses, dialects, and utterances, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have extensively demonstrated in Philosophy in the Flesh and other works. This referentiality links literature and all forms of writing with human agency, as Mikhail Bakhtin suggested about ninety years ago in Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Human agency, in turn, evokes the matter of responsibility. Like Aristotle, who believed that multiple affects worked to generate motion, like Steingraber, who believes that the information and call to action in her book can make a difference in human behavior and environmental interaction, and like Bakhtin, who believed “I exist in the world of inescapable actuality, and not in that of contingent possibility” (1993, 44), I believe that the theories, texts, and pedagogies that teachers choose to emphasize do make a difference in the world, that professors do act positively and negatively as agents of change or of stasis, and that we must accept our responsibility for the effects of our behavior on others and their worldly interactions. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, a social psychologist, states quite succinctly the position that each of us occupies in this world: Whether we like it or not, our lives will leave a mark on the universe. Each person’s birth makes ripples that expand in the social environment: parents, siblings, relatives, and friends are affected by it, and as we grow up our actions leave a myriad of consequences, some intended, most not. Our consumer decisions make a tiny difference in the economy, political decisions affect the future of the community, and each kind or mean act modifies slightly the total quality of human well-being. Persons whose lives are autotelic help to reduce entropy in the consciousness of those who come in contact with them; those who devote all their psychic energy to competing for resources and to aggrandizing their own self add to the sum total of entropy. (1997, 131)

Speaking more specifically to literary critics, Karl Kroeber opens Ecological Literary Criticism (1994) with these words: “an ecologically oriented

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literary criticism . . . seizes opportunities offered by recent biological research to make humanistic studies more socially responsible. . . . Humanists willing to think beyond self-imposed political and metaphysical limits of contemporary critical discourse can use these scientific advances to make literary studies contribute to the practical resolution of social and political conflicts that rend our society” (p. 1). Indeed, we should. A single decision to rewrite the curriculum of American literary studies in other countries, such as Korea or Japan, Austria or Estonia, to emphasize a different set of texts and a different range of authors from those commonly taught and clearly established to date will ripple, even if ever so faintly, through those societies for decades to come. Faculty working on curricular revision and adjustments to the canon of commonly taught works in both national literature and foreign literature departments around the world can ask themselves: how might the long-term attitude of our students and other members of our culture toward environmental protection and restoration be affected by the teaching of works in our national and foreign literatures that are devoted to nature and environmental topics? The ideas taught today can become the practice of tomorrow, but only if they are taught today. According to Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas, we either contribute to the reduction of entropy, which is to say for the expansion of balance and harmony in the entire world, or for the expansion of entropy, the increase in chaos and destruction. We are not agents of change simply because we have decided to think so. We engage in particular types of thinking because we are participants in a long evolutionary activity through which matter achieves consciousness and self-awareness. The ongoing reproduction with variation and adaptation of DNA in the lives of all animal species on the planet is one manifestation of this seeking. And human theorizing, which arises out of this manifestation and which depends on a particular temporary confluence of earth, air, water, and fire in the formation of each individual, constitutes a component of this quest. From the vantage point, then, of reducing entropy and advancing matter’s development of consciousness in a way that works toward our world’s indefinite human sustainability, I evaluate and develop the theories that I adopt, adapt, or reject in the course of my scholarly and pedagogical practice. The possibility of referentiality functions as a key to such selection. Literature can only affect the minds of its readers if it has the ability to orient their thinking not only toward the world in the text but also the world in which the text materially and ideationally exists at the moment of reading. Throughout ecocritical theory, the return to referentiality has been addressed both in opposition to postmodernism and poststructuralist theories and as a complement or corrective to them. Here I want to review three of the more successful of

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these addresses. Terry Gifford, Leonard Scigaj, and Laurence Coupe, among others, have developed various positions promoting referentiality. In 1995, English poet and critic Terry Gifford published Green Voices, which treats poetry. Gifford concerns himself in this study with the issue of referentiality and arguments about the social construction of nature. Commenting on his own text and its ostensible subject, Gifford notes that “this book is not ultimately about reading and writing poetry, but about our living relationship with the material reality we sometimes call ‘the environment’ or ‘nature’ or ‘our inner selves’ or ‘our bodies’” (1995, 10). And, arguing against Alan Liu, who critiqued Wordsworth claiming “There is no nature” and that “Nature is the name under which we use the nonhuman to validate the human, to interpose a mediation able to make humanity more easy with itself” (quoted in Gifford 1995, 15), Gifford notes that Liu “is wrong to deny the general physical presence that is one side of that mediation” (1995, 15). That is not to say that such a physical presence is simplistically and literally identified in any text in a transparent one-to-one idea and matter correspondence. Rather, as Gifford notes, “Any reference will implicitly or explicitly express a notion of nature that relates to culturally developed assumptions about metaphysics, aesthetics, politics, and status, that is, in many cases, ideologies” (1995, 15). But mediation does not dissolve extratextual materiality into pure textuality. Rather than there being nothing outside the text, as Derrida is repeatedly quoted as claiming and generally misinterpreted in the process, Gifford emphasizes that texts and the languages of their composition intellectually mediate sensuous human experience, personal and collective, immediate and historical. In the year 2000, another British critic, Laurence Coupe, provided a preface to his edited volume The Green Studies Reader, that begins by identifying the affinities between this reader and previous Routledge-published anthologies, the Cultural Studies Reader and the Post-Colonial Studies Reader, immediately taking this volume out of the realm of purely textual studies and into the realm of material culture and nature. In his “General Introduction” he goes on to emphasize, as did Gifford before him, that “green studies does not challenge the notion that human beings make sense of the world through language, but rather the self-serving inference that nature is nothing more than a linguistic construct.” Coupe approvingly quotes Kate Soper who observes that “it is not language which has a hole in its ozone layer; and it is the real thing that continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier” (quoted in Coupe 2000, 3). In the previous year, 1999, American critic Leonard Scigaj developed the most sustained theoretical challenge to emphases on pure textuality and Derridean différance. Observing that the origin of language itself is to be found

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in nature, both in the physical production of the sounds and signs that embody language and in the sensuous engagement of human beings in a world larger than themselves, which they sought to explain, Scigaj develops a theory of “référance,” a neologism that labels an experience: référance turns the reader’s gaze toward an apprehension of the cyclic processes of wild nature after a self-reflexive recognition of the limits (the sous rature) of language. After this two-stage process, a third moment often occurs, the moment of atonement with nature, where we confide our trust in (sen référer) nature’s rhythms and cycles, where reading nature becomes our text. (1999, 38)

Scigaj bases this definition on his claim that “Within ecopoetry and environmental poetry, language is often foregrounded only to reveal its limitations, and this is accomplished in such a way that the reader’s gaze is thrust beyond language back into the less limited natural world that language refers to, the inhabited place where humans must live in harmony with ecological cycles” (1999, 37–38). Here, as with the other writers cited, responsibility and referentiality are perceived as coterminous. Ecocriticism, then, at least as formulated by these writers and myself, sets itself against any conception of criticism as disinterested, aestheticist, or purely intertextual.

ECOCRITICISM AN ACTIVIST APPROACH TO LITERATURE Ecocriticism as the study of literary works with special attention to the representation of relationships among human beings and the rest of the “morethan-human” world has always been concerned with the agency of human beings and the need for rethinking social behaviors and actions. However one goes about teaching and analyzing nature-oriented literature, it inevitably involves challenging students to bring to consciousness their views about the world, their sense of personal responsibility in that world, and to consider the impact of contemporary society on the environments in which everyone lives and dies. Ecocriticism, then, tends to focus on the relationship of the reader’s attitude toward the text’s representation of the extratextual world more so than the world imaginatively represented in the text. This orientation is not what Lawrence Buell once labeled, borrowing the idea from Barry Lopez, as “outer mimesis” (Environmental Imagination), which would take us back to an Auerbachian sense of realism, but reflects what Rey Chow has referred to as “indirection” in her critique of poststructuralism’s “exercise of bracketing referentiality” (1912, 1911). In that essay, “The Interruption of Referentiality: Postructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism,” she fruitfully suggests a reformulation of referen-

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tiality “precisely as the limit, the imperfect, irreducible difference that is not pure difference but difference thoroughly immersed in and corrupted by the delusions of history” (Chow 1918). That is to say, that while no representation may accurately capture the plenitude of the world, no representation can avoid reference to it, either direct or indirect, because materiality comprises an inseparable and indissoluble component of human existence and cognition. As a result, Chow, in part quoting Johannes Fabian, argues that we ought “to acknowledge the inevitability of reference even in the most avant-garde of theoretical undertakings, and to demand a thorough reassessment of an originary act of repudiation/exclusion in terms that can begin to address the ‘scandal of domination and exploitation of one part of mankind by another’” (1919). While Chow limits her focus here to interhuman conflict, we can easily extend her claim beyond the human. Ecocriticism, however, should not be misconstrued as a singular theory but rather as a movement with common concerns among its participants. These participants diverge wildly and widely on which theories and texts ought to be included or be made the focus of attention. As a result, one can pick up a work of ecocriticism and find it focused on the Romantic poets and the issue of the politics of Wordsworthian nature appreciation or find it focused on contemporary novels of ecological disaster, or find it devoted to something called “nature writing,” which is usually defined as creative works of nonfiction focusing on individual experiences of wilderness and natural phenomena. Along these lines, numerous ecocritics have been intent recently on delimiting the distinction between nature writing and environmental literature, between those texts that extol individual encounters with the wild and those that focus on destructive human interaction with specific environments, including the urban, such as Lawrence Buell’s Writing for an Endangered World (2001) or The Nature of Cities (1999), edited by Michael Bennett and David W. Teague. Likewise, ecocritics draw on a highly diverse range of theories and fields of study for supplementary material in developing their arguments and critiques.

DIVERSITY IN METHOD AND DIVERSITY IN INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES Ecocriticism necessarily draws on a far wider range of disciplines and intellectual traditions than most other forms of literary criticism. The following works demonstrate this diversity and are drawn from neurobiology, genetics, Native American studies, and globalization studies. Other fields could also be drawn in here, such as environmental history, forestry, geology, geography, urban studies, and more. But these examples will have to suffice.

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Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman in Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind (1992) comments on theories of language from a neurobiological perspective: Cognitive models are created by human beings, and in this sense they are idealized—that is, they are abstractions. But they depend on the formation of images as a result of sensory experience and they also depend on kinesthetic experience—the relation of the body to space. . . . The important thing to grasp is that idealized cognitive models involve conceptual embodiment and that conceptual embodiment occurs through bodily activities prior to language. (1992, 246–47; emphasis in original)

Further, he argues that “we must incorporate biology into our theories of knowledge and language—an account of how we know and how we are aware in light of the facts of evolution and developmental biology” (Edelman 1992, 252). Incorporating biology into theories of knowledge would also mean paying attention in literary criticism to representations of human interaction with the rest of the natural world, to human representations of cultural and economic effects on local environments, and to environmental effects on human existence, psychology, and relationships. One effort to bring science into literary criticism has come from proponents of the ideas of E. O. Wilson and the field of sociobiology. Often these works, such as Robert Storey’s Mimesis and the Human Animal, provide valuable theoretical material, but then lapse into highly reductionist interpretations of specific literary works. Storey, Joseph Carroll, Frederick Turner, and others, tend to lapse into a desire for monocausal explanations on the one hand, and deterministic allocations of power and agency to systems, on the other hand. Granting all power, whether to genetics, to capital, or to the unconscious, fails to recognize the everywhere revealed multiplicity and variability of daily life. In contrast to the genetic determinists and their literary followers, other scientists offer nondualistic and potentially more salubrious arguments for the advancement of ecocriticism. Edelman, already quoted, certainly fits here. Also, the paleontologist Niles Eldredge, the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, and the biologist Steven Rose offer more multifaceted arguments about nature-culture and nature-nurture relationships that have a strong bearing on literary analysis. Eldredge, for instance, points out that art and language both involve the necessity of attention to external stimuli and the luxury or perhaps illusion of gaining “a sense of control over the natural world”: “Being able to talk about, to describe, to draw and paint a wild animal requires observation, thought, analysis, even intimate experience. It requires knowledge, and in human life, knowledge is power” (1995, 91). And, therefore, Eldredge in Do-

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minion (1995) after discussing the long history of human evolutionary and cultural change, in particular its relationship to climate and the development of agriculture, asserts that “The symbolic legacy of this ecological revolution—the stories we began to tell ourselves about who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into the world—still grip our collective consciousness.” Unfortunately these agrarian stories of dominion over the earth “have outlived their usefulness” (Eldredge 1995, 99). People today “continue to rely on local ecosystems, but because the vast majority of us are no longer functional parts of them, we simply do not see the importance of sustaining them” (Eldredge 1995, 123; emphasis in original). Therefore, “We need a new vision, a revised story of who we are and how we fit into the world” (Eldredge 1995, 166). Nature writing, environmental literature, ecopoetry, the Gaia hypothesis represented in the animated film Final Fantasy, and other artistic works represent diverse attempts to create such a revised story. A part of the process of revising that story involves rethinking such concepts as competition, the key term in the reductionism of sociobiologists but also many poststructuralists, who see the competitive exercise of power in and through systems as the fundamental determinant of cultural practice. Lynn Margulis and Steve Rose call into question the very concept of competition as the explanation for biological and cultural behavior. In Symbiotic Planet (1998), Margulis argues that symbiosis—the living together of species in the same space and time, such as the bacteria in our intestines that help us digest food, or ants that feed and feed upon butterfly pupae—represents the dominant form of organic interaction rather than competition. Rose in Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism (1997) concludes his book with these words: “Thus for humans, as for all other living organisms, the future is radically unpredictable. This means that we have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our own choosing. And it is therefore our biology that makes us free” (1997, 309). Not only do Margulis and Rose offer alternative orientations to competition and determinism but also, like Eldredge, suggest at least indirectly the significance of studying alternative theories, conceptions, and practices of human interactions with various environments as represented in literature, rather than just focusing on human-human interactions or human-culture interactions. It comes as perhaps no surprise that Native American literature and native cultural studies would focus frequently on human interactions with the nonhuman world in the local ecosystems in which all people live. But the understanding of representations of such cultural interaction requires attention not only to history, politics, economics, and sociology, but also to biology and environmental science. And hence, ecocriticism must also take these into account.

10

Introduction

Winona LaDuke, who was at one time Ralph Nader’s running mate on the Green Party presidential ticket, has written All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999). In it LaDuke builds her argument not only on native cosmology, customs, and community practices, but also environmental science. The traditional beliefs that she depicts coincide beautifully with Margulis’s argument for symbiosis. And at the same time, LaDuke’s discussions of the environmental struggles for survival of native peoples throughout North America and in Hawai’i inform our understanding and interpretation of Native American literature. Without the kind of cultural and scientific knowledge relayed by LaDuke, one simply cannot understand in any significant way the environmental issues addressed by such authors as Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, Simon Ortiz, and Haunani-Kay Trask. These writers as a group invariably point readers toward the issue of environmental justice, as demonstrated by LaDuke’s foreword to New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, edited by Rachel Stein, and the discussion of Native American struggles in The Environmental Justice Reader, edited by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. Another concern emerges in regard to Native American cultural studies and literature, which takes us back to the issue of referentiality, which is the various reductionist interpretations of Derrida’s privileging of text over speech leading to the creation of a hierarchy of literacy over orality. Keith Basso in Wisdom Sits in Places (1996) has used his training as an anthropologist and his experience as a rancher to demonstrate the integrated relationship between oral stories and relationship to place among the Western Apache. In the circumstances that Basso relates no radical separation exists between speaker, listener, language, and referent. Instead they are integrated into the spatial and temporal existence of not only the individuals involved but also the community, with a continuous interplay of absence and presence, metonymy and metaphor, literal and figurative understanding. Gregory Cajete, a Tewa Indian from the Santa Clara Pueblo, has written Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (1994). In this work he argues strongly for the need to combine the oral and the written, the scientific and the mythic in the educational process: The philosophical perspective received in modern non-Indian school courses, that the world is an inanimate mass of matter arranged by chance into a set of shapes and energy patterns, is a matter of belief, not experience, and is the polar opposite of the traditional Indian belief. Indian educators thus face the question of whether they will move the substance of education away from this essentially meaningless proposition toward the more realistic Indian model that sees the world as an intimate relationship of living things. (Cajete 1994, 12–13)

Introduction

11

In emphasizing the need for maintaining oral instruction alongside of textual instruction, Cajete’s argument complements neurobiological research that indicates that brain development, memory, and comprehension are affected differently by oral and textual learning. The ways that Native American literature and environmental writing attempt to incorporate an appreciation for and a promotion of orality need to be addressed theoretically in ecocriticism. The concern for environmental justice evident in LaDuke and Cajete leads to another area informing the development of ecocritical theory, globalization studies. Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) gives scant attention to ecology, but echoing Raymond Williams he does focus on a crucial cultural activity in resistance to the homogeneity promoted by corporate globalization and that is the “the production of locality as a structure of feeling” (Appadurai 1996, 181). If nothing else, all nature-oriented literature attends to locality. And Appadurai emphasizes the importance of locality in a postmodern world by noting that “Local knowledge is substantially about producing reliable local subjects as well as about producing reliably local neighborhoods within which such subjects can be recognized and organized” (1996, 181). Human beings need contexts in which to live and these contexts always include a natural environment and, rightly, in Appadurai’s view these environments become an integral part of the identity of their inhabitants, who are contextual beings—what Cajete would call a “geopsyche.” Thus, for Appadurai, globalization studies needs to develop “a theory of intercontextual relations” (1996, 187), of which ecocritical insights must necessarily constitute a component. Along with economic globalization has also come global pollution by transnational corporations and government entities, the Union Carbide plant explosion in Bhopal and the Chernobyl nuclear accident being just two examples. David Naguib Pellow comprehensively studies this issue in Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice, while Vandana Shiva takes up local resistance to transnational corporations and economic development in such books as Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis and addresses globalization’s commodification of seeds and water in Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Likewise in addressing the question of whether or not the nation-state is declining in the face of multinational and transnational growth, Thom Kuehls in Beyond Sovereign Territory (1996) points out how environmental pollution, global warming, and scientific theories of environmental change have called into question the very concept of national sovereignty. Kuehls and Appadurai’s analyses, coupled with work on local environmental justice movements, such as those recorded in Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues

12

Introduction

and Local Experiences (1996), edited by Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari, and theorized by cultural geographers, such as David Harvey, can help ecocriticism understand both the attention to the local paid by authors around the world and maintain attention to the particularities and specificities of the literary representations of such local inhabitation and struggles.

ECOCRITICISM ALWAYS NECESSARILY A PIVOTAL LOCALIST THEORY Such attention to diversity and particularity requires that ecocriticism always remain a pivotal localist theory. Proceeding from the recognition that biological diversity and cultural diversity necessarily interanimate each other, ecocritics would want to avoid the tendency to turn description into prescription and to make the new and the different old and familiar through assimilation. Theories should not allow critics to ignore that which doesn’t fit or to force literatures from other traditions and cultures into the categories created by our local knowledge of national or regional textual practices. Amateur national history in the United States has given rise to a prose genre known as nature writing, but we have to be careful not to go looking for exact reproductions of this form in other national literatures in order to find literary treatments of nature. The use of broader categories, such as my own “nature-oriented literature,” allows for an openness to a wide range of artistic forms, including those that freely cross the great fiction/nonfiction divide argued over in the United States and the United Kingdom. The tenets of ecocriticism, then, ought to remain pivotal rather than foundational—a starting point, a place to step in order to engage in any kind of interpretation, but not a throne on which to sit, or a foundation on which to stand unmoving (see Murphy 1995, chapters 2 and 9). Encouraging localist interpretations will help ecocriticism to remain pivotal and to maintain foundational assumptions as tentative constructs open to correction and emendation. A localist orientation also helps to maintain heterachy, a nonhierarchical appreciation of the diversity of literary production. Canon formation, then, ought always to be temporary, provisional, and reactive to local circumstances.

CONCLUSION Fundamentally, the theories that we develop, domesticate, dissect, and discard are all trying to explain what people are already doing. The autumn 2001

Introduction

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issue of Orion Afield, for example, is devoted to the topic of “Saving Stories” and contains an article titled “Can Stories Save a River?” It relates how a group of writers and academics used a book of stories to encourage a local community to clean up a polluted stream. Poets and novelists don’t have to understand consciously what they are doing; they can just do it. Theorists and critics, in contrast, must articulate what we observe happening and forecast where we think the literature is going. Our theories don’t bring literary activity into being or create readers; rather, theorists affect the coordinates of the directions they are already taking, nudging, and shoving each other along. Teachers, though, do create readers through designing courses and selecting classroom texts. If we are doing this work well we will reduce entropy and increase sustainability for the more than human world in which we live and for the literary production and appreciation that comprises one tiny pathway of the energy channeled by the universe through human material life.

Part One

CLIMBING THROUGH CONCEPTUAL FENCES

Chapter One

The Complexity of Simplicity

DEVELOPING THE CONCEPT Reviving a concept of referentiality may help turn people toward approaching theory in terms of understanding and articulating what people are already doing and how people might consciously approach doing what they ought to be doing. But, while the price of paper and the energy used to produce it continue to rise, talk remains cheap. But it does not do so evenly. The cost of face-to-face talk between people in the same city has increased due to the distances people commute to work and the sprawl that separates friends, especially as people become more connected with networking and more disconnected from neighborliness. At the same time, people imagine, if not actually experience, that the costs of distance communication have declined as a result of e-mail, flat rate phone calls, and the like. The ability of people to send larger and larger files makes it easier to run off at the fingers at nearly infinite length. But while such facility may make theorizing that precedes practice easier, it may actually hinder theorizing that builds on practice. Trying to come to terms with literary and critical writing about referentiality that seeks to address situated self-conscious action can, in contrast, prove difficult and cumbersome if we try to address the particularities, contradictions, and moment-to-moment problems of the life to be referenced rather than to elide particularities and smooth over inconsistencies through universalist abstractions. Simplicity, for instance, can prove to be amazingly complex. It would often seem that the technological “world is too much with us” these days when we find ourselves surrounded by people with telephones coming out of their ears wherever we go; or when an American commercial creates the illusion that people can have more freedom to enjoy the great outdoors if they 17

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take along various digital devices that enable them to surf the web while fishing and to fax reports from their palmtops while watching the sun set. And with Americans typically owing more than they earn, losing oversized homes full of luxuries bought on credit to foreclosure, and declaring bankruptcy almost as frequently as divorcing, cries can be heard across the nation calling for “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” These cries take many forms. Some are radical in the extreme as people in the desert prepare for their electricity to run out as quickly as their aquifers will run dry. Others are quite mild and aimed at urban professionals, such as Elaine St. James’s Simplify Your Life or any of her other books on simplifying holidays, child raising, and the like. Such an approach appeals to both exurbanites and inner urbanites engaged in gentrification (the restoration of older, once upscale neighborhoods that suffered urban decay after World War II). Certainly, the idea of simplicity is not new, even in terms of notions of its being a choice rather than a necessity. In the early 1800s in the United States, a host of utopian groups from England, Germany, and other European countries settled in various parts of the United States, particularly Pennsylvania, in order to establish communities usually unified by a religious vision and organized around simple living, shared work, and communal property. Many of these communities expected the imminent second coming of Christ, not anticipating a lifetime commitment, much less a multigenerational one. Others have maintained multigenerational, religiously based simplicity practices, such as the Amish. Their strong separatism and antitechnology orientation, however, have resulted in little knowledge or interest in their way of life on the part of other Americans, and the association of that way of life with a specific religious affiliation has made it seem even more exclusive and unattractive (Wendell Berry is one of the few environmental writers to give them any attention). Generally, the nineteenth-century movements saw simplicity in terms of religious purification and an other-worldly orientation. The idea that simplicity should be more this-worldly—a response to consumerism, industrialization, and the concomitant destruction of the earth—has arisen mainly in recent decades. One prominent manifestation of this trend is the development of Simplicity Circles, promoted by such writers and activists as Duane Elgin and Cecile Andrews. Their approach seems to avoid the pitfalls of extremism in any direction and is based, as the title of Elgin’s book Voluntary Simplicity indicates, on people making unlegislated and personal choices about simplicity and the degree and kind of simplification to be practiced. They do advocate significant scaling down, but with a margin for joy, entertainment, and pleasure rather than sackcloth and apocalyptic penance on the one hand or

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draconian legislation on the other. As Andrews explains, “Elgin sees it as a movement that leads people from a life of materialism to a life of inner joy. Giving up our obsession with consumption will give us time to explore our inner potential” (1997, 27). Given that Andrews penned those words in the late 1990s, it is perhaps no surprise that she calls for the adoption of an “ecocentric worldview,” building on the writing of Carolyn Merchant, and claims that “The day to day expression of the ecocentric ethic is the life of voluntary simplicity” (1990, 22). Nor is it surprising that she looks back in time by quoting an early twentiethcentury Quaker, Richard Gregg, and by invoking Thoreau as part of her process of defining voluntary simplicity. In many spheres of American life, then, there are people seeking to make their lives less complicated who have embarked on a variety of paths for realizing their diverse conceptions of simplicity. In addition, some of these paths have been articulated in the arts.

SIMPLICITY IN LITERATURE A formidable body of literature currently exists that addresses this idea of simplicity from a variety of angles. I want to consider here some of the diverse styles and positions such literature embodies and to discuss the ways in which such literature responds to the still widely read American classic of the ideal simple life, Thoreau’s Walden. I do this for several reasons: one, much has been made of trying to moor American Nature Writing to Walden’s dock; two, a significant number of contemporary writers who advocate a return to, or a discovery of a new type of, simplicity often allude to, meditate on, or argue with, Thoreau and his text; three, the illusory kind of simplicity that Thoreau promotes, or at least is used by others to promote, generates an antiutopian backlash from more people today than those it inspires to develop a realistic and livable simplicity. In this regard it would be helpful if more of the writers who invoke Thoreau would clarify whether they view Walden as primarily a theoretical piece, an inspirational piece, a test case exercise, or a lifestyle model. Why call it an “illusory kind of simplicity” ? Because largely through omission, Thoreau fails to educate his readers into the actual complexity that a livable simplicity would have required in his day and certainly requires in ours. Further, he promotes an individualistic isolationism that precludes the possibility of widespread social transformation—something that we desperately need. Those of us engaged in teaching and critiquing literature who do intend to encourage social transformation in this direction need to provide models and sources that seem flexibly realizable by many, rather than only a few, of our students.

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I don’t want to spend much time on Thoreau himself, except to observe that Walden omits some crucial details that must be taken into account in seeking to navigate the complex interrelationships that any effort at simplicity will require. One, Thoreau omits his continued relationship with his parents and their business. Two, Thoreau omits his regular friendship with the Emersons, and their being a frequent source for his caloric intake. Three, Thoreau downplays the degree to which even his idealized ascetic lifestyle required interdependence on a variety of people, such as nail makers. Four, Thoreau downplays the degree to which the area around Walden Pond had already been the scene of extensive human intervention, as Kent Ryden has pointed out. Five, Thoreau acts as if the only real human beings are men. As the Harvard comparativist and feminist deconstructionist, Barbara Johnson, noted, The association of deliberateness with human agency has a long (and very American) history. It is deliberateness, for instance, that underlies that epic of separation and self-reliant autonomy, Thoreau’s Walden. “I went to the woods,” writes Thoreau, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Clearly, for Thoreau, pregnancy was not an essential fact of life. Yet for him as well as for every human being that has yet existed, someone else’s pregnancy is the very first fact of life. How might the plot of human subjectivity be reconceived (so to speak) if pregnancy rather than autonomy is what raises the question of deliberateness? (1987, 190)

In line with Johnson’s emphasis, I believe that environmental writing and ecological understanding require a fundamental grounding not in autonomy or self-reliance but in interdependence and mutual aid. Thinking of Walden as a referential text, one engaged, according to Lawrence Buell in “outer mimesis,” I have to conclude that it is a work of fiction in which only selective aspects of the experience that Thoreau references are included, while others are omitted in order to create a more unified plot and shape a better story. Thinking of it as a theoretical text, I have to complain that it lacks sufficient reference to certain pivotal concepts, such as the fundamental physiological nature of human beings as interdependent social animals. As a result of considering such problems, I have to conclude that simplicity can and should mean the opposite of complicated, as everyone expects; but, on the other hand, achieving an uncomplicated way of life requires a complex set of interactions that not everyone wants to admit. By “complicated” I mean loaded down with unnecessary social burdens, overwhelming daily details, government paperwork, excessive logistic convolutions, enslaving consumer habits, disease causing personal production practices, work anxiety induced illnesses and addictions, and the like. By “complex” I mean

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the necessarily multifaceted features of material interdependence, psychologically healthy and gratifying social structures, mind-body-spirit interanimation, and the like. And among these necessarily complex human and environmental interactions, we need to foreground those aspects ignored or downplayed in Walden, such as pregnancy, family, friends, and community. Further, the retreat to the woods ideally rendered in Walden should be understood in its subordinate role as a retreat, that is, a period of withdrawal, in the complex process of simple living. That is to say, the singular dwelling of an individual in extreme circumstances is a temporary moment, a pause for reflection, to facilitate his or her return to the fulfillment of living socially among other human beings. Too often in efforts by professors to develop a canon of nature writing or selection of readings for courses, these individual retreats from the rest of human society and culture are treated as permanent, even when temporary, and emphasized over more community-oriented retreats and ways of living. And these can be the case whether the writers selected are men or women. I have in mind here the ways in which writings by such authors as Annie Dillard, Anne LaBastille, John Hanson Mitchell, and John Muir have been used. For my first three main examples in this chapter, I want to use a set of contemporary cabin-based retreat narratives, all of which make explicit reference to Thoreau, but in fundamental ways depart from the vision projected by him and the dominant ways in which he is interpreted. These texts are Charles Siebert’s Wickerby, Charles Gaines’s A Family Place, and Nancy Lord’s Fishcamp. Siebert subtitles his 1998 book, Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral. It depicts his five-month retreat from Brooklyn to a Canadian border cabin with an emphasis on how much he appreciates and feels at home in his Brooklyn neighborhood. Siebert invokes Thoreau when he remarks about his plumbing, electricity, phone, car, radio, and TV that Some might consider such devices gross impurities in the context of a place like Wickerby, but then I hadn’t left Brooklyn to achieve some Thoreauvian ideal, to shed all inventions and conventions by way of arriving at a more essential self. Such endeavors—a modern man playing at primitivism—tend to be far more encumbered by self-consciousness and pretense than any truly plain existence is by its inherent hardships. (Siebert 1998, 54–55)

Interestingly enough, Siebert’s trip to Wickerby is a retreat brought about by two circumstances: his girlfriend has left for an extended stay filming a nomadic African people and urban renewal has rendered the street in front of his apartment building unnavigable. His solitude is, then, to a large degree externally rather than self-imposed. And throughout his solitary stay at Wickerby

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he is drawn into relationship with the few individuals in the area and the animals that inhabit the locale and his cabin. These in turn cause him to reflect on the animals and people of his Brooklyn neighborhood. In the end, Siebert has gained a greater appreciation for the wild nature to be found in relatively wild lands—mainly second growth abandoned farmland—and a greater appreciation for the wild nature that inhabits his urban locale and inhabits every human being, such as the mumblers who raise pigeons on rooftops. As he realizes near book’s end, “I see everything here that I had at Wickerby except that it’s all in the margins. . . . At Wickerby, I was the marginal, the excerpted one” (Siebert 1998, 214). And he hopes to return the following summer with his girlfriend, Bex, to continue to work through the dialectics of rural and urban, wild and cultured, as they manifest themselves in both locations. His desire to return with Bex is significant on two counts. First, he wishes to share the experience of retreat, not making it always a solitary discovery. Two, Wickerby actually belongs to Bex’s family, not Siebert, and his desire for them to return as a couple reminds the reader of Siebert’s detailing how the cabin has a history of family involvement and historical continuity. There are several crucial aspects to Siebert’s understanding recorded in Wickerby. One, human beings are by their nature a communal species. Two, human beings are animals and like other animals build homes for themselves; and as a result of being communal, generally build homes in order to live either together or in close proximity to one another. Three, as a result of urbanites living closely packed together, they long for, need, and ought to have the opportunity to experience solitude on an occasional basis in order to be able to continue to live together. Four, such living together will benefit from a rural appreciation of walking, of open space, of wild plants and animals made possible by the original 1870 plan for Siebert’s Brooklyn parkway neighborhood to be “a kind of urban-pastoral weave wherein appointed pavement keeps giving way to a provided pause” (Siebert 1998, 23). And that word “neighborhood” is key because Siebert can long to return to his blighted portion of Brooklyn precisely because it is a neighborhood with neighbors and friends and face-to-face human contact, with not only the marginal and the eccentric but also the mainstream and the common. The simple life, accepting of the complexities of human interaction, can be achieved, suggests Siebert, in Brooklyn as well as anywhere else. While Siebert would like to make Wickerby a family experience once again, Charles Gaines in his 1994 A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life tells the reader about a cabin that is literally built as a family experience, with a photo of it on the dust jacket of the hardback edition. A significant portion of Gaines’s book actually details how he and his family grad-

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ually lost the simple life that had marked the early years of their marriage. Over nearly seventeen years, financial success made their lives increasingly complicated and eventually unmanageable, until their marriage came completely unraveled. Their marriage was breaking apart, but they refused to let it float downstream; instead undertaking a retreat into simplicity on the coast of Nova Scotia, which would provide the framework and the shelter for resimplifying their lives. Such resimplifying has enabled Gaines to return to family as the center of his life, with a clear recognition that it is not so much where you live, but how you live there that determines your familial, communal, and natural relationships. Gaines declares of their place in Nova Scotia that “the dominant feature of our dream for the place was the creation of an environment where, for a few weeks each year, we could reconstitute our family life with our children through daily, self-contained living together. We wanted the place to be not so much a ‘getaway’ as a ‘get back to’—a site for reclaiming intimacy” (1994, 39). The cabin in the wild here means acting out simplicity for improving the physical and psychological health of each individual as a member of the family, and not conjuring the illusion of individual autonomy. Gaines, too, alludes directly to Thoreau and Walden. In comparing Thoreau’s cabin with the one he and his wife intend to build, Gaines notes that “Patricia and I too wanted to reorganize our lives around a new place in order to live more simply (though neither of us was much interested in meager), but together with our kids, we found, we have a good many more needs to meet than did Thoreau” (1994, 44). And in detailing the various luxury items that Gaines includes in his plans, he remarks that “Rather than feeling ashamed of all that dispensable recreational equipment, I liked imagining Thoreau having some of it at Walden Pond and secretly enjoying it . . . indulging a secret playfulness that no one in Concord could suspect in the stern and parsimonious author” (1994, 45). But more than gadgets, what the Gaineses find generating the greatest pleasure in their leisure moments in Nova Scotia is the opportunity and practice of spending those moments with family members and friends. Without the ability to project the possibilities for joy and companionship, hard work and leisure in a communal environment, we are going to persuade few people to embrace simplicity. Only when most people realize that through simplicity they can save themselves will they be also willing to practice simplicity in order to save the wild world around them. Additionally, only when people appreciate, as Charles Gaines does, that in reconstituting themselves in relative simplicity and gaining such things as balance, fulfillment, peace of mind, and mutually reliant love rather than giving up status, business success, and gadget acquisition competition will their

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spirits truly open up to preserving, conserving, and maintaining. As Gaines notes, With a national divorce rate of 50 percent, and the American landscape littered with child abuse, welfare dependency, crime, drug use, learning disabilities, and all the other maimings of exploded families; with high-riding greed and materialism having turned consumerism into our most sacred and celebrated national ritual; with millions of us having chased the chimera of personal freedom into an existential black hole of loneliness and longing . . . more than a few other Americans wanted to . . . find a new way of living. (1994, 124–25)

He and his wife were able to look at the histories of their own families “for an historical model of how life can be lived short on individual license but long on loving involvement with other people, delightedly sacrificing independence for ties, and lived that way religiously, as a daily joyous discipline” (Gaines 1994, 125). In outlining such a life, Gaines turns to the image of the hearth, “the place where life originated and was sustained and where the skills and values of living were passed along from elders to children” (1994, 131), and that hearth is missing from Thoreau. Such a hearth can, however, be found in a rather unlikely cabin: the fishcamp that Nancy Lord and her husband, Ken, call home for the four months they spend commercially fishing for salmon in Alaska. Lord published Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore in 1997, sharing the details of a salmon fishing season. She and Ken do not retreat to the cabin and the wild inlet on which it rests, but rather live there for as long as the weather and the work allow each year, and define it as their hearth. To the degree that their life includes a retreat it is to the “roaded side of the inlet” where others like them, who live permanently in Alaska, ride out the winter (Lord 1997, 253). Thus, unlike the cabins of Thoreau, Siebert, and Gaines, Lord’s cabin is not a place for surcease but one of intense physical labor; it is the base for their main economic livelihood. And yet, at the same time, life becomes more simplified for them there because they become so singularly focused. Lord relates of their continued commitment to fishing in this particular place that Stubbornly, we stay—because making a living is less important to us than living where we want to be, in an environment where what we do for work fits comfortably into the overall life of the place. We live with fish and with others who live with fish—not just our human neighbors but also seals, bears, magpies, wind and waves, tides, boats, stories of the past, dreams and wishes and fears: all those things animate and inanimate, tangible and intangible, that make up the community in which we find ourselves at home. (1997, xiii–xiv)

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If one listens to these words he or she can hear Lord’s ecological sense of the web of the world in which she and her husband are interwoven, a complex location, grounded in a simple life, catching and selling fish. As with Lord’s recognition of the ecological web of their lives, her book also documents and examines the ways in which human beings have altered and continue to alter the natural world in which they live with an attention not found in Siebert and Gaines. Siebert is more concerned with seeing the wild and the natural world in his urban surroundings, while Gaines is more intent on the continuing bucolic character of Nova Scotia. Lord, for instance, writes about cutting down a nearby tree to make space for their airplane, the means of access to the fishcamp: One tree—a necessity. I am, perhaps, defensive. . . . People come to paradise and then they cut trees, they kill things, they change the land and what grows on it and can be sustained by it. Then it isn’t paradise anymore. . . . We don’t pretend to leave no marks on this land, but we don’t leave many. (1997, 28)

Perhaps it is her defensiveness that causes her to turn her father’s attention, recorded in the next few pages, to the activities of beavers in the area, cutting down in a season far more trees than the Lords will remove in a lifetime and just as busy building habitats as the creatures Siebert observes at Wickerby. From here, Lord goes on to critique Thoreau’s “grim assessment,” as she calls it, of the eastern forests, pointing out that along with human restoration efforts, “woodproduct economics and the resilience of natural systems . . . today’s eastern woods again shelter the missing creatures on Thoreau’s list” (1997, 32). In other words, as with Gaines’s book, Lord’s Fishcamp emphasizes the dynamic nature of life, emphasizing in greater detail and clarity that not only have people destroyed their environments, but they have also lived in dynamic balance with them, and in various places are acting to restore environments—not freezing nature in some museum tableau, but generating new environments, new habitats. Lord’s book is not some romantic elegy; it includes the realities of economics as they impinge on their deliberate efforts at living simply, practicing a vocation enmeshed in international trade and global markets. Their simple commercial activity involves a complex set of activities, not only at fishcamp where they must take care of nets, boats, loading scows, cabin, neighbors’ needs, competition with other creatures, and accommodation with the elements; but also at their winter home where they study market developments, participate in grassroots political campaigns, involve themselves in the lives of neighbors and relatives, and earn extra income as they can. Through it all, Lord observes: The world does all connect. We know these sacred truths, east and west, in our bones: everything has a life of its own, but nothing lives by itself. And there’s

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no picking out any one thing without finding it hitched to absolutely everything else. For the eight months we live away from fishcamp, we never cease knowing it as home . . . making it a habit, the custom and everyday practice of our lives. (1997, 256)

I selected these three writers, Siebert, Gaines, and Lord, not only because they combine Thoreau and cabins, but also because all of their books deserve attention. To commune intimately with wild nature and to pursue simplicity, however, does not necessarily even require retreating to, or living in the wilderness, although it does require a willingness to engage, as Siebert demonstrates, whatever nonhuman nature exists in the place that a person calls home. Two additional authors suggest other avenues to pursue beyond the cabin in the woods: Freeman House does so through discussing river restoration in Totem Salmon and Sharon Butala through meditating upon homesteading on a Canadian cattle ranch in The Perfection of the Morning. Like Nancy Lord, Freeman House is concerned with the life and continued existence of wild salmon. Unlike her, he has for twenty years been engaged, not in catching salmon for food, but in facilitating the breeding of Mattole king salmon. He has done so through a grassroots spawning support group and a watershed restoration process. Both are intended to improve the ecological sustainability of the Mattole River watershed in which these king salmon are born and in turn give birth. Also, situated in northern California, House’s habitat is blessed with weather that enables him to remain in one place year-round and live in a much more populated rural locale than can Lord. Although House and his family may be said to have fled the city to the woods, they did not move to Petrolia, California, as a retreat from anything so much as a going toward something. In this case, it is a general lifelong commitment to the then newly emerging bioregional vision of the San Francisco based Planet Drum Foundation and a specific commitment to salmon and watershed restoration in and with an established community—twenty years of which is recorded in Totem Salmon. While the choice of salmon seems very much a fortuitous one for Nancy Lord and her husband, it is quite calculated for Freeman House and his cohorts. He remarks that It seems that in this part of the world, salmon have always been experienced by humans very directly as food, and food as relationship. . . . Given the abundance and regularity of the provision, one can imagine a relationship perceived as being between the feeder and the fed rather than between hunted and hunter. . . . The food swims up the stream each year at much the same time and gives itself, alive and generous. (House 1999, 10)

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And, in a sense quite similar to Lord’s feelings at the end of her book, House also notes that Salmon were also experienced as connection. At the time of year when the salmon come back, drawn up the rivers by spring freshets or fall rains, everyone in the old village must have gained a renewal of their immediate personal knowledge of why the village was located where it was, of how tightly the lives of the people were tied to the lives of the salmon. (1999, 11)

From the beginning, then, House emphasizes connection, interrelationship, and community, already inclusive of both human and other creaturely participants. Further, House repeatedly reminds his reader that this participation is a multigenerational one, working itself out in geological rather than humanbased temporal cycles (1999, 44). Just as Siebert takes aim at pseudo-primitive posturing, House also clarifies his vision of watershed restoration, ecological equilibrium, and human balance as contemporary and realistic rather than nostalgic and romantic. He does so at one point by speaking of a friend’s understanding of their restoration work: Machines and other technologies have become part of the modern human psyche and social fabric, he realized; there is no turning back. . . . But perhaps there were signposts that led forward to a different set of relationships among lives in what had come to be called . . . the postindustrial age. . . . It doesn’t take an expert in the manipulation of statistics to understand that the survival of the entire human species depends on a sustainable relationship to the local expression of the processes of the biosphere. (House 1999, 48–49)

Such a sustainable relationship cannot be achieved by a single individual acting in isolation. From the beginning of his involvement with the salmon, House recognized that his relationship with wild nature was an engaged, activist one requiring cooperation and participation of numerous individuals working together for a common cause. At first, when he was only doing salmon spawning support, the number of people was relatively small: “we knew that there was enough interest among local people of every persuasion that we could locate stream-side incubators in the yards of volunteers. Backyard passion would supply the level of volunteerism needed for the daily maintenance of the little household hatcheries we envisioned,” he remarks (House 1999, 129). But as the recognition evolved that saving this subspecies of salmon from extinction and reinvigorating its presence in the Mattole River would require not just salmon support but also watershed restoration, the number of people

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in the Mattole watershed who needed to participate in this project in some way grew to become virtually all of its human inhabitants. In other words, restoration of habitat to facilitate the flourishing of one wild species required that the domestic, cultured dimensions of creaturely inhabitation of the watershed be revised, rethought, and reintegrated into the wild cycles that predated human, particularly Euro-American, settlement. As House came to understand it, for any creature to survive in the long run, nature and culture had to be consciously integrated in people’s daily lives, not seen as separate and distinct (1999, 153). And most importantly, human culture had to be understood as interdependent with, rather than independent, autonomous, or dominant over, wild nature. As House explains it in the course of defining the world “wild,” “if the word is fastidiously defined to describe a homeostatic, self-organized relationship that does not require management from outside itself, then it can provide us with a meditation large enough to occupy a lifetime” (1999, 133). In understanding this definition, it is important to recognize that House’s bioregional vision perceives human beings as having the potential to become inhabitory people who affect nature from the inside rather than the outside of a locally situated wild system, and hence can become part of a “selforganized relationship.” As far as the human community in which House lived that meant “a community sensitive enough to understand and adjust itself to the opportunities and constraints of an even larger whole—in our case a riverine watershed of three hundred square miles” (1999, 157), which, by the way, contained about 2,000 people. One of the beauties of this type of orientation for House’s community was the realization through scientific study and consensual discussion and planning that no individual’s livelihood was in any greater need of extinction than that of any local species. Logging practices would need to change to stop the erosion that damaged the river, but timber harvesting could continue without clear cutting. Further, a careful mapping of the region showed that “over 70 percent of the large erosion problems in the watershed were related to poorly designed roads. Most [Mattole Restoration] Council members believed that the survival of the ranching tradition was a necessary element in any dream of maintaining the wild” (House 1999, 187). If the diversity of species is to be appreciated, the diversity of human activity also has to be accommodated in developing a consensual place-based politics that can have as great a degree of inclusiveness as possible with the longest multigenerational vision of dynamic interaction that is perceivable. House concludes Totem Salmon with these words: “As we engage directly the recovery of our shared habitats, we find ourselves in the embrace of the expansive community that offers the best hope of realizing ourselves as fully human. There is no separate life” (1999, 218).

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Freeman House and many of his early compatriots, as well as numerous later allies in the Mattole Watershed, are people who led relatively simple lives compared to their urban American counterparts in terms of their occupations. But in addition, they were often people who had already adopted some individually designed form of voluntary simplicity. Yet, as House shows his readers, once these people began to perceive themselves as part and parcel of a larger world of nature and culture intertwined, the realization of their initially modest goal of helping one type of salmon to spawn became increasingly complex as larger and larger circles of connection, domestic and wild, were consciously interworked toward specific local goals. As Nancy Lord and others have recognized, everything is hitched to everything else, and the simple living of sustainable local fishing, ranching, and logging in Mattole requires a complex and interanimating vision of ecological process. In many ways, however, Freeman House’s experience and visionary practice represented in Totem Salmon is an extreme case. It serves as an example of just how complex one’s life can become in taking up an activist simplicity aimed essentially at remaking contemporary American society. Sharon Butala’s experience is more narrowly proscribed and, like Siebert’s time at Wickerby, is one that most readers can find more possible to emulate than the genuinely heroic life commitment that House has made. In The Perfection of the Morning, published in 1994, Butala records her personal apprenticeship in nature that begins at the age of thirty-six. She did not retreat into the wilds, but rather married into the life of cattle ranching in southwestern Saskatchewan just north of the Montana border. Certainly, Butala expected her life to become simpler as she left urban life behind, but she did not anticipate she would slowly begin “to realize how life for all of us in the West is informed and shaped by Nature in ways we don’t even realize, much less notice consciously” (1994, xv). In seeking a certain simplicity, Butala had the opportunity to observe the ways in which human life is governed by a complex set of processes vast in geological scope and temporal sweep, and in Perfection she records her seventeen-year journey to that awareness. That journey begins with an appreciation for the qualities that persuaded her to marry her second husband, Peter Butala, of whom she notes: “he was secure in his community. . . . Maybe it was his calmness, engendered by the deep sense of security stemming from a life lived all in one place, and of his sense of the rightness of his life that attracted me . . . but also the greenness and beauty of the landscape” (1994, 2). It turned out, however, that Butala really had no idea how much of a new life she would need to adopt to remain married on a Saskatchewan ranch, particularly through the terribly harsh winters. And yet, something quite magical happened to her. Writing of having to forage for kindling to get the wood

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stove going on a day when the temperature had fallen to minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit the night before, she focuses not on the difficulties, but on the numinous quality of basic experience: “It was a world where things were . . . clear and simple and made a kind of sense so elemental that I didn’t have to learn them and I didn’t have to think at all with my mind. I thought instead with my bones and my muscles, with some deeply human place in my gut” (Butala 1994, 53). She notes that while she “was doing hard physical labor,” she was also “moving in beauty” (Butala 1994, 54). Here Butala expresses the same kind of bone weary satisfaction with simple living that House depicts in the opening chapters of Totem Salmon. Also, over a long period of difficult adjustment to the relative isolation from more varied human companionship that ranch life generally requires, she came to an understanding about rural people in contrast to urban ones: “It is one thing to come from the city and be overwhelmed by the beauty of Nature and to speak of it, and another thing entirely to have lived in it so long that it has seeped into your bones and your blood and is inseparable from your own being. . . .” (Butala 1994, 89). And from that Butala was able to reconceive the development of human cultures in terms of a rather simple, yet complex, and uncomplicated approach: conform local human cultures to the land in which they live (1994, 100). American and Canadian urban cultures have become so complicated, because they generate a system whereby everything organic is made to fit a self-perpetuating artificial system of production and consumption. This system has been set in motion with no strategic ground as the measure of its integrity or “congruence”—to use a term that Butala finds quite powerful for her own understanding. While Butala expresses the feeling that she did not become integrated into the already well-established community of rural women in her area because she was such a newcomer; nevertheless she felt that she had understood enough of her life and their lives after a decade of ranching that she wrote a novel titled Luna about such women. She remarks of her thinking about this novel that It began to seem clear to me that if women had gained in personal freedom and self-determination by abandoning or being forced off the land, for one reason or another, and out of that traditional life, they had lost some valuable things too, the chief one being a stable support system in which to raise their children in peace and security, a terrible loss from which society, I believe, has not yet begun to feel the full and awful effects. (Butala 1994, 183)

These words take me back to Charles Gaines’s remarks about the American culture in a pell-mell rush toward self-destruction for which he sought an al-

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ternative in taking the family to Nova Scotia to build their cabin. That is not to say that Butala observes the continuation of aspects of traditional rural life uncritically in terms of women’s oppression. But even as she critiques the patriarchal deformities of such life, she recognizes the possibility that the positive aspects need not be abandoned. Rather, she argues for gender differences to become part of the complexity of simple living. Unfortunately, at the end of the 1980s a series of natural and commercial factors intersected that threatened every manifestation of traditional life in southwestern Saskatchewan as its agricultural economy collapsed. And with that Butala saw the threat of the end of the kind of existence integrated with nature in her locale that Freeman House and his friends were so successfully realizing in theirs. With that insight, Butala writes toward the end of The Perfection of the Morning that “If we abandon farms and farmers as we have known them for the last ten thousand years, we abandon our best hope for redefining ourselves as children of Nature and for reclaiming our lost souls, for what other sizable body of people exists in North America with their knowledge?” (1994, 203). Why? Because, she observes that they embody the following: “tightly knit extended families and small communities . . . where interdependence is clear and cooperation thus a way of life. . . . Country people understand how the world was built” (Butala 1994, 203–4). And in that understanding lies hope for the dominant postindustrial cultures and countries of the world to learn to be at home once again in the world. Paul Shepard makes the point that “Belonging is the pivot of life, the point at which selfhood becomes possible—not just belonging in general, but in particular. One belongs to a universe of order and purpose that must initially be realized as a particular community of certain species in a terrain of unique geology” (quoted in House 1999, 158). Appropriate as a conclusion to Butala’s remarks it is certainly not surprising that Freeman House finds these words eminently quotable in Totem Salmon, words to which my three previous authors no doubt would also consent.

SIMPLICITY IN VARIETY Consideration of works such as Totem Salmon and The Perfection of the Morning, along with other books, such as Fishcamp, are crucial for coming to an understanding of the complexity of simplicity as it refers not just to retreats into the woods or the wilds of arid plains, but also as it refers to working in those and more settled places on this earth. If simplicity is to become a lifelong practice, then theories, conceptions, and representations of it have to include ways by which people can earn a living within the money

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economies in which they are immersed. I think we all stand to gain from an increased attention to a writing that emphasizes family and community efforts to relate to and become integrated with the natural world. In that vein, it is important to keep in mind that there are many more works that a critic can use to approach the complexity of simplicity through natureoriented literature. Certainly, there is a need to extend and intensify attention to other agrarian and ranching writings, such as those of Wendell Berry, Jane Brox, Linda Hasselstrom, Wes Jackson, David Mas Masumoto, and Dori Sanders. Such a group would enable critics to look more clearly at regional and ethnic differences among authors. Critics could look at other homesteading and community nature activism, as well, such as in the prose of Amy Blackmarr, Annick Smith, and Gary Snyder. Add to these Sallyann Murphey’s Bean Blossom Dreams, about a Chicago family who moves to the Indiana countryside in order to simplify their lives and participate in growing their food, and other books like it. Many of these writers also invoke Thoreau at some point in their writing and do so in a variety of ways. But invariably, their experiences are not depicted in nearly as isolated, individualistic, or independent a manner as Thoreau represented his experiment to be. These works that integrate family, community, and environment hold out greater hope for inspiring a variety of people to undertake a diverse array of acts of beneficial simplification in a complex process of interweaving theories and experiences, and referential writing about them.

Chapter Two

Difference and Responsibility in Literary Alternatives to the Nation-State

DIFFERENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY AS ANOTHERNESS AND ANSWERABILITY In the previous chapter I focused on works that would normally be labeled creative or literary nonfiction. But I don’t want to imply by that set of examples that referentiality requires writing in an allegedly nonfictional genre, or even that works labeled fiction need to be written in a realist mode to be treated by readers as referential. Rather, here I want to claim that the dialogical concepts of answerability and anotherness provide a way of talking about how various movements within nature-oriented literatures ground their action and ground their readers in ethically referential situations aware of difference and responsibility. They do so without presuming that nonfiction equals fact and that facts are required for writing about nature. Thus the equation of nature writing = nonfiction = fact = truth that formed the dominant mode of literary criticism that privileged the nonfiction natural history essay over all other literary modes in the early years of American ecocriticism is cast aside for a recognition of the multivalent textual displays of the search for better ecologically ethical understanding. Also, we find the casting aside of perhaps the most profound symbol of realism, the nation-state, as authors turn to transnational, bioregional, localist, new agrarian, and futurist sites and locations for the settings, contexts, and political placement of the ethical conflicts they narrate in which allegiance to, and betrayal of, habitat, place, and environment take center stage. But are these thought-experiment literary alternatives to the nation-state just that, imaginative fictions, self-referential verbal constructs; or, do they indeed ground their readers in a specific ethically referential position of having to 33

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examine the role of the nation-state in relation to environmental issues and environmental justice? And, in particular, to what degree do these literary works align themselves with, provide alternatives to, or push forward contemporary philosophical and political thinking about the future of the state in contemporary green political theory? The best way to consider answers to these questions is to combine the Bakhtinian-based concepts of anotherness and answerability in relation to literary allonational formations in conjunction with the most advanced thinking about ecological democracy, which, at the moment, is represented by the recently published work of Robyn Eckersley. The concepts of anotherness and answerability are initially derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Bakhtin emphasizes at the outset the “once-occurrent event” of being (1993, 1), which he understands as the actual plane of existence upon which each of our thoughts and actions occurs as a deed performed once and only once by a unique individual. And while he defines these deeds of thought and action in a radically individualistic way, he does not define them in a solipsistic way. Rather, these unique events—such as a person’s decision to eat meat or go vegetarian at lunch, perhaps to skip the mad cow lurking in the menu—do not occur in isolation from other unique events but in solidarity with them through mutual participation in human culture and in the material world. The individual fear about tainted food is linked with a government policy, is linked with cultural taboos regarding cannibalism, is linked with a social network that has or has not debated bovine growth hormone (bgh), cloning, or genetically modified organism (gmo) food processing. In this larger domain of culture my unique and once occurrent actions take on the ethical responsibility of answerability. And in the cultural domain of environmental ethics that answerability must necessarily involve both human and nonhuman actants, must necessarily involve other entities that have their own unique once occurrent event of being, whether they enjoy volitional behavior or not. Many writers have perceived this answerability in the domain of culture as obligating their characters and themselves to entertain alternatives to the nation-state and, at times, to rebuke those readers who imagine the human world only in terms of nation-states and who accept the limitations on answerability that the environmental instrumentalism of their respective governments would place on them. The U.S. nation-state, for instance, tells us that we must accept the use of depleted uranium on the battlefield and the practice field without regard to its long-term environmental impact on noncombatants, both human and nonhuman. For some, answerability requires that we protest such weaponry for its environmental contamination and that we also protest the military occupation of native peoples’ lands where so much military practice degrades the inhabitability of those environments.

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Such native writers as Simon Ortiz in the U.S. southwest and Haunani-Kay Trask in Hawai’i have written eloquent poems of military protest precisely along these lines. For environmental ethics answerability must extend beyond moral considerability for humans to encompass other entities. And here we get to the concept of otherness. But I quickly want to step beyond that concept of the Other, extremely popular in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. I want instead to think about the concept of anotherness, based on the Another—not the Alien and not the Stranger, but the brother, the cousin, the sister, and not just the human ones, but all the creatures with whom we share the planet. In this postmodern period of globalization, that sharing is becoming increasingly destructive, self-destructive, and excessively consumptive. The domain of culture is one largely dominated throughout the realm of the new world order by the propaganda of nation-states using continuous growth economic models to guide national political, economic, and military policy. If that claim is descriptively accurate in its larger outline, then literature that presents allonational formations necessarily stands at the forefront of a contestatory international environmental literature by offering alternatives to the business-as-usual models accepted as realpolitik (for earlier discussions of these ideas, see Murphy 1995, 1998).

GLOBALIZATION AND THE NATION-STATE Arjun Appadurai, referenced in my introduction to this book, writes that “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation. . . . But most writers who have asserted or implied that we need to think postnationally have not asked exactly what emergent social forms compel us to do so, or in what way” (1996, 158). He claims that we see today in identity politics an effort to generate nationalism based on nonterritorial principles of solidarity that necessarily rely on cultural constructions of ethnicities and counterethnicities because of the strongly diasporic character of much contemporary global population flows (Appadurai 1996, 165). Such efforts would generate a stateless or multistate nationalism, but it is doubtful that such an entity could hold people’s allegiance for long without some homeland or territory to picture, to visit, to desire. In that regard, Masao Miyoshi views recent efforts at nationalism and ethnic separatism as “brute” response to the expansion of transnational corporations (TNCs) that are coming to dominate the economic world order (1993, 744). These TNCs are particularly troubling to Miyoshi because they no longer have any interests in or allegiances to a particular territory on the planet, national or otherwise, and thus are wholly irresponsible ecologically

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(Miyoshi 1993, 748). At the same time, nationalism divorced from situated knowledge, local culture, and any history of responsibility or stewardship of local ecologies could end up equally irresponsible in terms of long-range commitments to sustainability and any form of ecological restoration or conservation. In early 2004, MIT Press published The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty by Robyn Eckersley, which represents some of the most advanced thinking on the notion of the “green state” from the position of green critical theory. It is noteworthy that the two key terms in her subtitle are “Democracy” and “Sovereignty,” because ecotheory, environmentalism, environmental justice, and ecopolitics have all called in various ways for radically extending the concept of democracy to embrace entities beyond the human in political deliberations and have all called for the debunking of the myth of sovereignty. As J. F. Rischard, the World Bank’s vice president for Europe, observes, the theories of the nation-state based on the establishment of absolute rule within the borders of a given state as decreed by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia presumed that the borders of the nation-state could contain not only a political system but also under it an economic system and an environmental system. But, Rischard points out that the new world economy “is creating an economic system that straddles . . . borders” (Rischard 2002, 46). Increasingly the economy takes place across borders and, as we have seen with the rise of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is adjudicated multilaterally. And “Global warming, regional water shortages, and other stresses accompanying the population increase also dilute the nation-state’s mastery over its own environmental system. So do AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis, diseases that respect no boundaries and sweep through the world at a faster rate than before” (Rischard 2002, 46). That certainly was the case with SARS. In other words, the concept of absolute or complete control of activities within a set of borders outlined on a map is being increasingly revealed as an illusion that fails to enable states to meet the needs of their people, their economies, and their ecosystems, much of all three of which they increasingly share with other states. While Eckersley speaks out strongly against turning our backs on the state as a potential agent of positive change in human environmental behavior, she is quick to decouple the “state” from the “nation.” In her introduction, Eckersley explicitly states that her theories of the green state are not based on a nation-state but rather on a “transnational, democratic green state” (2004, 2). She, in fact, devotes an entire chapter to the issue of “the Transnational State” (Eckersley 2004, chapter 7). This transnationalism arises from her recognition that, for the state to play a positive role in regard to the global environment, it must function as “an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its

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territory and ignoring or discounting the needs of foreign lands. Such a normative ideal poses a fundamental challenge to traditional notions of the nation, of national sovereignty, and the organization of democracy in terms of an enclosed space and polity” (Eckersley 2004, 3). Eckersley identifies in relation to her own theorizing what constitutes the strongest justification for taking seriously the role of environmental literature in encouraging new ways of thinking about government and social organization in the minds of its readers: “the role of imagination—thinking what ‘could be otherwise’—should not be discounted. As [Andrew] Vincent also points out, ‘We should also realize that to innovate in State theory is potentially to change the character of our social existence” (2004, 4). And as we look at the allonational formations imagined in environmental literature in comparison with Eckersley’s state theory, we will see repeatedly that the novelists, poets, and literary essayists have already imagined and described both the steps toward a green democratic state and various versions of such a state in operation. But why do we find both political theorists and environmental writers entertaining alternatives to the nation-state as a necessary transition in political sovereignty in order to realize specific and general environmental goals? First of all, nation-states by definition are organized around the alleged homogeneity of a group of people within a given territory. And, as we have seen in the history of Europe as well as in the Manifest Destiny policy of the United States, it is the appeal to the unity of the people that is frequently used as a justification for the expansion of territorial boundaries or the annexation of another state. In some cases, the other human inhabitants of a territory are either annihilated to make room for the expansion of the nation, or restricted to a small portion of the annexed territory. In other cases, the subject people are defined as having once been a part of the greater nation and are brought back into the fold through military conquest or political negotiation, with their cultural divergences from this alleged greater nation then suppressed. When subject peoples then appeal to their own separate national identity as a basis for resistance to their subjugation, extermination, or territorial restriction, they end up appealing to the same fundamental concepts that the invading state has used to justify its expansion. As Eckersley notes, it is increasingly the case that nation-states do not have the human homogeneity necessary to maintain the racial, religious, and even linguistic myths on which they have been based, and a new kind of “patriotism” is needed in which there is a sense of shared membership (2004, 182). Although territorial in basis, this new kind of patriotism, to have progressive environmental potential, must take a fundamentally different approach to the territory of its inhabitation than has been the approach of the

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modern nation-state. Land, not as the father, not as a frozen, demarcated setting or mere backdrop for the human drama, or as a resource base for capital accumulation, but land as the ground of an entity, an ecosystem or set of ecosystems, a portion of the earth as ecosystem, with which we interact along with all of the other biota residing in specific places must become the basis for a state in which political relationships incorporate all of the actants and entities of a territory, not just the human. A green state, perforce, must be more comprehensive in its orientation and representation than one based on the nation can possibly be. To the degree that any such green state must have human relationships built on the basis of communities and community interaction, their variability, permutations, and diversity must be taken into account, evolved, and recognized. As Eckersley claims, “National communities are only one kind of community and they are under increasing strain from the processes of globalization. If nations are imaginary communities based on abstract rather than embodied social bonds, then there seems to be no good reason for denying the significance of other kinds of imaginary communities that come into being in response to common problems that transcend national boundaries or simply in response to human suffering or ecological degradation wherever it may occur in the world” (2004, 185). In many instances, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) represent types of networking communities, which span vast territories, or which focus on segments of a territory. Water affinity groups, for instance, dedicated to supporting struggles for clean water, wild rivers, and aquaculture communities around the world can form networks and alliances with each other that represent a type of global community based on shared interests, concerns, and objectives. The Indigenous Environmental Network is an excellent example of what we might call an intentional community in which disparate groups are linked by fundamental commonalities and threats, regardless of the local territories of inhabitation, but who, through their commonalities of inhabitory practices, feel a sense of shared identification and common bonds. Along these lines, Rischard sees the formation of global issues networks as a key civil society structure necessary to function multilaterally in order to exert pressure on states to respond less hierarchically and more laterally to pressing environmental crises worldwide. These groups, then, would be fundamentally transnational in their orientation. Such networks represent a progressive response to what Miyoshi perceives as the growing domination of TNCs. We see a resurgence and historical continuation of territorial solidarity smaller than the nation-state, along community lines and more recently along explicitly articulated bioregional lines, and solidarities larger than nation-states along international NGO and transna-

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tional allegiances that challenge the environmental exploitation justified within national boundaries by appeals to energy self-sufficiency, national security, and the denial of answerability for pollution that circulates from within but beyond national borders (see Kuehls 1996). These larger than nation and transnational formations, like the smaller than nation ones, maintain territorial identifications that generate loyalty to specific, concrete locations that are defined by a sense of shared threats and shared interests based on both a sense of answerability and a sense of anotherness. Such sensibilities constitute the diametrical opposite of the fundamental fears and privileges that undergird national identity because, as Thom Kuehls notes in Beyond Sovereign Territory, “The problem . . . lies not with the size of sovereign territories, but with the concept of sovereignty itself. Ecopolitics forces an engagement with a host of questions that challenge the otherwise unproblematic presentation of the space of sovereignty” (1996, xi), which is currently formulated as the borders of the nation-state. Challenges to the nation-state, and its TNC competitors, as a political entity organizing cultural change and cultural conservation can thus come from the development in the political arena of materially anchored entities larger than and smaller than the nation-state as an organization. For example, as we have seen in Rio, Seattle, and elsewhere, environmental alliances are being formed that are as equally transnational in scope as corporations, but maintain their loyalty and answerability to real environments in specific locations. In response to the WTO, we are seeing the gradual development of what may one day be known as the WEO, the World Ecological Organization, formed not through mergers but through alliances and affiliations. Such a WEO would become the allonational opposite of the WTO, one that would continuously make the representation of nonhuman anothers a part of its fundamental answerability. It then comes as no surprise that Eckersley, in line with voices within the European Union, calls for the formation of both a world environment council and a world environment court (2004, 239).

LITERARY TRANSNATIONAL FORMATIONS Literary works have already been published that point to such ecologically answerable transnational formations and resistance to WTO regulations, such as Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Other literatures that I would place under the same category consist of literary representations of cultural, political, and economic formations that ignore, repudiate, or consistently transgress national boundaries in order to maintain the integrity of historically

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established peoples and groups whose environmentally located inhabitation preexisted national boundaries, or people who have come to rely on traversing established boundaries for their contemporary existence. Writing by and about indigenous or native peoples around the world constitute the bulk of such literature. For example, Leslie Marmon Silko’s sprawling novel, Almanac of the Dead, links the rebellions in the Chiapas region of Mexico with the resistance to oppression of people of color in the United States, who in turn at the end of the novel link up with environmental activists to assault the U.S. government on multiple fronts. Silko ends the novel by presenting to her readers a vision of large political alliances that unite groups and organizations across tribal, national, and racial lines, such that long-standing ethnic peoples and various recently evolved micro-cultures can work toward common ecological goals. Thus, in opposition to the reactionary neoethnicism that Miyoshi decries, Silko posits a recognition of anotherness on the part of a variety of characters from different ethnicities and nationalities who unite around a common ground of answerability for the fate of the earth. In Yaqui Deer Songs: Maso Bwikam, Larry Evers and Felipe Molina show a different kind of transnational antinationalism in a nonfiction work that discusses the cross-border interaction of Yaqui Indian communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. They take the deer songs that unite the various Yaqui communities in ceremony and ritual and define their culture’s relationship with the natural world as the focus of their discussion of Yaqui survival as a people. These deer songs function within ritual as displays of both anotherness and answerability in relation to the deer and the other animals with whom the Yaqui interact, many of whom serve as food. And Linda Hogan, working on native relations across the U.S.-Canada border in her novel, Solar Storms, shows the fallacy of sovereignty that Kuehls critiques. Hogan demonstrates how the lives of native peoples on both sides of the border are affected by the destruction of First Nation lands by Hydro Quebec’s enormous rerouting of rivers and flooding of huge tracts of land in the name of electricity generation—electricity that is mostly sold to the United States. And she does so through depicting the lives of female characters who accept both answerability and anotherness as part and parcel of their daily interaction with the rest of the world. Most of the environmental responses to the limitations of the nation-state and TNCs have come not at the transnational level but at sub-national/ sub-state, regional, and local levels. Mitchell Thomashow in Ecological Identity grounds his environmental education on the concept of the commons. The commons, in his teaching and writing, functions as an allonational formation because it requires his students and his readers to define their moral obliga-

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tions and to critique their own daily behaviors in relation to various levels of community affiliation, from the very local to the global, insisting that they think beyond the illusion of absolute political, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. Thus, the commons functions simultaneously as a type of bioregional situated space for local identification and affiliation, and as a type of transnational relationship for global ecological citizenship. Eckersley’s theorizing supports this simultaneity of identification, giving priority to the local, in order to provide the experiential basis for the appreciation of the global, when she writes that “Without knowledge of and attachment to particular persons or particular places and species, it is hard to understand how one might be moved to defend the interests of persons, places, and species in general. Local social and ecological attachments provide the basis for sympathetic solidarity with others; they are ontologically prior to any ethical and political struggle for universal environmental justice” (2004, 190). Likewise, for Thomashow, community is key to all other affiliations and identifications, and in support of his argument quotes Vaclav Havel’s concern for how a nation can become a community in the contemporary world (Thomashow 1995, 92, 98). Ecological identity, then, becomes the foundation for local and global citizenship in the forthcoming age of the green state (Thomashow 1995, 99). Gary Snyder makes the point that “small cultures” within larger nation-states “are not only arguing for cultural authenticity and the right to exist, but also for the maintenance of the skills and practices that belong with local economies and that enable them to operate in a sustainable manner, via their own specialized, local forms of knowledge, over the centuries” (1990b, 13). Part of the flip side of the transnational formation of larger alliances is the bioregional movement of small intentional communities. There is a very narrow definition of bioregional that defines it as a self-consciously articulated political movement within the United States, Australia, and other countries, marked by bioregional congresses and political parties. There is also a looser sense of the term that understands bioregional as a regional commitment to place and social organization based on natural conditions and formations. With the looser definition, we find that much of the contemporary writing about new agrarianism is bioregional and localist in emphasis, such as the writing of Wendell Berry, who focuses on the specific problems of the survival of family farming in Kentucky in particular and the rural South in general. He tackles these issues in essays, novels and short stories, and poems. Particularly pertinent here would be his collections of essays, The Unsettling of America, Home Economics, What Are People For? and Another Turn of the Crank. Like many other writers focused on agrarian concerns, such as Wes Jackson, Berry shows a strong sense of answerability but a relatively weak

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sense of anotherness, as embodied in his particular stewardship model detailed in The Gift of Good Land. In Becoming Native to This Place, however, Jackson argues that Becoming native to this place means that the creatures we bring with us—our domesticated creatures—must become native, too. . . . Our interdependency has now become so complete that, if proprietorship is the subject, we must acknowledge that in some respects they own us. . . . We must acknowledge that our domesticated creatures are descendants of wild things that were shaped in an ecological context not of our making when we found them. . . . We must think in terms of different relationships. . . . (1996, 98–99)

Bessie Head, writing several decades ago, portrays a new kind of agrarian community in the just-independent Botswana of the 1960s. Through her depiction of the village of Golema Mmidi, in When Rain Clouds Gather, Head thematically states that inhabitation in a Botswana existing on the border of South Africa, surviving in a postcolonial world, and struggling in a global economy, requires the establishment of new techniques of sustainable agriculture and animal husbandry, the development of new gender and family relationships, and the generation of new traditions and customs. Fortunately for Makhaya, the novel’s protagonist, he has landed in a progressive village established around an experimental farm, which has attracted individuals from all over Botswana who are ready to break with the negative aspects of tradition and forge a new life on the land. Head makes it clear that the people of this village cannot rely exclusively on traditional cultural beliefs and values in order to build a viable new community. The new villagers must overcome traditional prejudices not only against women but also against so-called inferior tribes who actually demonstrate better sense about the selection of agricultural crops in relation to soil quality and rainfall. As one might expect, then, anotherness first has to be extended to other human beings outside of tribal affiliations and in contradiction to hierarchies and prejudices reinforced by colonial ideology. At the same time, the animal husbandry model Head extols would lead to a reduction in suffering of the cattle that constitute a mainstay of the local economy, but traditionally have been subjected to misery and starvation by the inability of nomadic herding practices to mitigate cycles of drought. In the narrower sense of the term, we can look at the writing of Gary Snyder, particularly his prose work from the 1980s and 1990s. His most spectacular essay on this subject would have to be “Coming into the Watershed.” As Snyder states explicitly in that essay, bioregionalism as a political practice “would be a small step toward the deconstruction of America as a superpower into seven or eight natural nations—none of which ha[s] a budget big enough

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to support missiles” (1995, 227). Further, Snyder contends that “The city, not the nation-state, is the proper locus of an economy, and then that city is always to be understood as being one with the hinterland” (1995, 233). Freeman House, a friend and ally of Snyder, demonstrates this kind of bioregional environmental and political activism in his memoir, Totem Salmon, discussed in the previous chapter. For Snyder and House and other bioregionalists, such as the contributors to Home! A Bioregional Reader, the key features of this kind of antinational bioregional politics is an emphasis on human inhabitation based on the carrying capacity and sustainability of the land base in terms of food production. They are concerned with the daunting task of reducing the ecological footprints of contemporary societies. Both Snyder and House extend their attention not only to answerability but also to anotherness, seeing the other animals of their region as mutual inhabitants with whom we share an interdependency that requires respect and consideration in terms of a high appreciation of long-term affectedness. As Snyder observes, “Human beings who are planning on living together in the same place will wish to include the non-human in their sense of community. This also is new, to say our community does not end at the human boundaries; we are in a community with certain trees, plants, birds, animals. The conversation is with the whole thing. That’s community political life” (1990b, 18). Richard Manning in Inside Passage takes up House’s concerns and places them in a larger framework of analyzing the bioregional and indigenous movements of the watersheds of the North American Pacific Northwest from the Columbia River dividing Oregon and Washington states and British Columbia up to the Alaskan border. Manning in each chapter looks at a different watershed and the issues of coevolution, biodiversity preservation and stimulation, and local sustainable economies. For Manning and the various informants who speak through his essays in this volume, national governments cannot address any of those issues. First, they do not recognize that “Economy is a subset of the environment” (Manning 2001, 15). Second, they support and propagate industrialism, which, in the case of agriculture in both the United States and Canada, generates monocultural farming, and, as Manning notes, “Nature abhors a monoculture” (2001, 16). Third, “Nature,” not governments, “show us that there are limits, and this is the fundamental limit from which all others are derived” (Manning 2001, 19). For many of the communities that Manning explores in Inside Passage, answerability based on a clear sense of long-term affectedness is integral to their systemic thinking about watershed and bioregional communities; for some, particularly Native American communities, that answerability includes a historic and revitalized sense of anotherness, which other peoples who are seeking to become reinhabitory are adopting.

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Many European critical theorists might be quick to warn American theorists that such concepts as the commons and bioregionalism can be, and are, deployed by both progressive and reactionary forces. To ensure that identification with the commons as a foundation for global citizenship will further the goals of a movement toward progressive green states, Eckersley is careful to posit that the principle of belongingness, both in individual emotional identification and in domestic and international legislation and litigation, must be accompanied by the principle of affectedness (2004, 193). Here, without using the terms, Eckersley invokes both answerability and anotherness as requisite principles of ethical political behavior. The principle of affectedness requires that all of those entities, human and nonhuman, affected by political and economic decisions made by human communities need to be taken into account before policies are implemented and actions are taken. The weakest version of this probably is the existing legal practice of the filing of environmental impact reports. But Eckersley and numerous other environmental thinkers and writers would radically expand the moral considerability of affectedness and the ways in which those affected would have a voice in decision making. For Eckersley, many nonhuman others are not capable of giving approval or consent to proposed norms; however, proceeding as if they were is one mechanism that enables human agents to consider the well-being of nonhuman interests in ways that go beyond their service to humans . . . the relevant moral community must be understood as the affected community or community at risk, tied together not by common passports, nationality, blood line, ethnicity, or religion but by the potential to be harmed by the particular proposal, and not necessarily all in the same way or to the same degree. (2004, 112–13)

Along these lines, Snyder proposed in the 1970s that there ought to be mechanisms for a whale to make a speech before the U.S. Congress, for the other creatures who are affected by human actions to be able to have their interests represented in political decision making. This participation, via human spokespersons, goes beyond the notion of legal standing first outlined by Christopher Stone. Snyder reiterated this idea in 1992 in “A Village Council of All Beings.” Building on the ideas of Australians Joanna Macy and John Seed, Snyder calls for a political formation that includes anotherness as a foundational structure of government: “Imagine a village that includes its trees and birds, its sheep, goats, cows, and yaks, and the wild animals of the high pastures . . . as members of the community. The village councils, then, would in some sense give all these creatures voice” (1995, 79–80).

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In The Fifth Sacred Thing, an ecofeminist novel set in California in the near future, Starhawk embodies this very idea in the local government she describes. The Council Hall of the San Francisco Bay Area is envisioned as a regional government that has radically extended democratic representation so that various nonhuman entities have their spokespersons participating in political deliberations. The healer Madrone reflects on the time five years earlier when Council participants realized that a weakness of their organization was revealed in the fact that the nonliving inhabitants of their region had no representation in the decision making process. In response, they developed four seats at Council to represent the “Four Sacred Things,” the Four Elements: White Deer for the earth, Hawk for the air, Coyote for fire, and Salmon for water. For each a human sits masked in trance with the duty to represent the interests of the entities of each element. While some might be quick to note that this utopian format still contains the reality that human beings are speaking “for” nature, such a practice would be a radical step beyond the anthropocentrism and androcentrism of current governmental bodies (on the issue of humans speaking for/as nature, see Murphy 1995 and Armbruster 1998).

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: ORION AND WILD EARTH The conflict of whether or not environmentally ethical political, cultural and economic formations can be developed within the framework of the existing geopolitical reality of nation-states, or if such development requires the dismantling of that geopolitical reality and its replacement with formations that are simultaneously postnational, transnational, and local, can be seen in the focus of two American environmental magazines: Orion and Wild Earth. Orion tends to focus on the playing out of environmental issues within the context of U.S. national interests, political structures, and American culture. Articles treating U.S. laws and freedoms focus on readers as “Americans,” as when David Orr writes about constitutional quality of life guarantees. In contrast, Wild Earth takes a bioregional and continental approach that is both localist and transnational as indicated by its manifesto that links environmental actions across the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican borders. Both magazines play valuable educational roles, but in terms of developing allonational potential and consciousness, Wild Earth generally has more to contribute (although it has had to suspend publication to divert more funds to direct action). Whether we are talking about environmental magazines, literary nonfiction, poetry, or novels, literature that constructs and imagines allonational formations necessarily reflects and encourages expectations on the part of

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authors and readers that people and places need not be run by governments in the ways that they are run today. Their depictions of anotherness and answerability generate a cognitive dissonance with the existing status quo of the instrumentalist nation-state that will affect not only the way readers think about the world, but to some extent, no matter how discretely minute, will also affect the way they act in the world.

Chapter Three

Paradise or a Pair of Dice Contradictions and Contingencies in Real and Virtual Terrains for Tomorrow’s College Students

THE ENWEBBED, INTERPLAYING, AND MULTIMODAL NEXT GENERATION American middle and high school students, as well as those of many other nationalities and citizenships, are growing up immersed in a more complex and more synthetic mixture of sensory stimulations than at any other time in human history. The synthetic side has certainly been gaining ground since the advent of the personal computer and the digital coding upon which it depends to function. A plethora of gadgets have evolved from the computer, such as play stations, DVD players, and cellular picture phones. Today even the most radical environmentalist organizations and the majority of wilderness advocates rely on digital technology to communicate with each other, to pinpoint accurately wilderness habitats and their spoliation, to reproduce images of nature worthy of conservation, preservation, and restoration, to disseminate their ideas, and to solicit financial support and new members. Proponents of environmental activism will increasingly rely on website development and email petitions to promote their messages and to enlist supporters in a variety of worthy causes from saving the manatee to reducing cancer deaths caused by industrial and military pollution (e.g., Orion November/December 2003, 78–79, and www.orionline.org). Contemporary societies, through alterations in recreational and workplace environments, changes in the frequency and character of physical and intellectual opportunities for interaction with other people and with other living creatures, permutations of technology that both extend and impede direct engagement with much of the world, transformations of pedagogy, curriculum, and institutions in education, are all blurring the distinctions between work 47

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and play, and between education and entertainment. Despite their highly contrived characteristics, a variety of so-called reality shows have been appearing on television, particularly on less well-funded cable channels. The Freshman Diaries on the Showtime cable network, for instance, followed the lives of an ethnically and socially diverse group of first-year students at the University of Texas at Austin as they coped with a variety of challenges common to students moving away from home to attend a major American university. Although fundamentally entertainment, this show has been used in a composition course at my university to discuss issues of citizenship, community building, and the benefits of service learning activities. Digital technology has made it possible not only for this low budget series to be recorded and broadcast but also to be reproduced in the classroom. Millions of Americans, with the numbers increasing every year particularly among fathers, are working from home and intermingling domestic work and child raising with career employment that is often only enabled by computer technology and high-speed Internet connections. This same type of flex time has facilitated the small but growing ranks of the exurbanites, those professional men and women who have moved beyond the city and the suburbs to repopulate small towns and rural areas, a movement facilitated by ecommerce. These circumstances have enabled tens of thousands of Americans to take up small scale agricultural activities and animal husbandry on formerly abandoned farms without having to try to earn a living from such subsistence scale activities (see Murphey 1994, for example). Are these gardens and backyard sheep herds work or play? At the same time that free, open-ended physical recreation for young people becomes less available and more and more limited to structured afterschool and weekend activities supervised and organized by adults, we find a highly contradictory situation in the United States. More children than ever before participate in organized sports programs and various types of summer camps, and simultaneously suffer rapidly escalating rates of obesity and juvenile onset diabetes. They also have less and less direct contact with uncultured nature and their own somatic spontaneity, yet have significant hours available for socialization experience. Thus for many young people outdoor exercise and sports activities feel increasingly like school and work and less like play and recreation. In many families the parents get more exercise and engage in more physically active recreation than their children. Yet, while they engage in less gross motor activities and have less contact with wild animals, they have more pets residing in the home. And, the children actually spend less time acting like couch potatoes, passively watching television, than the children of ten or twenty years ago. Rather, through digital technology an increasing number of them are interacting with an ever-

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widening range of peers, even at the international level, through computer games, websites, and e-mail (See Gee 2003, chapter 7). Sometimes these exchanges are organized around virtual sports and virtual animal care, and sometimes they are tied to following real sports teams and involving themselves with real animal rescue and support organizations. For many younger people, then, especially those in their early teens, there is developing a seamless web of interplay between real and virtual animals, actual and virtual sports, face-to-face and online computer games, personal friends and virtual friends. One can further see that they mix together adult pretend play and animated simulations of adult life. Digital technology has also affected their reading and researching practices so that they mix together textual book reading and iconographic, multimodal screen reading—book knowledge and web knowledge—work and volunteer activities, talking and instant messaging, cultivating physical friendships and networking virtual communities. While I was much more likely to run into a deer, possum, or raccoon at the age of ten than my daughter, she has her own physical encounters with animals, particularly dogs, cats, deer, snakes, armadillos, and various raptors; she also has more accurate knowledge of whale songs, of dolphin behavior, of manatee interaction through listening and watching video clips of them on the web, than I had reading about them in an encyclopedia. While she can enjoy imagining what it would be like to swim with whales alongside a character in a fantasy novel, she can also go to the electronic zoo and call up video and audio clips of someone else actually doing such swimming. While her backyard may have fewer wild animals in it than mine did, although the differences are not extreme, her indirect contact with, and knowledge of, animals beyond her backyard is far greater than mine ever was. The expansion of this web of interplay and increased interpersonal networking and technologically mediated experiencing of wild nature raises serious questions about the understanding and practice of environmental justice among the next decade’s college students. How does it affect their level of interspecies and intraspecies empathy? How does it shape their moral distinguishing between real and virtual situations and actions? How does increased technological mediation of the natural world alter their experiencing of desensitization or enhanced sensitivity? What does the digital age do to their levels of abstract thinking and imaginative perceiving and their degrees of practical thinking and concrete observing? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that my daughter’s instant messaging net name was “Witch Goddess” at the age of twelve, but now has become “totallyprincess” or that she modulates her persona through naming, vocabulary, and discourse, often initiated on the web and then transferred to face-to-face interactions? What has been the

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relationship between her hours spent surfing the Neopets.com website, designing, trading, and caring for virtual species, joining a guild and networking with other Neopet enthusiasts from several different countries when she was ten and eleven, and her sustained desire from the age of six through sixteen to become a veterinarian, as well as her willingness to spend on average ten hours a week doing volunteer work for an animal rescue nonprofit organization throughout middle school? These are not abstract, virtual questions for me as some kind of disinterested educational theorist when I know that I will still be teaching into the next decade and will have to engage the computermelded children of today. Rather, these are pressing, practical questions for me as the father in his midfifties of a teenager, whose experiences of reality have an integrated technological dimension that I only contemplated at her age when reading “what if” science fiction. I want to address this set of questions pertaining to my daughter’s life and to the lives of tomorrow’s college students from a variety of directions in order to try to get at some sense of the risks and benefits associated with the current kinds of multimodal, hypertextual reading/gaming practices that students from all over the world will be bringing to college classrooms within the next decade. While millions of these children with computer and web access cannot speak each other’s languages, an increasing number of them can read sufficient English to link those words with an international array of iconography to communicate about topics, toys, and games of mutual interest, to team up with each other and to compete with one another on varied virtual terrains. The rapid development of translation software will only facilitate their bridging national borders. How many of the websites they visit, how many of the games they play, will encourage their abilities to practice environmental justice, whether they hike in the wilds or visit a virtual Antarctica? In other words, how are ecocritics and environmental activists today positioning themselves in relation to this up and coming audience, in relation to this audience that will have to answer the environmental questions we leave unresolved and solve the ecological crises that contaminate their world and threaten the maintenance of the processes of this symbiotic planet? In relation to this question of what proponents of environmental justice will do to engage the contested ideological terrains of cyberspace, I want to consider some additional questions, not all of which I will be able to answer, even partially. For instance, how might changing patterns of reading from linear textuality to screen multidirectionality and its potential impact on neural pathways affect the way young people look at the patterns in nature (we know, for instance, that reading Chinese characters stimulates more bilateral brain activity than reading linear alphabetic languages)? How do the nonlinear thought patterns in complex, synthesizing problem solving encouraged by

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surfing the web and associative hyperlink traveling depart from the kind of Aristotelian and linear development navigation on which conventional narrative, curricular materials, and expository writing models are based, and what benefits or detriments might arise when youth used to such thinking confront environmental crises? How do we evaluate the relative benefits and dangers of varying types of recognition, experience, and acceptance of contingency, unanticipated consequences, and open-endedness displayed and encouraged by numerous computer games and simulations in relation to the consequences of daily physical social experience and actions? Will virtual realities and mixed realities fundamentally hinder or facilitate young peoples’ defining, playing with, and experiencing of inhabitation, given that conceptions of inhabitation affect the inculcation of environmental justice values?

DEFINING AND ELABORATING TERMINOLOGY AND GAMING-SHAPED RESPONSIVENESS A few terms that I have used in the foregoing remarks could bear some clarification and elaboration. Let me begin with the concept of “multimodal discourse.” In Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen state that “multimodality” is “the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event, together with the particular way in which these modes are combined” (2001, 20), which probably provides little clarity given its level of abstraction. But a statement early in the book might help: “it is therefore quite possible for music to encode action, or images to encode emotion” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001, 2). Communication, then, is not purely verbal, nor is its message purely conceptual, but rather as we have come to expect from literature and art, meaning can be conveyed by a variety of sign systems and meaning itself may be as much emotional affect as informational exchange. Kress and Van Leeuwen define “communication as a process in which a semiotic product or event is both articulated or produced and interpreted or used” (2001, 20). Interactivity, then, is understood as a fundamental component of acts of communication, which renders them invariably dialogic and process-based activity rather than monologic and packaged product. Such a definition of communication when applied to teaching requires that the teacher integrate the expectation of student alteration, interpretation, and modified reproduction of the material being presented. Thus, viewed as a discourse, classroom pedagogy contains radically varied degrees of monomodality and mutimodality, and, therefore, varying levels of

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interactive communication. The National Research Council; Kress and Van Leeuwen; Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital; and many others anticipate that the technological literacy developing today among the college students of 2010 will require that classroom pedagogy become more multimodal and interactive in response to the expectations and electronic literacy of the students. In contrasting television and the world wide web, Tapscott notes that “TV is controlled by adults. Kids are passive observers. In contrast, children control much of their world on the Net. It is something they do themselves; they are users, and they are active. They do not just observe, they participate. They inquire, discuss, argue, play, shop, critique, investigate, ridicule, fantasize, seek, and inform” (Tapscott 1998, 25). Perhaps that is why “Video game sales are beginning to eclipse Hollywood box office receipts,” with 60 percent of Americans playing video games, with 40 percent of these women (Chadwick 2003, 52). All of this activity on the web results in people in general, but children in particular who have grown up with the home computer as standard operating equipment in the household, becoming hypericonographic readers. By that, I mean that they do not understand nor undertake reading as a purely visual assimilation of printed text. Rather, their reading consists of multiple complementary semiotic strata, both in terms of discourse and distribution (see Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001, 4–8, 20). They use icons to navigate the web and also anticipate seeing them turn up in communiqués from friends, who embed a variety of shorthand icons in their instant messaging. In addition, as they are interacting with neopets.com and other sites, they read website pages with various icons, graphics, pictures, hypertext links, and texts as one semiotic unit. While they are doing so, they are reading that website page embedded in a computer Internet screen replete with iconic toolbars, hypertext sidebars, advertisements, photos, and streaming video options. Their reading gestalt is hypericonic rather than textual; in the former case all of the nonverbal semiotic elements are perceived as part of the medium and the message, while in the latter case illustrations, photos and the like are perceived as add-ons and not integral to the message. The comic book and the graphic novel are the print-text version of this multimodal reading, but are far less varied, fluid, and multidiscursive than websites. As Jay David Bolter has noted, “the World Wide Web offers us the experience of moving through a visual and conceptual space different from the space of the book” (2001, 45). With such a gestalt formation for reading, hypericonographic readers have a very different reaction to references, notes, appendixes, and glossaries. Print text readers often view such material as intrusive: “In a printed book, it would be intolerably pedantic to write footnotes to footnotes,” observes Bolter, but “in the computer we have already come to regard this layered writing and

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reading as natural. Furthermore, the second page is not necessarily subordinate to the first” (Bolter 2001, 27). As a result, for my daughter, doing homework about whales and dolphins involves not only reading a passage in a reference book or an encyclopedia but also viewing several websites of organizations that conduct research on whales, engage in whale rescue and rehabilitation efforts, and undertake actions to protect the various whale species. She will not just read about whales in general, but also will read about different species and will be aided in remembering their differences through the pictures and video clips of each type that are hypertextually linked to the printed information. She will also spend some time listening to recorded whale songs and if she has to prepare a report for school she may download various media representations to create a multimedia CD-ROM rather than just a typed up essay. These technological differences in communication are contributing to the development of students who will be high contingency semiotic thinkers and communicators. By that I mean that hypertext, websites, computer games, and Internet messaging increase individual’s awareness of the contingencies of daily life and the porosity and permeability of personal experience. My daughter has become a great fan of the various Sims computer games, which by 2003 had “sold more than 8 million copies worldwide” (Phan 2003). These games build in far more contingent experiences and addressing of virtual reality variables than ever was possible when she played traditional Barbie games. In Sim City, for instance, the player must determine how much land to devote to agriculture and forests, how much rainfall is needed for crop growth, and so on. In Sim City 4, players are not only offered the opportunity to build major cities, but also to build agricultural communities and have the two forms of inhabitation interact. They also can create environmental catastrophes and then work at responding to them. In Sims Unleashed, attention must be paid to the contingencies of daily life. If a player fails to empty a kitchen wastebasket, flies begin to gather around it. If a player installs a fire hydrant in front of a home, dogs begin to converge on it the next day. In one of the houses, the stove will catch on fire unexpectedly, while in another household the father in the family will suffer from depression and be at risk of losing his job. Far from reducing the amount of imagination involved in child’s play, the Sims products introduce variables and contingencies that require significant imaginative activity, both in designing virtual worlds and in addressing the intrusion of very real world problems into such virtual projections. James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, argues that good video games “stress both nonlinear movement . . . and linear movement. . . . They stress multiple solutions”

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(2003, 164). Learning for players of such games is predicated upon “situated cognition,” “reason on the basis of patterns . . . picked up through their actual experiences in the world,” and being “networked with other people and with various tools and technologies” (Gee 2003, 8). Numerous lessons about ecology and human environmental interaction are explicitly or implicitly presented through various quality computer games. For instance, as Gee notes, one game for primary schoolchildren, Pikmin, includes the possibility of all of the Pikmin characters dying off in what the game defines as “an extinction event” (2003, 20). In a game for older players, Deus Ex, the player’s decisions lead him to face three possible ways of ending the game. One of these calls for letting a centralized computer become the world government, while another calls for destroying the global communications infrastructure, so that political centralization is overthrown and the world returns “to a plethora of small villages” (Gee 2003, 80–81). One could easily imagine designing a computer game along these lines that would pit technologically driven environmental solutions against Murray Bookchin’s social ecology or the formation of a global green U.N. with military power to punish polluters against a primitivist model of bioregionalism. A few years ago, E Magazine ran an article on “Environmentally Themed Videogames,” which provided examples of games for all different ages (Chadwick 2003, 52). Not only the games but also other hypertext sites and texts encourage such multisided engagements and activities. For instance, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats is written by an author who established a reputation as a documentary filmmaker and that training is reflected in the structure and style of the novel. That structure in turn encourages students to respond with hypertext projects that would provide more factual information about the environmental problems associated with the American cattle industry’s high use of antibiotics, growth hormones, and dangerous feed supplies, which could easily be supplemented by video on cattle ranching and slaughterhouses. But beyond such convenient linkages because of the content of a particular novel, Bolter argues that the very design and spatiotemporal configuration of electronic media can facilitate a more systemic, and hence ecological, perception of reality: Our culture is defining the electronic encyclopedia, and electronic books in general, to reflect a different natural world, in which relationships are multiple and developing. It is a world in which the distinctions between nature and culture and between information and medium are unstable. . . . Cyberspace is not, as some enthusiasts have argued, divorced from the natural and social world that we know; rather, it is an expression and extension of both. (2001, 98)

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CONTINGENCY, PROBLEM SOLVING, AND THE ORIENTATIONS OF YOUNG ADULT AND ADULT LITERATURE The foregoing suggest what computer games, hypertext, and other electronic media might offer environmental justice if its various practitioners and proponents were to engage in various kinds of computer game design. It also suggests how students will make use of the websites that various environmental organizations are developing. In this section, I want to focus on literary texts young adults and adults are reading and their relationship to environmental justice on the one hand and technological development on the other hand. Across a diverse array of contemporary American fiction, particularly genre literature, that is, detective, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, and even romance, literature, environmental crises, ecological issues, and acts of pollution have become common plot devices and settings. This situation both reflects the depressing ubiquity of natural despoliation and the uplifting prevalence of recognition of environmental problems. But the recognition does not necessarily mean that authors are building heroic stories out of fighting the good fight. Three novels stand out in this regard: Sara Paretsky’s detective novel, Blood Shot; Charles Baxter’s Shadow Play; and Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac. Paretsky has written a series of novels about a Chicago-based female private investigator, V. I. Warshawski. In Blood Shot, this hero risks her life to lay bare a cover-up of environmental pollution in her south Chicago childhood neighborhood. She learns that the cancer ravaging a mother’s friend results from a corrupt chemical company determined to avoid paying the hospital and death benefits due for their unnecessary exposure of the workers to toxic substances. While the novel focuses on corruption, greed, and inhuman treatment of workers at the hands of capitalists, the novel nevertheless exposes the kinds of toxic poisoning all too frequent in the industries of greater Chicago and the efforts of corporations to hide their liabilities rather than to accept them. The political geographer David Harvey views this novel as exemplary of a crucial recognition: “as the contemporary environmental justice movement has rediscovered . . . the only path to improvement was empowerment of the poor and working classes in the face of a recalcitrant, obdurate, and often corrupt corporate power structure. . . . Sara Paretsky’s novel Blood Shot, set in contemporary Chicago, captures the nature of this struggle most graphically” (1996, 395). In contrast Charles Baxter in Shadow Play builds industrial pollution into the plot as if it were a given of contemporary society. The back cover observes that “when [Five Oaks Assistant City Manager Wyatt Palmer] lures a

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toxic-waste-producing chemical plant to his economically depressed town, he discovers he has truly made a deal with the Devil.” With such a description we might expect that Wyatt would fight to undo the damage he has done by enabling this factory to operate under his jurisdiction, especially given that his brother develops terminal cancer as a result of working there. But no, Wyatt merely helps his brother commit suicide, then tries in a half-hearted amateurish way to set the factory owner’s house on fire, succeeding in only burning a dog to death, and then has a nervous breakdown. During this breakdown Baxter’s narrator reveals the protagonist coming to the conclusion that no morality exists any longer in a world without either a living God or clearcut evil. In the end Wyatt moves to New York and resumes his vocation as an artist. Unlike other tragic novels that depict the unacceptable destruction of human lives and the unaffordable price of prosperity in terms of ethical decay and the despoliation of nature, Shadow Play can lead readers to view escalating cancer rates as another part of the setting of aimless American lives, a setting that is neither tragic nor changeable. Fortunately, Baxter’s novel does not represent the typical response to contingency in the world or to the recommended reaction to environmental ills. Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller was originally published in 1988, the same year as Paretsky’s Blood Shot. In response to his rising popularity as an author and the ability of a widening audience to appreciate the content of his novel, it was reissued in 1995 and again in 2003. In this novel, the protagonist, Sangamon Taylor, works in Boston as a chemical analyst for a peaceful environmental activist organization constantly blowing the whistle on industrial polluters in the region. As with any well-plotted thriller or detective novel, Taylor deals with myriad contingencies, plot twists, and surprises produced by new evidence. But in the end, and beyond what he can imagine at novel’s beginning, he finds his corporate and individual culprits and helps reduce the level of Boston Harbor’s notorious pollution. Unlike Wyatt in Shadow Play, Taylor is never paralyzed or overwhelmed by the uphill battle against overwhelming odds that defines the environmental justice movement. At the same time, Stephenson nowhere provides a silver bullet that will allow all to be made better. Rather, readers come away having learned a great deal about environmental pollution, particularly biphenyls and dioxin, as well as a sense of the necessity to continue to struggle for promoting what Sandra Steingraber labels “the least toxic alternative” in Living Downstream (1997, 271). Having read all three of these novels, readers might walk away from Blood Shot satisfied that justice has been done in a single incident and the case has been closed. The same readers may either walk away from Shadow Play gripped by a pessimistic sense of fatalism or, having refused to identify with

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the protagonist, angered that some people would accept environmentally induced cancers a necessary cost of doing business. With Zodiac readers both gain some satisfaction, but also are forced to think beyond the covers of the book to the environmental justice battles looming around them and the need not to turn away or pretend that all is well or well enough. Zodiac thereby neither embraces paradise or totally accepts the pair of dice contingency and chance of daily life, but calls for intervention and action. Let me now turn to another trio of novels: Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape, and Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day. Prodigal Summer represents the embrace of paradise as a potential for immediate human realization. Girl in Landscape and The Dazzle of Day, in contrast, focus on the more realistic pair of dice contingencies of life while set in the future and written as science fiction. Kingsolver presents the interlocking stories of a group of individuals living in southwestern Virginia. One is a forest ranger observing the survival skills of coyotes, another is an elderly widower alienated from family and friends, and another a young widow who needs to decide whether to stay on the land and knit ties with her in-laws or return to an urban life. Eventually these lives are revealed as already interconnected and become more intertwined as the plot unfolds. Throughout, Kingsolver seems to establish the coyote species’ survival skills as a utopian model for human social rehabilitation. In the end the ranger is happily pregnant, the elderly widower is entering into a relationship with the widow next door and his own estranged grandchildren, and the young widow is taking responsibility for her dying sister-in-law’s children. Readers learn about national forests, coyotes, sheep, farming, orchards, and cancer along the way, but primarily Kingsolver promises readers that all can be worked out and made better if family is placed at the center of people’s lives and we accept that we form an integral part of the natural world to which we must adapt. The utopian tone of the novel comes through clearly in its final words, claiming that each choice a person makes renews the world. The novel is highly successful and affective for those already sympathetic to the author’s values, but unlikely to convert skeptics or to hold the interest of younger readers. In contrast, Lethem presents a kind of punk fiction with hard edges and mostly dubious characters. The humans have left a highly toxic earth for promising parts unknown on a planet portrayed much like the American western frontier of the nineteenth century. The aliens remain highly alien and the adults all blunder in their efforts to populate the planet on which the aliens already live. Reversals abound in the novel. Lethem concludes that the adults are incapable of learning to inhabit the portrayed planet because they cannot cast aside the earthboundedness of their ideological blinders, particularly

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their individualistic utopian perceptions of what constitutes paradise. The children, however, such as the girl identified in the title, do learn to accept the planet on its own terms and the aliens on their own terms and represent the possibility of learning how to inhabit a new place in new ways, rather than turning the alien into the familiar and destroying it in the process. Without utopian expectations, the young people of the novel embrace the contingencies of new inhabitation and the word “maybe” is voiced and thought repeatedly in the final few pages. Multimodal rather than monomodal, contingent rather than utopian, Pella, the girl in the landscape, is committed to muddling through rather than discovering or realizing some grand design. With The Dazzle of Day, Molly Gloss begins with a utopian community that leaves a toxic Earth increasingly hostile to the group’s Quaker beliefs aboard a spaceship. On the long voyage to another world, eventually all of the community members are people who have been born, raised, and lived exclusively within this ship, with its ecological and technological stability and its cultural homogeneity and proximity. As the ship nears the first potentially habitable planet they have charted, the people begin to become divided. The surveyors of the planet experience shipwreck, death, and disaster and have their faith and sanity shaken by the harsh reality of the world they encounter. The residents of the ship realize that the planet is far more inhospitable than any of them could have imagined and some wish to remain in the safety of the ship, electing to remain within it forever or continue searching for the utopian planet of their desires. Jumping forward in time, the novel reveals that the would-be inhabitants have had in many ways to rethink the culture that worked on shipboard and redefine home while adapting to a new way of life. Again, as in Girl in Landscape, contingency and the pair of dice chance of multiplicity, variety, and difference are accepted as the means for continuing to survive. While a beautiful novel, Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer remains in many ways quite static and predictable, optimistically fatalistic and self-assured, whereas the other novels seem more reflective of the ways of thinking likely to appear more prominently in the next generation of college students. Which kind of thinking should we expect to encounter in contemporary writing for young adults, for my daughter’s age group? Based on her reading selections and her gaming selections, she appears to prefer the contingent to the utopian. One set of books she has followed is called The Young Wizard Series. Each novel in this series incorporates some kind of environmental topic or action, even when it does not constitute the main theme. In Deep Wizardry, the two young wizards become involved in helping whales, dolphins, and sharks reestablish balance in the waters off the New York/New Jersey coast. In the course of describing their shape-shifting experiences, the author, Diane Du-

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ane, describes the extent of environmental pollution and its harm to the creatures of the sea. While the novel ends on a more utopian or paradise note in the successful reestablishment of equilibrium, it comes at great price, including death and self-sacrifice. In The Wizard’s Dilemma, efforts to reduce environmental pollution are reiterated in the context of the fundamental responsibility of wizards to care for the planet and to slow the pace of entropy. But in this novel, there is no possibility of a utopian ending, since the conflict is focused on the female wizard’s mother having terminal cancer. The right of all creatures, including viruses, to pursue survival is addressed, on the one hand, but on the other hand, the focus falls primarily on the necessity of remaining principled and not accepting an end-justifies-the-means approach to resolving interspecies conflicts. The mother’s life cannot be saved and cancer cannot be eliminated magically, although wizards can continue to learn how to restore balance and reduce destruction. In many ways, this young adult novel parallels the attitude expressed in Stephenson’s Zodiac. While I have only been disappointed by one of these novels, Shadow Play, and enjoyed all of the rest, I remain concerned with how these novels position their readers in relation to monocausality and multicausality, and how they will play with the readers of today, both adults and young adults. Which novels will interface better with the experiences, practices, and ways of thinking of computer-oriented thinkers? How can we integrate the ideas, experiences, attitudes, and ideologies represented in environmental literature promoting concepts and practices of environmental justice with the kind of technological literacy of today’s middle school, high school, and college students? Which literature will encourage protest, activism, understanding, and the will and belief in change, and which may not?

BEYOND THE CRY OF PROTEST, BEYOND THE APPEAL TO TURNING BACK THE ANALOG CLOCK The cry of protest must always be heard and supported and must always be made available for students to understand the crises, the issues, the problems that beset people. In particular, as teachers, citizens, and parents, we must work hard to bring continuously before the majority, before the dominant, the protests of the disenfranchised, the exploited, the oppressed, the imperiled. In recent decades, in fact, tremendous strides have been made in literature and composition courses, through new historicism, multiculturalism, and cultural studies. As a result, the protest poems of such native writers in the United States as Simon Ortiz and Haunani Kay-Trask and the historical novels

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documenting environmental destruction of Kiana Davenport and Louise Erdrich, are widely available and frequently taught (see Murphy 2000a, 1995). Yet, I want to suggest that they are not enough, that the emphasis only on what has gone wrong, on what has been broken will not suffice. When people speak of returning to the old ways, of going back to a relationship to place only to be found in the past, and perhaps only imaginatively so, if they are talking about metaphorically turning back the hands of time, they are using an analogy that will not work in the digital age. Only analog clocks have hands and allow for turning back time. Digital clocks are only reset by going forward and have numerical icons. Yes, the numbers are reflashed as the time is reset; yes, the previous numbers can be recovered and reset, but only by situating them in the future. For the cries of protest, for the historical evidence of environmental destruction and habitat degradation to win the hearts and minds of the next generation of citizens, they will need to be placed in the context of the potential for change, correction, and redress in the future. The next generation will want to explore them on a virtual terrain in order to test out potential solutions. They will want to generate myriad computer simulations to explore the ways that cultural diversity can be brought to bear to maintain biological diversity—just as many of the arguments about global warming are based on simulations and models, to investigate how the restoration biology projects of reintroducing this or that species to the wild might impinge upon the ecosystemic interactions already occurring. They will want to play the computer game of Yosemite wolf reintroduction before supporting a local initiative to reintroduce a predator species in the local waterway. One can think back, and not so far, to numerous species introduction projects for both flora and fauna that have proven disastrous and speculate profitably on how a generation raised on computer simulation games might have investigated the pros and cons of such actions before undertaking them, whether this exploration were to occur with rabbits in Australia or kudzu in the southeastern United States. But whether or not teachers will be shaping curriculum, reading choices, and gaming selections that will promote such interest or not depends to some degree on the willingness of ecocritics and environmental justice advocates to embrace what Chris Hables Gray has called the “cyborg citizen.”

RISKING THE EMBRACE OF THE CONTINGENCIES OF THE CYBORG CITIZEN: THE MULTITASKING PROBLEM-SOLVING MIXED REALIST AND THE PLAYFUL FABULIST In “The Seductions of Cyberspace,” N. Katherine Hayles, while recognizing the significant dangers of virtual reality and inadequate tactile contact with the material world, concludes on a note of optimism:

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One can imagine scenarios in which the Other is accepted as both different and enriching, valued precisely because it represents what cannot be controlled and predicted. . . . Applied to the physical world, this realization values it for its differences from the virtual world—its incredibly fine structure, sensory richness, material stability, and spontaneous evolution. The positive seduction of cyberspace leads us to an appreciation of the larger ecosystems of which we are a part, connected through feedback loops that entangle our destinies with their fates. (1993, 188)

The multiplicity of options for information, contrary viewpoints, correctives, and challenges to dominant scientific prejudices and popular beliefs, dialogues across cultures, genders, and generations, and the mechanisms for forming affinity groups, alliances, and social activist organizations that digital technology enables facilitate this kind of appreciation of the Other as a familiar, but different, always somewhat mysterious, Another—proximate yet never identical. And they intensify the sense of contingency and opportunities for effecting the changes that the next generation will need to pursue. As Will Wright argues in Wild Knowledge, “the world must be conceptualized as both independent of direct human control and reliably responsive to knowledge-based human actions. Similarly, human beings must be conceptualized as having a formally necessary but substantively contingent relationship with their world, a relationship through which knowledge is always formally possible but also possibly mistaken” (1992, 173). In order to develop and sustain an optimistic view toward the long-term impact of digital technology on human-nature interaction and environmental justice, we must believe along with Arjun Appadurai that “conceptions of the future play a far larger role than ideas of the past in group politics today” and that “imagination and agency” are vital “to group mobilization” (1996, 145). Perhaps that is why Niles Eldredge argues in Dominion that “We need an updated story, one that acknowledges that we did not so much leave the natural world as redefine our position in it” (1995, xv) and “We need a new vision, a revised story of who we are and how we fit into the world” (1995, 166), because “We have indeed stepped outside of local ecosystems. But we have not stepped outside the natural world” (Eldredge 1995, 168). For young people today—many of whom can have only relatively limited access to wilderness spaces if we want those spaces to remain wilderness—many of whom will have direct contact almost entirely with cultivated, domesticated, and incarcerated nature, computer simulations, ecological system models, and conservationist and sustainability games will provide an essential component of their intellectual engagement with the world. Such engagement can generate environmental empathy for wildness both near and far. At a time when at my own university the newsletter of the Office

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of Research describes faculty research on nano-sized particles for medical applications and declares that “The potential for creating new materials at a size capable of being absorbed by human cells calls for a new type of scientist— one who can collaborate across seemingly unrelated disciplines” (“Unique” 2003, 8), ecocritics and environmental advocates cannot afford to ignore the need also to “collaborate across seemingly unrelated disciplines” and leave the terrain of virtual cyberspace to technocrats and transnational corporations. Nostalgia as a strategy for instilling a love of nature and a conservationist agenda in the college student of 2010 is not likely to carry the day. I find myself utterly unable to disagree with Gray’s contention that “Tools are here to stay, machines are here to stay, cyborgs are here to stay. The real issue is which tools, which machines, which cyborgs we will have in our society and which will be excluded or never created” (2002, 6). For the sake of the possibility for an ecologically sustainable future, I must hope that my multitasking mixed realist mode daughter, who shifts from textual reading to multimodal reading, from biography to fantasy, to documentary, from playing the emergency vet computer game to volunteering on weekends with the local pet rescue and adoption organization and donating money to save the manatees, will use digital technology in ecologically beneficial and productive ways. And, finally, I must also embrace my role as a playful fabulist who critiques literature and weaves ecocritical theory and criticism into fabulations of how society might embrace the wild knowledge of this world’s multitudinous contingencies to become ecologically literate and do justice to each other and the world in which we live and die. To do that, I must not only study a wide range of literary and semiotic production, but also need to broaden my awareness of the varieties of ecocritical theory. Increasingly, ecocriticism is becoming not only an international phenomenon, but it also is generating a transnational ecocritical theory, one that is situated and particular, rather than universalist. But it is also one from which everyone can learn in different and distinct ways, as part of a movement that cannot afford to have insular and parochial elements and attitudes among its models and its practitioners.

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Toward Transnational Ecocritical Theory The Example of Hwa Yol Jung

INTRODUCING THE TRANSNATIONAL At the end of the previous chapter I used the phrase, transnational ecocritical theory. By that I do not mean a single, unifying theory for ecocritical literary practice around the world. Rather, I mean a theory that would transect, that is, cut across, the limitations of national perspectives and boundaries. It would do so both in terms of the theories, concepts, and beliefs on which it would draw for developing critical approaches and methods and in terms of the kinds of literary and cultural texts that it would compare, analyze, and appreciate. Although, not always treating examples beyond a particular national literature, practitioners of such theory would always seek an awareness of different practices and possibilities for literary production. For example, a transnational theorist would not assume that a particularly culturally entrenched form of theorizing represented the correct way for ecocritics in other places to theorize in order to generate fruitful interpretations or even to orient readers toward a nationally defined particular reception of a text. In like manner, a transnational theorist would not assume that the most popular literary genre for writing about nature in his country or in a particular century ought to be a genre practiced elsewhere or even a genre to be promoted as the “nature writing” for any specific time or place. Avoiding parochialism does not mean practicing universalism, but it also does not mean abandoning the idea that ecocriticism in whatever varied forms it may take is a crucial, relevant, and necessary literary and cultural practice to be promoted worldwide. A transnational approach can be based on recognition of and support for diversity, and healthy borrowing, adapting, and adopting. Rather than generating claims about a transnational ecocritical theory at a level 63

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of generality that would probably prove unproductive, I want to demonstrate what I mean through the discussion of one individual’s critical work that exemplifies such an approach, Hwa Yol Jung. I have chosen Professor Jung because of our interaction over the years, because of our mutual interests and concerns, and because of the ways that his life and scholarship demonstrate the best that transections can offer. He is, on the one hand, a Korean émigré teaching at an American college, founded on the basis of the beliefs of a distinct religious sect. On the other hand, he is a phenomenologist focused on Eastern philosophy teaching in a political science department.

THINKING SYNCRETISM AND THE I-THOU On the cover of Gary Snyder’s first volume of prose, Earth House Hold, one sees the photograph of a bisected nautilus shell with its numerous chambers. This cover reminds me of Hwa Yol Jung for two reasons. One, our mutual interest in Gary Snyder as an ecological poet and environmental activist led to our first meeting nearly twenty years ago. Two, the many chambers of the nautilus provide a symbol for Jung’s accretive, continuous, and maturing search for an engaged, sustainable ethics adequate for our world’s ecological crisis. With each new advance in his thinking, each additional theorist he adapts or corrects in his quest, another chamber is added to what has become a highly promising and sophisticated ecological ethic for responsible human action. I want to elaborate on that second reason and explain how it represents a transnational ecocritical theory. Only two years after the first Earth Day, Jung published in the Bucknell Review a crucial starting point for an environmental ethic. In “The Ecological Crisis: A Philosophic Perspective, East and West,” he builds on José Ortega y Gasset’s recognition of modern humanity’s one dimensionality and cogently observes that “What is more important than the physical development of modern society in industry, commerce, transportation, and communication is technology’s impact on the psychological making of modern man” (Jung 1972a, 29). We see here the parallel in this point with numerous literary works that had been published prior to and shortly after the first Earth Day in which various technologically produced disasters, particularly nuclear war, signaled the destruction of human civilization, if not of the entire species, and resulted from social inability to grasp the limitations of technology. Jung’s point is helpful in understanding the systemic critique of such novels as George R. Stewart’s The Earth Abides (1949), Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971).

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These novels and others like them critique the mind-set of those who believe that technology will alleviate or resolve crises created by previous technology. Jung quite clearly recognizes, in contrast, that the master’s tools cannot tear down the master’s house. In response Jung calls for the “cultivation of an aesthetic and reverential ethos toward nature” (1972a, 33) at the very same time that on campuses across the country there blossomed English department and interdisciplinary courses devoted to “nature writing” and “environmental literature,” with such works as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire; the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder; and, as soon as it was published in 1974, Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, central to many course syllabi. Invariably the works chosen for study included ones with a strong devotional, humble, and often spiritual approach to human engagement with nature, sometimes containing a rejection of technology and at other times less stridently calling for a retreat from its ubiquitous presence in daily life. Jung’s syncretic effort to blend Eastern metaphysics and Western philosophy also helps readers to understand better the melding of ecology and spirituality in the poetry and prose of such Beat writers as Allen Ginsberg, Diane diPrima, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch, all of whom to varying degrees practiced different forms of Buddhism and studied East and South Asian cultures. It comes as no surprise then when one finds Jung linking Thoreau, D. T. Suzuki, and Rachel Carson. Likewise, in looking back over his body of work, we find in this early essay Jung linking spirituality, carnality, and nature phenomenologically, thus preparing the ground for the development of an ethic that will lose sight of none of these three poles at any time. In that same year, 1972, Jung published the article “Ecology, Zen, and Western Religious Thought” in The Christian Century as part of an ongoing effort to bring Zen and other forms of Buddhism to the serious attention of Christian thinkers. He followed that with “The Splendor of the Wild: Zen and Aldo Leopold” in 1974 in the Atlantic Naturalist, reaching out to an audience of conservationists. In finding connections between Zen and Leopold, Jung again emphasizes carnality and the ways that Leopold’s land ethic forms a component of a wider movement to emphasize an “I-Thou” rather than “I-It” relation between human beings and the other aspects of the natural world. The use of the language of Martin Buber here displays an anticipation of the Bakthinian dialogics that Jung will find helpful in later years. We also find the advancing of the aesthetic dimension of the environmental ethic in his emphasis on “appreciation” versus “appropriation.” Here we see, however, the limitations of the argument at this point in time, in that this polarity, although fundamentally sound theoretically, does not address a possible middle way, one which must be found

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for human beings to act in the world rather than limit themselves to passive observation of natural phenomena. The challenge of that middle way between appreciation and appropriation is the one taken up by many environmental agrarian writers, such as Wendell Berry, Jane Brox, Wes Jackson, David Mas Masumoto, and numerous others, throughout the 1960s and into the present. The problems of sustainability and stewardship that Berry addresses in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction require practical and practiced responses and actions. Often, in this respect, the poets, novelists, and nonacademic essayists offer concrete and detailed visions, as well as working through actual, specific problems that philosophers tend to treat in the abstract. The enactment of Leopold’s land ethic requires patience, hard labor, and finesse on a farm, on a ranch, or in a fish camp by means of which people must support themselves. In addition to the works of Wendell Berry, particularly the nonfiction prose, the writings of Linda Hasselstrom on ranching and Nancy Lord on small scale commercial fishing, just to provide a few examples, help literary critics and philosophers see the complexities of realizing a change in thinking and action that can challenge the technological juggernaut at the same time that individuals and families earn a living within a capitalist economy. But these remarks do not fault Hwa Yol Jung, since most of the authors I have mentioned have only brought their ideas into publication in the past decade. Likewise, a fairly recent development in nature writing that will provide grist for Jung’s philosophic mill comprises books written about restoration biology, such as Stephanie Mills’s In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land and a book I have already discussed, Freeman House’s Totem Salmon. In 1974, publishing “The Paradox of Man and Nature: Reflections on Man’s Ecological Predicament” in The Centennial Review, a predominantly literary journal, Jung expands his discussion of the I-Thou relationship in terms of the phenomenological and comparative religion insights of Mircea Eliade and provides a critique of both Marxism and capitalism as two sides of the technological, instrumentalist reasoning developed out of the Enlightenment. In particular he dismantles the mind-body dualism of Descartes that justifies the arrogant belief that human beings can successfully dominate nature through science and technology without destroying themselves in the process. Technocentrism comes under a withering critique as Jung turns toward poetry to demonstrate an “aesthetic appreciation of nature” that embodies the I-Thou of biocentrism. First, the British Romantics, Blake and Wordsworth, are discussed by Jung; but, as always, he does not remain in Western realms. Even as he links the philosophies of East and West, so too the poetry, adding Shiki and Rabindranath Tagore to the discussion. As in other essays, he makes a surprising leap, connecting these poets from vastly different national cultures to the

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thinking of Rachel Carson, quoting her own poetic remark that “there is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.” Just as he crosses cultural traditions and philosophical schools, Jung here crosses intellectual genres, linking science writing and poetry, to demonstrate the necessary unity of aesthetics and ethics. Two years later, Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, his wife, teamed up to produce a manifesto published in the German journal Man and World: An International Philosophical Review, “Toward a New Humanism: The Politics of Civility in a ‘No-Growth’ Society.” They announce as their goal nothing less than “to outline a phenomenology of ecological conscience.” Here we find the introduction of the ethics of “care” into the discussion and an increased attention to the insights of anthropology and the widespread interest in indigenous and so-called primitive societies. In furthering the critique of the Enlightenment project of instrumental reason, the Jungs here work especially with the corrective insights provided by Taoism and Confucianism, the Sinitic perspective. But from a literary critical viewpoint, I am particularly interested in the attention not only to classical cultures and their philosophies but also the embodied philosophies of indigenous peoples because this attention parallels the interest of American poets at this very time and a tremendous outpouring and publishing of Native American and First Nation poetry and prose. Snyder had already broached this subject in several of the prose pieces in Earth House Hold, in particular “Poetry and the Primitive.” In the year following the publication of the Jungs’ essay, Snyder published The Old Ways, which contains among other writings, “The Politics of Ethnopoetics,” “Reinhabitation,” and “The Incredible Survival of Coyote.” At the same time Jerome Rothenberg and others were strenuously engaged in efforts to recover, reproduce, and disseminate a new oral poetics that built on the preliterate arts of the Americas. Native American and First Nation writers had already been introducing the North American public to new stories, poems, and songs, that embodied and revitalized the oral poetics of their tribal heritages, such as Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, and M. Scott Momaday.

TURNING TO SNYDER AND ECOPIETY I now want to jump ahead a little more than a decade to 1989 and 1990, the years in which Hwa Yol Jung began publishing a group of essays focused on the concept of “ecopiety.” Although building on his earlier work regarding the aesthetics of environmental ethics, the ethics of care, and the need for a spiritual attunement with nature in opposition to technological manipulation, this work represents a major growth node in his thinking. Three essays can be

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discussed together here: “The Way of Ecopiety: A Philosophic Minuet for Ecological Ethics” and two essays coauthored with Petee Jung, “The Way of Ecopiety: Holistic Education for Ecological Ethics” and “Gary Snyder’s Ecopiety.” Jung begins “A Philosophic Minuet” in a celebratory mood citing Snyder’s remark about the earth as “our dancing place” and reminding readers of the classical linkage of music, dance, drama, and oral poetry. Jung is working with the imagery of music, including as it relates to both dance and poetry, in emphasizing the categories of “harmony and mood”: “While harmony refers to the outer landscape of cosmic reality as social process, mood describes the inner landscape of the human condition. Mood is the tonality of human existence as being-in-the-world, the way of attuning oneself to the environing or surrounding world” (1989, 84–85). The year 1990 is also the one in which Hwa Yol Jung and I met at a conference on postmodern spirituality held at Cambridge. There I presented a paper titled “Pivots Instead of Centers” that treated the “postmodern spirituality of Gary Snyder and Ursula K. Le Guin” by focusing on the poetry of each writer. I claimed then that “these two writers develop philosophical pivots rather than idealist centers on which to base a nondualistic, nondichotomous process of being-in-the-world, which is very much an ecological perspective” (Murphy 1995, 111). Pointing out that Snyder had named a recent collection of poetry No Nature and that Le Guin had titled a collection of essays Dancing at the Edge of the World, I concluded by hoping that “we can adaptively learn from these two poets—although, of course, not from them alone—how to dance with this world at the edge of no nature” (Murphy 1995, 121). In all of our cases, poets and critics alike, I think this emphasis on dancing represented a maturation of thought and practice that backed away from the gloom-and-doom attitudes initially attendant upon the widespread recognition of ecological crisis. Coming through the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, many people in our generations felt at various times a sense of impending apocalypse, an attitude toward time and process that itself arises from technophilia and the frenetic pace of technological innovation and consumer goods production. The turning toward or deepening of a commitment to ecology as a social movement reframes an individual’s perspective as best represented by Joseph Meeker’s argument that “comedy grows from the biological circumstances of life” and that “Comedy demonstrates that man is durable even though he may be weak, stupid, and undignified,” and, finally, “Comedy illustrates that survival depends upon man’s ability to change himself rather than his environment, and upon his ability to accept limitations rather than to curse fate for limiting him” (1996, 158, 168–69). Dance, laughter, and play support the

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comic orientation of a mature environmental ethic. It comes as no surprise, then, that Hwa Yol Jung finds himself turning toward the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin not only for the dialogic method, which itself comprises a pivotal orientation toward life as process, but also for the appreciation of carnality and carnivalization. Dance here needs to be understood as not merely metaphorical but also as literal and metonymic. As Jung notes, “The ecological crisis as we know it today points to the loss of man’s sense of touch or intimacy (Stimmung) with nature or earth” (1989, 88). That word “intimacy” reminds us that the quest for ecological balance cannot be undertaken in isolation or in the mode of American individualism, which really stands for the illusion of exceptionalism. Although individuals may retreat from society, as a pause in order to adjust their ear and gain a new sense of tonality, the mood of which Jung writes can only be achieved by reimmersion in human community. That distinction marks the clear limitation of Thoreau’s foray to Walden Pond, which Jung criticizes in a much more recent essay (see my discussion in chapter 2). The Jungs’ definition of “ecopiety” in “The Way of Ecopiety: Holistic Education for Ecological Ethics” would serve Charles Siebert quite well to help him understand what his character has accomplished in Wickerby. The Jungs emphasize the holistic character of the concept: “By ecopiety, we wish to convey a deeply abiding sense of care and reverence for coexistence among all beings and things, whether they be human or not” (1989, 33). This simple definition sheds significant light on certain kinds of poems written by a variety of authors, such as Ortiz and Snyder, Hogan, Pat Mora, and numerous others, who seek to break down the distance that one tends to find in a significant amount of Romantic poetry, wherein the speaker/viewer stands back from the natural environment, which is rendered as sublime in part due to its magnitude and its difference from the daily environment in which the speaker lives. Rather, these contemporary poets move into the realm of “communionism,” an engaged spiritual relationship often rendered in poems that take the form of prayers and songs. They are joined by a host of essayists and fiction writers. For example, one finds this distinction running throughout the writing collected in The Soul Unearthed: Celebrating Wildness and Personal Renewal through Nature, edited by Cass Adams. In that volume, much of the writing focuses on places and environments, whereas another collection emphasizes the relationships between human beings and other animals, Intimate Nature: The Bond between Women and Animals, edited by Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson. A single volume of prose that perhaps best embodies the concept as defined by the Jungs would be Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. Ecopiety proves a crucial concept for understanding and explaining what these writers set out to do in

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an age of ecological crisis that complements but nevertheless remains quite different from the nature appreciation of the Romantics. Recognizing the role of poets in embodying this concept of ecopiety, the Jungs published “Gary Snyder’s Ecopiety.” Here they discuss for the first time deep ecology, the philosophical orientation developed by Arne Naess, and link it with aesthetics. As with “A Philosophical Minuet,” Snyder’s poetry leads them to emphasize the celebratory and playful aspects of ecopiety as most clearly realized in the poems of Regarding Wave. It should be noted that the “Regarding Wave” series in this collection constitutes an epithalamion suite in which Snyder celebrates his marriage to Masa Uehara and later the birth of their first son. Thus, these poems synchronistically unite home and family in an ecological relationship participating in the larger planetary and universal processes of molecular and cosmic activity. But, as the Jungs rightly note, Snyder does not allow for escapism or a retreat into wilderness without dealing with the ecological crisis and the problems of civilization. Connecting this volume of poetry with Snyder’s first prose collection, published the following year, Earth House Hold, and then looking at the 1974 poetry volume, Turtle Island, requires the Jungs to take up the issues of economics and politics in relation to ecopiety and a larger environmental ethic in ways that they had not previously done. After Snyder, politics cannot be perceived as exclusively the realm of the human, nor can economics be understood from the limited perspective of exchange value and use value. The aesthetic demands attention to intrinsic value, on the one hand, and synchronicity and holism demand that economics take into account the integrity of the environment and the psychological orientation of humanity, on the other hand. While the Jungs have emphasized the concept of the “primitive” in much of their discussion here and elsewhere on Snyder, they rightly turn in their epilogue to the concept of “postcivilization.” This distinction is crucial so that readers understand that the attention to the primitive is not a nostalgic looking backward, but rather a comparative analysis of indigenous and nonindigenous societies for the development of a philosophy of reinhabitation. Although Snyder had already broached reinhabitation in The Old Ways, he develops the concept much further in the prose writings of the late 1980s and 1990s included in A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds.

DEVELOPING CRITIQUE AND CONSIDERING SIMPLICITY Two essays published in 1991 find Hwa Yol Jung writing to two very different audiences. “Marxism and Deep Ecology in Postmodernity” published in

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the Australian journal Thesis Eleven, which is devoted to critical theory and historical sociology, speaks to theorists oriented toward Marxist and postMarxist theories who may not be ecologically literate. “The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective,” published in the British journal Asian Philosophy presumes an audience familiar with Taoism and Confucianism but likely to know little, if anything, about deep ecology. Both of these demonstrate the value and necessity of a transnational ecocritical theory that also attends to diverse and conflicted audiences. Besides providing an attack on individualism, Jung educates his Marxist/post-Marxist audience about geopiety. Invoking the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák, Jung promotes the concept of geopiety and the need “to recover first the moral sense of nature” in an I-Thou relationship (Jung 1991b, 89). Gregory Cajete in Look to the Mountain takes this orientation a step farther, or at least a step in a different direction, when he writes about “geopsyche,” his term for the way that the land, the environment imprints itself not only on the consciousness of an individual, where geopiety might be said to reside, but also on the very neurological structure of the human brain (a theory reinforced by the neurological research of Gerald M. Edelman). To return to the notion of dance and the need to reinstate a tactile relationship and perception of the natural world, I want to link geopiety and geopsyche and to suggest that many writers try precisely to invoke in their readers a sense of geopiety or ecopiety through sharing not only their emotional interactions with particular places, especially but not exclusively wild places, but also their fundamental perception of the world based on the environments in which they have either been raised or have settled as adults. This literary communication arises most frequently in the form of memoir, but sometimes also in fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences provides an excellent example of the fiction, while such memoirs as Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of Morning, Susan Hanson’s Icons of Loss and Grace, Teresa Jordan’s Riding the White Horse Home, Lisa Dale Norton’s Hawk Flies Above, Dan O’Brien’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart, and Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood demonstrate the diversity of the nonfiction writing. Women writers are particularly well represented in this vein of nonfiction, perhaps because they show more attention to the shaping influences of home and upbringing than many male writers who emphasize adventures and travels away from home as their primary encounters with the natural world. Also, as one might expect in an essay oriented toward Marxist and postMarxist theory, Jung addresses the subject of economics more so here than in previous essays. Alluding to E. F. Schumacher, and seeking to reunite economics and ecology based on their etymological roots, Jung provides a single

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closing italicized injunction: “to ecologize is to economize and share scarce resources, to live the life of simplicity and frugality” (1991b, 95; emphasis in original). That key word, “simplicity,” of course takes us into the terrain of another type of environmental writing that has increased in frequency in recent years, as I discussed in chapter 2. But in addition to the works considered in that chapter, there exists another category of simplicity writing that proves somewhat more problematic. These works of fiction promote simplicity through cautionary tales predicated upon some kind of ecological disaster. One example will suffice. Based on scientific understanding of the potential for global warming to genererate a greenhouse effect, Arthur Herzog depicts in Heat a sudden onset of catastrophic global warming that largely takes the world by surprise. Published in 1977, it was certainly ahead of its time in terms of public awareness of this disastrous possibility. While Herzog has technology provide a way to drain off excess solar radiation to reverse global warming, he nevertheless makes it clear in the novel that the American consumerist lifestyle cannot continue unchecked in the short run or the long run, as immense sacrifices are required to reduce energy consumption in the near term and to free up capital, equipment, and material to build the necessary solar radiators. Herzog poses the question in Heat of whether or not Americans would be willing to sacrifice today for the welfare of future generations and concludes that they are not and will only make such sacrifices in the face of imminent disaster and self-apparent crisis. Bill McKibben expresses a similarly pessimistic viewpoint in his nonfiction work, The End of Nature. Herzog’s position raises significant philosophical and political questions about the ability of environmentalists and ecologists to persuade the American public to practice self-restraint and to rethink its fundamental economic foundations in a period of human history where we seemingly have averted the greatest threats to continued human existence. Is there a way to realign human priorities prior to a disaster of such magnitude and lasting impact that it creates the kind of crisis conditions that earthquakes and hurricanes generate to alter daily habitual practices? While Hwa Yol Jung has been working diligently to provide the alternative ethic, clearly we need others to work on providing the how of implementation. Many of the literary works that I mention in this essay do contribute to answering the how and do so not only by their specific thought experiments, scenarios, and personal testaments, but also through making environmental issues a regular part of the public reading experience and thereby elevating the general level of public consciousness. Again, a transnational ecocritical theory can provide new avenues for thinking theoretically about how to develop an alternative ethic to American consumerism and new examples of literary and cultural works that embody such avenues.

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CULTIVATING DIFFERENCE In the second of the two 1991 essays, the one published in Asian Philosophy, readers can see another node developing in Jung’s ethical quest: the node of difference, gender, and cultural multiplicity. Although gender issues and feminist insights have appeared previously in his writing and in the coauthored essays, in the 1990s it became an increasingly crucial component, particularly through the writings of Luce Irigaray. Here readers see Jung working in this direction by first returning to the concept of harmony and identifying three components of it: the universe is pluralistic; all elements of this pluralistic world are synchronistic; pluralistic phenomena are differentiated and linked through the “logic of correlation, not the logic of identity” (Jung 1991b, 129). The implications of this new node in his environmental ethic develop in a distinctly postmodern direction a few years later with the publication of three essays in 1995 and 1996. “The Tao of Transversality,” the first of these three, takes the concepts of carnality and carnival in a distinctly postmodern direction when Jung invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of the “rhizome” (Jung 1995, 12). From a promotion of the concepts of “difference” and “correlation” in opposition to the bankrupt notion of enlightenment universality, Jung now promotes “multiversity” and “transversal movement.” Twenty years earlier, two authors hailing from the American southwest had actually represented the kind of rhizomatic political action that Deleuze and Guattari theorize and that Jung is here able to link with key Sinitic and Western environmental ethical concepts. One of these novels, The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, was not treated so much as a novel in the years immediately following its publication as a manifesto and a bible by the organizers and followers of Earth First!, Greenpeace, and other direct action environmentalist organizations. Networks of activists participating in a horizontal organization of affiliation with minimal ideological prerequisites—complete counterpoints to Marxist and New Left parties with their rigid hierarchies and democratic centralist orthodoxies—these groups spiked trees, unfurled banners on offshore oil rigs and company headquarters, vandalized corporate operations, and disrupted the routes of whaling ships and nuclear-powered navy vessels. With many of their actions highly theatrical they practiced both rhizomatic organization and carnivalized demonstrations. Abbey’s novel explicitly envisioned such political activism. The other novel of the day was John Nichols’s The Milagro Beanfield War, which introduced people of color into the equation of environmental activism. Significantly different in orientation from Abbey’s monkeywrenching and the wilderness protection of Earth First!, Nichols’s novel focuses on the

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political activism of minority people seeking to protect local knowledge and local agricultural practices in the face of eradication by multinational corporations. Ana Castillo takes up the issue in an equally “magic realist” style in her novel, So Far from God, which promotes community based cooperatives while critiquing industrial pollution along the U.S.-Mexico border. The most detailed and developed literary investigation of the promise and problems of rhizomatic political organization for environmental ethical action, however, can probably be found in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, published in the same years Jung is making his turn overtly toward postmodernist philosophy. This science fiction trilogy, running to some 2,000 small print pages, explores human settlement of Mars and all of the environmental problems attendant upon that, as well as the environmental crises and steps toward redress on Earth. Perhaps though for all of the various environmental issues the trilogy addresses, Robinson’s most important scientific point is that space colonization can do absolutely nothing in itself to alleviate either population or environmental issues on this planet. A list of other novels appearing around the same time as Jung’s essay that also tie into the rhizomatic principle and direct environmental action would have to include Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues, which addresses environmental conditions in Hawai’i particularly in relation to the native people, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, which foresaw Mexico’s Chiapas rebellion, and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, which treats Native American and First Nation resistance to the monumentally destructive actions of Hydro Quebec’s James Bay project that has flooded thousands of square miles of First Nation lands. Toward the end of his essay, Jung raises the issue of the “fitting response,” quoting Calvin Schrag’s Communicative Praxis. All of the novels I have mentioned in this paragraph address precisely this concept, and do so by having their responses come clearly from a variety of “decentered subjects” (Jung 1995, 18–19). Thus, what these authors were working out in imaginative fiction to demonstrate fitting responses to the environmental crisis, Hwa Yol Jung was working out theoretically to enable the conscious linkage of philosophy and literature to help individual readers determine their own appropriate action as socially decentered individual subjects seeking to become ecologically centered interbeings.

ADVANCING PHENOMENOLOGY AND DIALOGICS In two 1996 essays, “Phenomenology and Body Politics” and “Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics,” Jung works on a synthesis of the thought of Immanuel Levinas and Bakthin. And

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while Jung is certainly correct in contending that much in Levinas provides a corrective to Derrida, there is an aspect of Levinas’s remarks that Jung does not challenge at this time, but does move beyond in 1999 in “Difference and Responsibility,” where he emphasizes “relationality,” “interbeing,” and “interdividuality,” turning to Thich Nat Hanh, René Girard, and Bakhtin to criticize Levinas for ignoring the nonhuman world. These terms of Jung all work to combine key concepts from East Asian and European philosophy. Levinas errs when he contends that to understand and embrace radical alterity, we must accept “the absolute otherness of the Other” (quoted in Jung 1996a, 8). The recognition of the dialogic construction of the social being and the Buddhist recognition of interbeing directly challenge that notion of “absolute.” Rather, as I think Julia Kristeva suggests in Strangers to Ourselves, we need to emphasize the relational difference of human beings, a recognition that accepts alterity on a heterarchical plane rather than along a hierarchical axis of power, control, and expropriation. For such a relational difference among beings of the same species and even among beings of varying species, we need to incorporate the concept of Another, the other that is proximate and made familiar through recognition and dialogue (Murphy 1995, 114–15). Such a concept can be traced back to the two different words in Russian for the English word “other” as discussed by Bakhtin’s translator, Caryl Emerson, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin 1984, 294, 302n15; see also Murphy 1995, 35). This Another frequently becomes the antagonist of alien encounters in ecologically sensitive science fiction novels. Amy Thomson in three of her novels, The Color of Distance, Storyteller, and Through Alien Eyes, provides the best example of the working out of the Other and the Self as both Anothers in the alien contact experiences on which these novels focus. At the same time that The Color of Distance, for example, educates readers about the possibility of sustainable inhabitation of a rain forest bioregion, it also shows the psychological process of translating the initially perceived Other into the appreciated Another, and the reciprocal experience of coming to see oneself through the eyes of another.

EMBRACING HETERONOMY AND CONTINUATION Finally, I want to mention one more essay published by Hwa Yol Jung in 2002. “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other” finds Jung focusing on “heteronomy, which cultivates difference and plurality rather than identity and homogeneity” (2002, 298). This position brings Jung into proximity of the large body of literature, most of it nonfiction, being generated by the

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bioregionalist and indigenous movements in the United States and around the globe. I see here the fruitful potential for dialogue between Jung’s theorizing and the debates about the future, or lack of it, for the green nation-state, particularly since those thinkers find themselves critiquing the same people that Jung takes to task, such as Jürgen Habermas, as in the case of Robyn Eckersley’s The Green State (see chapter 3). The envisioning of allonational formations—alternatives to the nationstate—in imaginative literature provides an important arena for debating and conceptualizing green alternatives to the modern corporate state. Such work precisely fulfills the action that Jung calls for when he states that “The reclamation of truth must come by way of planetary (or cosmopolitan) thinking which is no longer Eurocentric but the result of correlating laterally the multiple sociocultural life-worlds as the decentered sites of truth” (2002, 303). As I hope that I have shown by my various suggestions for future reading, we need also to undertake a fruitful lateral correlation of the insights, thought experiments, and representations of experience occurring in both philosophy and literature, in tandem and often synchronistically. And such lateral correlation, as exemplified by Hwa Yol Jung’s publications, precisely demonstrates what I mean by developing a transnational ecocritical theory.

Part Two

SURVEYING THE BOUNDARIES OF GENRE

Chapter Five

Nature in the Contemporary American Novel

Environmental problems, themes, and struggles for environmental redress are appearing across all manifestations of contemporary American fiction, and have been represented in that genre for over two centuries. In this chapter, I want to focus on the diversity within contemporary works, but to do so I need to provide some background and review literary production prior to this time. I will define “contemporary” as beginning with 1970, the year of the first Earth Day celebration. Contemporary publication includes serious realist literary novels, activist novels, detective and mystery novels in ongoing series, historical novels, postmodern, magic realist, and multicultural works, science fiction, and fantasy. They are being produced by multigenre environmental writers, commercial writers who select an environmental theme for a single book, writers of color from every ethnicity, particularly Native American writers, as one might expect, but also white, Asian American, Latino/a, and African American authors. Both women and men are equally active. Part of a larger development of nature-oriented literature in the United States, the nature-oriented/environmental novel has received far less attention than poetry and nonfiction despite the popularity of these novels and their prevalence across fictional genres. While numerous essays and conference papers have been presented and published on individual novels, individual authors, and small groups of novels, and a few critics have written monographs that focus on the fiction of a handful of writers, usually canonical ones, no monograph exists providing an overview of the field and not even an edited volume provides the kind of wide-ranging treatment given either nonfiction or poetry. While I, too, am not yet ready to present that comprehensive overview, I will provide an outline here of what such an overview would have to cover and in the next few chapters will provide 79

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some illustrations of the kind of study that is needed, particularly with regard to popular genre literature. Approaching such a study presents some daunting problems of organization and it is no surprise that critics prefer to treat a particular author or individual texts. By so doing one avoids the difficulties of categorization and the vexations of deciding which novels to foreground in any given category. At present, I would divide contemporary American nature novels into the following major categories: (1) historical and realist novels, (2) postmodern and magic realist novels, (3) mystery and detective novels, (4) science fiction and fantasy novels. Other distinctions that can serve to organize these texts, for criticism or course design, include the bildungsroman and regionalism, both of which appear in the four categories I am using. In addition, the need exists to distinguish among novels that can be said to be nature-oriented but perhaps do not have any kind of an activist component and would be considered by many as fitting into a pastoral mode, novels depicting activism involving environmental justice, and cautionary dystopian works in contrast to visionary utopian ones. Further, a distinction can be made between novels that encourage readers to take action and those that leave readers passively trusting to superheroes, fate, or institutions to handle the environmental health of the planet.

THE NOVEL BEFORE 1970 For example, the promise and problems of Lawrence Buell’s adoption of Barry Lopez’s concept of “outer mimesis” need to be addressed, particularly its limitations in terms of the relationship of setting, detail, and human-nature experiences in relation to conventions of plot development within specific fictional genres, the needs of characterization, and the advancement of environmental, philosophical, or political truths, as distinct from the conveying of factual information. Fiction also requires taking a look at the debate, most significantly advanced by Terry Gifford in regard to poetry, over pastoral/ anti-pastoral and post-pastoral. It appears to be the case that up to this point in time, actually, that both the British and European ecocritics have been far more willing to focus attention on fiction than have their American counterparts, although the tendency has generally been to emphasize the nineteenthcentury and canonical works from other periods author by author or work by work, with little attention to popular and experimental texts outside of what the academy defines as “literary.” That is not to say that experimental works are avoided, but rather that they are either established works or written by established authors, such as Günter Grass. A significant exception to these

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remarks would be Axel Goodbody’s new study focusing on German literature, Nature, Technology, and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature. To understand the contemporary, however, critics and readers also need to look backward in time at least in terms of a general survey of major natureoriented novels in American literature preceding 1970. We need to do such a review in order to consider precursors of contemporary efforts and the kinds of expectations generated by reading and studying such novels. I think here immediately of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, not only The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer series, but also some of his sea novels, where, according to Russell Newman, Cooper develops his concept of the true gentleman having to develop a relationship to the American land. In this regard, the Japanese ecocritic Shin Yamashiro can provide guidance in reminding us to look beyond land for nature-oriented novels. Frank Norris’s The Octopus and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of Pointed Firs are also obvious choices. These works, although distinguishable as either novel, romance, or historical fiction, according to nineteenth-century criteria, generally conform to realist stylistic features with chronologically ordered narratives, usually in the third person. Similarly, early environmental utopian works, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, tend to be based on static, idyllic, isolated communities vastly different from the eutopian social experiment in-progress novels of the past three decades. Such standard features that would come to mind when considering these well-known texts work well for readers approaching contemporary novels from a reading horizon based on expectations derived from such nonfiction standards as Walden and Sand County Almanac. In like manner, William Gilmore Simms’s depictions of the colonial Carolinas combine easily recognized features of both historical fiction and regional nature writing. Such works, however, do not prepare readers well for the diversity of styles and genres employed by contemporary American novelists, even though early experimental works do exist, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Melville’s sprawling novel participates in a long tradition of mixed genre writing resurgent today, as in Katharine Haake’s That Water, Those Rocks, which one reviewer describes as “Part memoir, part natural history, part fiction.” It is also important to discuss the early forays into environmental issues represented by such novels as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Mary Austin’s The Ford in contrast to the pastoral romances of Willa Cather, Gene StrattonPorter, and Harold Bell Wright, all of whom were working in the first third of the twentieth century. Ideally, these pre-contemporary novels would best be studied by breaking them up into at least two major groups with 1900 as roughly the dividing line for a variety of reasons. One reason would be that the distinction between

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novel and romance, so intensely debated and discussed in Hawthorne’s day is a dead issue by the time Henry James has become the don of American letters. Likewise, local color has largely died out as a category of dismissal and is replaced with a recognition of the significance of regionalism as a feature of American fiction. Also, there is relatively little environmental literature concerned with urban locations and urban-rural conflicts prior to this point in time, although I am sure there are texts that prove the exception. In a thorough review of pre-1970 fiction, I would not want to provide or even see new close readings of a few canonical works with those being used to imply that the handful represents the bushel, as was the case with F. O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance, for instance. Rather, such a review should remind readers of the rich tradition of nature novels in their great diversity and recall for readers some of the forgotten and neglected works of this rich heritage, many of which proved quite popular in their own day and deserve to be revisited, particularly works by women and visibly ethnic authors. Many readers will be surprised to learn how many of these works are in print and readily available today. For example, a set of contested works that need to be revisited and reevaluated are the novels of the early African American filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. The Homesteader, originally published in 1917 and later made into his first silent film, is an autobiographical novel about his experiences as an African American pioneer homesteading farmland in South Dakota. It has been reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press. The Conquest, which was written a year earlier, is likewise an autobiographical novel that focuses on the motivations of a young African American from Chicago who decides to leave the city for the wide open spaces of the western plains. A significant contradiction in this novel that must be addressed is the fact that the U.S. government’s theft of Indian reservation lands and their opening up for sale as a result of the Allotment Act provides the novel’s hero with his opportunity to become a rancher and farmer. As a result, in a variety of courses focused on the nature novel, one might have the opportunity to set one or the other of Micheaux’s novels against Louise Erdrich’s Tracks or other Native stories about the impact of government privatization of indigenous lands. There are other writers, of course, whose names remain well known, but often today for only a single book out of a prodigious body of work. Upton Sinclair is almost exclusively associated with The Jungle, yet he turned the same intensity found in that novel toward other muckraking projects, such as King Coal in 1917 and Oil! in 1926. John Steinbeck, too, receives less attention than he deserves because his influence and legacy have not been traced in relation to contemporary nature novelists. Most Americans know

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him exclusively for a few short stories in anthologies and The Red Pony. Few even read The Grapes of Wrath, even though the treatment of migrant laborers, including children, remains a serious matter of racial, economic, and environmental injustice. It would seem that he receives more attention from ecocritical Americanists in Japan than here in the United States. Numerous authors of the first half of the twentieth century, especially women writers, who frequently wrote best sellers in their day, working in multiple genres, have been either completely forgotten or are known now only as authors of children’s stories. Such is the case with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Gene Stratton-Porter. Yet, while many of their novels do have teenagers, frequently teenage girls as the protagonist, they need not be relegated to youth-only audiences. Rawlings’s The Yearling and South Moon Under, for instance, the former defined now only as children’s literature and the latter long out of print, comprise key nature novels in the regional literature of Florida, a state that I have come to understand as being in the South, but quite distinct from it in essential ways, geographically, ecologically, and culturally. Most of Stratton-Porter’s work to be found in bookstores today consists of the Limberlost series about a young girl of the woods. But she has other novels, recently brought back into print due to the renewal of interest in regionalism, by Indiana University Press that, while still using girls and young women as major characters, go beyond the childhood innocence of the Limberlost books. The Harvester tells the tale of a Thoreau-style herbalist who abandons bachelorhood to marry, but in the style of traditional romance conventions, she returns with him to live idyllically in the woods. At a time of increasing urbanization and the rapid decline of subsistence farms, StrattonPorter declares that people can go home again to a rustic life of joyful subsistence. In A Daughter of the Land, originally published in 1918, StrattonPorter’s protagonist, Kate Bates, struggles against family tradition and agrarian patriarchy to realize her dream of owning and managing a large farm. Through perseverance, she overcomes a bad marriage and realizes her dream. This novel would stand up well as a bridge between Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! on the one hand and Dori Sanders’s Her Own Place, on the other hand. There are other regional writers waiting to be recovered and reconsidered, and many of them are women, such as Ruth Moore, who wrote novels about life in the state of Maine. Finally, there exists a large body of science fiction and fantasy novels that take up environmental issues from the turn of the century forward, reflecting not only the influence of H. G. Wells, but also advances in science and technology. I am thinking here especially of novels written in the 1940s and 1950s, such as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, Dexter Masters’s

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suppressed novel about the early days of atomic bomb development, The Accident, Pat Frank’s nuclear war novel, Alas, Babylon, and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s controversial A Canticle for Leibowitz. Cautionary tales about the environmental destruction wrought by science run amuck, particularly in the form of nuclear war and animal mutation in the 1950s and 1960s are simply too numerous even to mention.

THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL, 1970–2005 I have given much thought to the problem of how to organize the nature novels written over the past thirty-five years, the period I am defining as contemporary. Historical and realist novels represent obvious continuations of the reader-anticipated tradition. In regard to historical novels, one has to tackle the issue of what constitutes historical. Is it any novel set in a period of time and cultural situation preceding the date of the novel’s composition? If so, then all novels about an author’s childhood would be defined as historical, but I think that really reflects reader response rather than authorial purpose and strategy in defining setting. Instead, I would more narrowly define this category as novels set in a period of time prior to the lifetime of the author, so that for Wendell Berry, for example, it would have to be a period prior to 1933, rather than the common time frame of a majority of his novels and short stories, which are usually set in the decades when he was growing up in Kentucky, the 1930s and 1940s. Works fitting this category include Marly Youmans’s Catherwood, set in the colonial period; William Haywood Henderson’s post–Civil War novel, The Rest of the Earth; Dan O’Brien’s Great Sioux War–era novel, The Contract Surgeon; Chet Raymo’s medieval fiction, In the Falcon’s Claw; Brenda Peterson’s Depression-era River of Light; Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit, set in the 1920s; and frontier novels by such authors as Molly Gloss and Susan Lang, The Jump-off Creek and Small Rocks Rising, respectively. These novels call for a focus on a couple of key issues: (1) the degree to which they are based in nostalgia and romantically re-create the period to serve eutopian ideals; (2) the degree to which they attempt to rewrite official or popular history in order to assess more accurately the contradictory characteristics of human-environment interactions in specific times and specific locales; (3) the degree to which they share similar thematic impulses and emphases or employ very different environmental ethical and philosophical positions. Particularly, I would want to investigate what kinds of claims they make about the way humans lived in the past in terms of implicit claims about how humans ought to live in the present and the future. Thus, it is possible that

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some of these novels can be defined as novels of environmental justice, or ecological novels, more so than novels that merely describe a particular environment or locale. Such an investigation helps to remind readers and critics that these novels are never obligated to fit into the categories we create to organize our thinking about them, but rather that we need to use the architectonics of individual novels to critique the adequacy, productivity, and necessary limitations of our categories. A discussion of realist novels could fruitfully begin with Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack and A Place on Earth. While set in the past, with the exception of the present-day Remembering, Berry’s novels always occur during his lifetime. Individual works worth treating in this category would include Frank Bergon’s Wild Game, a novel based on actual events in Nevada in the 1980s centering around the murder of a wildlife biologist by poachers; Philip Lee Williams’s The Heart of a Distant Forest—written as if it were a diary of a man living out his final days dying of cancer; David James Duncan’s The River Why, about a fisherman’s upriver journey of self-discovery and his growing commitment to wilderness preservation; James Galvin’s The Meadow, a set of interlinked stories spanning a century in which a meadow is the main character; Stephen Goodwin’s The Blood of Paradise, about a couple filled with 1960s naïveté attempting to return to the land; Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, about a set of women, and the men around them, coming to terms with a particular ecology and the possible ways of life it offers; Kent Nelson’s Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still, about three women on a contemporary Dakota alfalfa ranch. Additionally, we need to be sure to include novels set in other countries that reveal something about American attitudes about nature, place, and inhabitation, such as Marne Mueller’s Green Fires and Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast. The next category calls for a focus on postmodern and magic realist novels. In addition to these two kinds of contemporary writing, the definitions of which have been debated and detailed at great length, this category also needs to use the definition of paramodernist works, that is, works by ethnic minorities, particularly Native American authors, that may contain stylistic features and narrative strategies that look the same as those used in cosmopolitan postmodern novels but derive from a fundamentally different world outlook. Native American fiction, for the most part never having been modern/modernist has no need of becoming postmodern/postmodernist, although many traditional Native American narrative devices bear striking similarity to those deployed by practitioners of postmodern fiction. One need only look at Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart or Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. I would argue that authors such as Vizenor, Silko, and Hogan proceed from different ontological and ontic orientations than John Barth or Janet Kauffman. Thus, I would discuss such novels

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as those by Vizenor, Silko, and Hogan—at least her fiction set in the contemporary period—as well as Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest and Tropic of Orange; Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day; Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; John Nichols’s The Milagro Beanfield War; Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and, perhaps, All Over Creation; Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar; and Toni Morrison’s Paradise. I don’t think it is so important to say that this novel is postmodern, or that novel is magic realist, or that novel paramodern, as it is to point out how these novels use experimental, avant-garde, mystical, spiritual realist, and antirealist devices to write about nature, the relationship of human culture to treatment of the earth, and environmental justice. Further, what kind of ontological and epistemological positions are posited by the forms of these novels and their departures from traditional or consensual realism? Do they sketch out new conceptions of material reality? Do they treat the spiritual in a different way from the nonfiction nature writers who are usually defined as having a spiritual orientation? Or despite their formal experimentation do they reinscribe traditional and well-established cultural attitudes toward humanity and its relationship to the rest of the natural world? In order to understand the range of depictions of nature in the contemporary American novel, one must look across not only so-called serious literature, but also consider the categories usually considered genre or commercial fiction, although I find both suspect terms. Formula fiction might work for some of these works, but in other cases the authors have set up a certain kind of thought experiment, just as the authors do who write in a postmodern or magic realist mode, to explore scenarios and topics not treatable through recourse to realism. To my mind, the two main categories here can be defined as mystery and detective, which can include thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy. Frankly, I have been astounded by the number of mystery series and individual works that provide serious education about nature and environmental issues and build their plots around an environmental problem. In contrast, science fiction and fantasy have a long and well-established reputation for treating such issues and only their scope and sheer number might surprise readers. Since the next few chapters of this book will take up these two categories in some detail, I will not summarize an approach to them here.

CONCLUSION Whatever categories a critic might use to organize contemporary American nature-oriented novels into discussable units, any such study ought to admit

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the limitations and arbitrariness of those categories, as well as the degree to which many of the novels treated need to be considered from the perspectives afforded by multiple categories rather than reductively pigeonholed into a single one. For instance, if one uses the bildungsroman as a category, then such novels as Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Edna Escamill’s Daughter of the Mountain, and Leonard Unger’s Leaving the Land could be grouped with some of Wendell Berry’s novels, science fiction, such as Lethem’s Girl in Landscape, and some of Le Guin’s novellas. And if one considers some of the young adult fantasy novels that rely on mystery plots for structure, such as the Young Wizard series, then the bildungsroman list cuts across all of my established categories. And when concern is voiced about the potential cultural influence of nature-oriented literature, particularly in terms of environmental justice, it becomes crucial to remind critics not to shun the commercial and the popular in terms of the significance of their wide readership and the seriousness with which many of the authors in this category take up the education of readers in scientific fact, environmental history, public policy, environmental regulations and their legal loopholes, and current and on-the-horizon events. Indeed, in the next few chapters I intend to demonstrate this claim in regard to science fiction and mystery novels.

Chapter Six

The Non-alibi of Alien Scapes Science Fiction and Ecocriticism

A leading American journal in the field of critical analyses of science fiction is Extrapolation. Its title identifies a basic orientation toward defining the relationship between the genre of science fiction and literary realism and referentiality. The application of the concept of extrapolation to science fiction insists that the writing and reading of science fiction (SF) are intimately linked to, and based on, getting people to think both about the present and about this world in which they live. SF stories that emphasize analogy between imagined worlds and the reader’s consensual world encourage such thinking as well (see Suvin 1979, 28–29; 1988, 37). The encouragement of that type of critical thinking provides a linkage between SF and nature-oriented literature. Rather than providing the alibi of a fantasy—in the sense of an escape from real-world problems—extrapolation emphasizes that the present and the future are interconnected. What we do now will be reflected in the future, and, therefore, we have no alibi for avoiding addressing the results of our actions today. Some critics of science fiction have recognized the relationship between their field of study and environmental concerns and appreciation for nature for decades now. Ecocriticism has also occasionally made use of SF works in courses and articles, such as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and various novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin (see, for instance, Alaimo 1998; Gough 1998; Tschachler 1998). Yet, the nonfictional prejudice of much ecocriticism that causes the slighting of fiction in general carries over to the slighting of SF. One subgenre of SF that does get some play would be that of the near future ecological disaster/nuclear destruction novel. Such texts as The Earth Abides and Alas, Babylon, for instance, come to mind, while Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is probably the most famous of these as a result of having been made into a major motion picture. Ecofeminists have been more open to including SF writing in their 89

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critical purview, perhaps because women writers concerned about nature and environmental issues have utilized the genre of fiction more readily and extensively than they have that of nonfiction. It also seems to be the case that environmentally concerned women have turned to SF in order to depict dystopias, utopias, and eutopias (good places) that demonstrate the connections between the oppression of women and the destruction of nature, as well as the changed relationship to nature that humankind would have if there were gender equality. Suzy McKee Charnas’s dystopian Motherlines and Walk to the End of the World and Marge Piercy’s eutopian/dystopian Woman on the Edge of Time include strong environmentalist dimensions, while Starhawk in The Fifth Sacred Thing links patriarchy with ecological destruction and binds heterarchy and ecological restoration insolubly together (see McGuire and McGuire 1998 for a comparison of the Piercy and Starhawk novels). Certainly, SF is not nature writing, in the sense of that genre’s definition as being scientifically based, personal observation written in nonfiction prose. What it can be, however, is nature-oriented literature, in the sense of its being an aesthetic text that, on the one hand, directs reader attention toward the natural world and human interaction with other aspects of nature within that world, and, on the other hand, makes specific environmental issues part of the plots and themes of various works. SF also at times shares with both nature writing and other forms of nature-oriented literature detailed attention to the natural world found in the present, as well as to the scientific disciplines that facilitate such detailed attention (Van der Bogert 1983, 58). Large scope SF novels and series, such as Dune and its sequels, often combine a greater array of scientific disciplines that bear on perceiving, interpreting, and understanding the world than does most nature writing. Such SF works often bring together geology, hydrology, archaeology, physics, biology, biochemistry, and mathematics along with natural history, pseudo-natural history, psychology, social and environmental history, and other social sciences (see Gough 1998). In the next three sections of this chapter, I will initially survey a variety of SF works to show the diversity of SF treatments of nature. Then I will focus on a couple of recent novels to consider how writers of the 1990s were producing an ecologically informed or misinformed corpus of science fiction. And, finally, I will zero in on an explicitly environmental work of SF, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.

EXTRAPOLATIONS AND CAUTIONARY TALES HERE AND ELSEWHERE Every year, on average, it gets a little hotter, and commentaries about this phenomenon of global warming have been regularly appearing for well over

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a decade, including reports that 2005 was the hottest year since modern measuring began (for examples of 1990s commentaries, see Linden 1998; Warrick 1998; and Schmid 1999; for 2005, see Eilperin 2005 and “2005 Hottest Year on Record”). While Time magazine and numerous other media outlets publicly recognized the general world scientific consensus on global warming in early 2006, the Bush administration continued to sandbag the issue, rewriting government reports to water down their language and avoiding any policy statements that might lead to binding agreements to take action to reduce American greenhouse gas emissions. Not only are their concerns about the environmental future that global warming is preparing for humanity, but there are also regularly occurring ecological disasters that impinge upon the present directly and, in some cases, irrevocably, as in 1998: “Authorities estimated . . . it would cost $105 million to clean up rivers and streams flowing into Europe’s largest nature reserve that were contaminated in one of Spain’s worst ecological disasters” (Spetalnick 1998); or in 2005 with the string of major hurricanes that hit the United States, or, before that, the tsunami that devastated numerous Indian Ocean countries. The preceding topics and any prediction of environmental disaster that has been made in the past decade, however, have been prefigured in science fiction in one way or another. Until the resurgence of the environmental movement in the United States in the 1970s, the greatest threat to the natural world in the minds of most people was that of nuclear war. While activism against nuclear war centered on the possible extinction of humankind, there were many who also recognized the environmental threats posed by tactical as well as strategic nuclear weapons. SF addressed those fears in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of attention to the impact of such war on the world beyond humanity. Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) portrays a limited nuclear war in which the good people of small American towns survive by relying on the Jeffersonian agrarian-yeoman values that Frank believes to be the bedrock of the Heartland. At novel’s end, the U.S. military is going to help such people get back on their feet, but it is clear that their allegiance has shifted, at least temporarily, to the local community and away from the nation-state. Frank seems very aware of the degree to which urban people have become disconnected from both domesticated agrarian nature and wild nature, but presents a small town model of American life that can recover from devastation by separating out the necessities of life from the frivolities. These are people capable of learning once more to live off the land. Twenty-five years later, one of the last of the great American nuclear-war books was published, War Day and the Journey Onward, written by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka. War Day depicts a limited nuclear war, similar to that occurring in Frank’s Alas, Babylon. The United States is devastated by

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a war that lasts less than an hour in 1988 and is breaking up into independent states by the time the characters Strieber and Kunetka take a journalistic trip across the continent. Written in a pseudo-documentary style (see Murphy 1990), the authors are clearly intent on instilling as strong an aversion to nuclear war in their readers as possible. But they focus not only on human devastation but also on environmental destruction, thereby emphasizing the interdependence of nature and culture and reiterating the environmentalist message of the intervening years that people are a threat to the rest of the natural world, an idea frequently lacking in the cautionary novels of nuclear war that preceded theirs. Fifteen years later, in 1999, Strieber teamed up with Art Bell to write a nonfiction book that made the New York Times best-seller list, The Coming Global Superstorm, which became the basis for the movie, The Day After Tomorrow, and depicts the possible meteorological consequences of global warming’s disruption of the North Atlantic current. But certainly nuclear war has not been represented as the only threat to civilization, if not humankind itself, in post–World War II SF. I find it quite interesting that a decade before Frank published his novel, George R. Stewart had published Earth Abides (1949), which steers a middle course between total human annihilation and the continuation of civilization. Nuclear war is not the cause of the decimation; civilization is not to blame. Rather, nature just runs its course, as it has throughout human history. A plague descends upon North America and wipes out the vast majority of the population. The protagonist Ish, who provides the novel’s point of view, just happens to be a graduate student alone in the mountains working on an environmental studies thesis when the plague hits and he is one of the people who is spared. As a result of this circumstance, Stewart’s novel provides the reader with a perspective that repeatedly works against anthropocentrism by emphasizing the longterm power, diversity, and self-regulating mechanisms of nature in opposition to the short-term ephemerality of human beings and their nations and states. At novel’s end, Ish defines himself as the last of the Americans and Stewart concludes the novel with the quote from Ecclesiastes 1:4, that provides the book’s title: “Men go and come, but earth abides.” In thinking about the relationship of SF to other forms of nature-oriented literature, it might be useful to remember that Earth Abides appeared in the same year that the first posthumous edition of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac was released and a year after the publication of Robinson Jeffers’s The Double Axe and Other Poems. At virtually the same time, then, authors were espousing deanthropocentric perspectives in a variety of literary venues and, no doubt, to very diverse audiences. Five years before Jacques Derrida shocked American humanists and structuralists at Johns Hopkins University through his deconstruction of the work

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of Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1966, a Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem, had already deconstructed Western science and anthropocentrism in his SF novel Solaris, originally published in Polish in 1961 and published in English translation in 1971. Solaris is an apparently sentient planet, but one that has a sentience indefinable by any form of human scientific analysis, which has been undertaken exhaustively, excessively, and obsessively over many years when the novel commences. Darko Suvin says in his afterword to the English edition of Solaris: “The truth it teaches through its fable is an open and dynamic truth. Lem’s major novels have at their cognitive core the simple and difficult realization that no closed reference system . . . is viable in the age of relativity theory and post-cybernetic sciences” (Lem 1961/1980, 220; emphasis in original). And further, Suvin contends of Lem that he has a “central concern for a Copernican or Brunoan dethroning of anthropocentric theory. Man is not the measure of all things except for other people, and his mental models cannot be usefully projected onto the universe” (Lem 1961/1980, 221). While some ecocritics and environmental philosophers doubt that it is possible to be anything but anthropocentric, others argue for the need to become, at least intellectually if not instinctively, ecocentric or biocentric. From that perspective literary works, then, that are anti- or de-anthropocentric can be understood as environmental literature. Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To . . . , a clearly primarily feminist work, has a secondary emphasis on critiquing not only androcentrism but also anthropocentrism. The plot of the story begins typically enough with a small crew of shipwrecked earthlings landing on an uncharted planet. The plot, however, proceeds atypically when one of the female characters refuses to participate in the men’s plan to establish human dominance over the planet through colonizing it, which would mean impregnating the protagonist against her will in order to increase the human population. In the end such plans come to naught and all of them die. But along the way, the protagonist has a startling revelation when she realizes that the spaceship’s equipment is not designed to determine for the crew and passengers whether anything on an alien planet is edible. Rather, the ship is designed to prevent the humans from accidentally contaminating the local ecology (Russ 1997, 14). The protagonist concludes that they have no right to invade this planet, even when arriving accidentally (Russ 1997, 27). Russ’s We Who Are About To . . . raises ethical questions about human colonization of a planet that appears to be uninhabited by any creatures with higher intelligence. Usually in SF such planets are fair game, but colonization does not always mean adapting to the planet to meet the needs of a preexistent human civilization. In British author John Brunner’s short novel Bedlam Planet (1968), he emphasizes that the only hope for the colonists’ survival is to allow themselves to undergo adaptation to the ecosystem of the planet on

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which they land. They must learn the fauna and flora and figure out where they can fit into the food chain rather than simply terraforming the place to support terran agriculture. While making a claim, then, for the necessity of becoming inhabitants through transforming these individuals from exogenous to indigenous human beings, Brunner conveniently works with a planet with no competing sentient life (in Brunner’s Total Eclipse [1974] in contrast, the planet’s plant life kills off the stranded archeological team that is forced to try and establish a permanent colony). Unlike Brunner, Ursula K. Le Guin in The Word for World Is Forest (1972) pits an indigenous sentient species against human interlopers, who consider themselves superior because they know how to exploit the planet, whereas the indigenous species only lives there. At the time of its publication, Le Guin’s novel was caught up in debates about SF being used to generate political parables about the Viet Nam War, and it certainly is amenable to such an allegorical reading. But more than that, it is an ecologically sensitive novel pitting not simply colonizers against colonized, but rather inhabitants against interlopers. SF has a strong potential to function as parable addressing the issue of how people become inhabitants and what it means to be indigenous in relation to environmental responsibility and the mutual adaptation between humans and the rest of nature (see Suvin 1979, 30). In one of his most famous novels, The Sheep Look Up (1972), Brunner depicted—in the new wave style he had already established in Stand on Zanzibar (1968)—what happens when people don’t learn to become inhabitants but continue to try to live on the borrowed time of environmental depletion and pollution proliferation. Brunner, developing a kind of if-then extrapolation, describes in extensive detail a United States awash in hazardous waste sites, love canal–style housing complexes, leaky microwaves and other carcinogenic appliances, killer smog, and high security, sterile suburbs. Eventually, the intensification of despoliation reaches a trigger point and the American masses begin to revolt. Brunner suggests that the chaos that descends on the United States results in part from business, government, and developers refusing to listen to the more reasonable of the environmental activist movements, which provided programs of action that could have averted disaster. Much of what Brunner depicts in The Sheep Look Up constituted only minimal extrapolation from information available in the late 1960s, while other projections in the novel quickly became modest versions of government acknowledged crises. Less than ten years after the publication of Brunner’s novel, and indicative of the extrapolative accuracy of the work, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation in 1980 to set up the Superfund to address national toxic waste sites. But after twenty-five years, the Environmental Protection Agency proudly announced that work had been undertaken on 966 sites, or

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62 percent of the sites ranked on the National Priorities List. At the same time, the number of toxic sites designated as needing Superfund cleanup continued to grow (“Annual Superfund Data”; “Basic Information”). While Brunner spun out his extrapolation close to home and close to the present in both Stand on Zanzibar, which addresses human overpopulation, and The Sheep Look Up, Le Guin has usually not set her SF novels close to the present, and only rarely on earth. These distances make it easier for her to generate a what-if, rather than if-then, type of SF. For instance, in one of her award-winning novels, The Dispossessed (1974), the action takes place in another solar system a century or two into the future. There, Le Guin generates a novel that matches up the working out of an anarchist society with conditions of environmental scarcity. Her Anarresti develop their economy and culture on the inhabitable moon of an earthlike planet named Urras, from which they have been exiled. Through this novel Le Guin is able to raise a series of questions about the possibility of environmental responsibility prior to conditions of scarcity, as well as the possibility of egalitarianism when there are margins of profit and luxuries that can be hoarded. She also suggests that the most important technologies are the ones that can increase communication and the free flow of information among people rather than the ones that generate higher rates of consumption and the excesses of possession. But lest the reader think that The Dispossessed is merely a thought experiment with no application to the present day, Le Guin introduces near novel’s end the Terran ambassador to Urras, who tells the protagonist Shevek about conditions on Earth. The ambassador describes Earth as a planet that human beings have spoiled through overpopulation and unsustainable consumption with the result that they have almost completely destroyed their own means of survival (Le Guin 1974, 279). In response to the devastation the survivors have had to submit to total centralization and rationalization of all resources. Destroying planetary biodiversity will lead, Le Guin argues, not only to human self-destruction but also to the loss of human freedom. In other words, unlike the arguments of some critics of the contemporary international green movement, Le Guin contends that it is not environmentalists who would deny freedom to other human beings but that the unbridled consumption of the present day will necessitate draconian measures tomorrow. Only if people today learn the lessons that Shevek and the anarchists of Anarres have to offer can they hope to have freedom in a future that is ecologically sustainable rather than diseased and blighted. Brunner, then, provides what might be labeled a dystopian cautionary tale, while Le Guin provides a eutopian cautionary tale. In The Sheep Look Up people come to awareness as a result of environmental crises that devastate North America and other parts of the globe and throw the United States into

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chaos. He suggests that the conflagration could have been avoided but wasn’t. Le Guin posits the world of Anarres as a place where human beings are working out a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature, where culture and economy are being adapted to environmental constraints. And Le Guin wants readers to identify with that possibility in contrast to the blighted landscape of the Earth that the ambassador describes. But in a way, Le Guin might be providing a loophole, in that the Anarresti are able to work out this new nature-culture relationship on a planet separate from Urras, where business as usual is the order of the day, and on a planet where there are no other sentient beings to challenge the Anarresti over the right to settle and transform the environment even as they adapt to it. As with Russ’s We Who Are About To . . . and Brunner’s Bedlam Planet, this issue of the right to settle another planet as represented also in The Dispossessed will need to be revisited when considering Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. But before doing that, I want to take a look at two novels published in 1994 and 1996, contemporaneous with Robinson’s Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996). While both of these novels address environmental issues explicitly from different angles, each suffers from certain problems if viewed ecocritically, and as a result I came away in both cases enjoying the adventure while it lasted, appreciating some of the education about nature and environment presented, and feeling troubled by some of the implicit conclusions in each work.

META-METEOROLOGY AND INDIGENOUS CLONING The first book I want to treat here is Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather (1994). Well known as one of North America’s cyberpunk phenoms, Sterling fills this novel with computer technology and high-tech wizardry. It focuses on a team of high-tech nomadic tornado chasers. This iconoclastic team headed by Dr. Jerry Mulcahey is out in an environmentally devastated southwestern United States, which has been wracked, dried, and cracked by the greenhouse effect and the agribusiness practices that contributed to it. The “Storm Troupe,” is tracking tornados on the lookout for the mega-tornado, the F-6, that their leader has been predicting. Eventually, in the year 2031, it does arrive. Prior to that, however, readers are gradually educated about some other likely effects of global warming and the greenhouse effect, but such education often gets overshadowed by the loving attention Sterling pays to the technological details of the troupe’s eclectically developed equipment, especially the virtual-reality devices that let them observe tornadoes from the inside out. As Noel Gough remarks, Heavy Weather dramatizes

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the ways in which our knowledge of climate change is constructed by the global networks of satellites, weather stations, supercomputers, meteorologists, and broadcasters that produce the images, models, and simulations that materially represent such knowledge. . . . In Sterling’s novel it is clear that much of what counts as nature is the measurement and projection of human interactions with the biosphere in and on a virtual ecology of global information flows. (1998, 413)

But beyond that, and perhaps inadvertently, Sterling also demonstrates how unreliable and limited such knowledge remains. When the F-6 does arrive, the story of its appearance gets mixed up with the plot of a group of behindthe-scenes terrorists who use it as a cover to become independent of their anonymous superiors. What remains unclear is whether the F-6 is the inevitable freak of nature unleashed by human eco-destruction or the results of meteorological manipulation by a secret organization of terrorists who have attempted to lessen human impact on the world through acts of sabotage and assassination. This point remains unclear, perhaps, because in either case the F-6 is a result of human manipulation of the environment gone awry. It is precisely the awry part, however, that casts doubt on the idea that we are witnessing today, or that we will witness in the future, “the end of nature,” since at novel’s end readers quite clearly see that neither Dr. Jerry or anyone else can accurately predict, much less control, the weather. That, however, must be considered a rather pedestrian lesson to be proposed in the course of a novel that runs over 300 pages. Sterling does, however, provide other lessons, all of which I find troubling, even though I cannot refute any of them. First, and perhaps most important, is the lesson suggested by Jane Unger in an exchange with Jerry about the F-6. He points out that its winds could scour the planet and it could become a permanent fixture in the atmosphere, but she discounts such fears, remarking that other events take place that push predictions of doom to the side of the road (Sterling 1994, 207–8). Despite the tortured logic here, the point seems to be that warnings about catastrophes are just public relations and do not play a role in changing mass consciousness so that the disasters about which people are being warned can be averted and avoided. The examples she uses, nuclear war and a resulting nuclear winter, however, cast doubt on her argument, because one of the reasons they did not occur is that people did worry about them and worked to prevent them. Sterling establishes a double-voiced discourse here in which the reader is left wondering both whether Jane might be speaking for the author or if Jane is an authorial object lesson for the benefit of the reader who is expected to see through her foolish position. A second message in this section of the book seems to be that no matter how bad it gets humanity will muddle through, and there is no evidence that

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this message is in any way double-voiced or ironic. Is such a message a positive or helpful one at this point in time? Does it encourage people to muddle toward a more ecologically sustainable human culture or does it provide them with another excuse to continue living their lives without assuming responsibility for the health of the biosphere? After all, the United States lived through one Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, so it can handle that same kind of extensive drought, even if on a grander scale, in the future, such as the one causing fires across Oklahoma and Texas in 2006, or will a megadrought brought on by global warming prove to be the last straw. Another significant moment in the novel occurs when a reporter asks the members of the Storm Troupe when they think humanity lost control of its destiny (Sterling 1994, 243). The members of the troupe give a variety of answers: 1967 or 1968 when the first data came in on CO2 buildup in the environment; 1989 with the opportunity for a genuine New World Order; 1914; late 1980s with the ignoring of congressional hearings on global warming; the League of Nations, 1945; the arrival of Columbus; the French Revolution; the failure to go with nuclear power in the 1950s (Sterling 1994, 245). But Jerry and Jane basically question the question by doubting that humanity ever controlled its own destiny. Jane again takes the position that things have been worse and are likely to be worse again, but such catastrophic conditions are cyclical (Sterling 1994, 246). Her position seems to be that if we have never been in control, then we have never been responsible either. As with Jane’s early dialogue with Jerry, these conclusions about a lack of control over “destiny”—whatever that term might mean—seem to undercut the value of environmental activism in the present. If something might not make any difference, why should people bother sacrificing to do it? Certainly one can reply that sacrifices for environmental health ought to be undertaken because they are what we understand to be the right and moral course of action to take today, and they may make a positive difference, but will that argument persuade the average undergraduate or average American consumer? Or will the argument that Sterling seems to be making at novel’s end have greater appeal? At the end of Heavy Weather, Jerry has received a lucrative research appointment at the University of Texas and has settled down to academic life. He and Jane have married and she is a happy homemaker and mother in a walled-off and guarded university housing complex (Sterling 1994, 296). Jane’s chronically ill brother, who has been an important secondary character, has been completely transformed by gene therapy. In other words, at least for the professional middle class and the rich in the United States, “heavy weather” comprises just another inconvenience that cannot halt the continued striving for the post–World War II suburban American dream even in the

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warmer-globe years of the 2030s. Perhaps I find this conclusion to the novel so chilling because of just how realistically its portrayal seems for so many Americans in the early years of the twenty-first century. And yet, at the same time, I can see it from another angle in which the ability to weather the storms spawned by environmental irresponsibility in the early part of this century may mean the gradual development of a widespread ability to ameliorate and redress the damage later in the century, without apocalyptic or cataclysmic destruction of human life. I do not think the novel ends on any such note of ambiguity, but an ecocritical reading of Heavy Weather can productively pursue such ambiguity in terms of whether the novel’s conclusion is a pessimistic one regarding environmental accountability or an optimistic one regarding human adaptability to environmental change and environmental awareness. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s The Bones of Time (1996), like Sterling’s Heavy Weather, is set on Earth in the 2030s. But the prologue begins in the year 1887, introducing the story of the last princess of Hawai’i. Of all of the American and British authors discussed so far who write near-future SF set on Earth, Goonan is the only one to engage any culture in depth other than the dominant white American one. She sets her novel on Hawai’i with a protagonist who is a resident of Japanese descent. In this near-future world schools recommend genetic engineering of children, multinationals control the genetic marketplace, and Hawai’i continues to be controlled for the benefits of the military, agribusiness, and tourism to the detriment of the lives and culture of its indigenous people. The protagonist, Lynn Oshima, accidentally comes into contact with a Hawai’ian homeland movement to clone an ancient leader, Kamehameha, a movement under attack from those who would lose if a Hawai’ian independence movement were to make any gains. Intertwined with Lynn and the efforts to kill the Kamehameha clones is the story of another Hawai’ian, a brilliant mathematician who discerns how to travel in time in an effort to save Princess Kaiulani. Eventually these strands are brought together, of course. Throughout the novel, Goonan provides a good deal of information about the environmental destruction of Hawai’i and the exploitation and oppression of the colonized Hawai’ians. She also introduces the perspective that there are other forms of scientific thought than the Western laboratory model. Specifically, she discusses at some length traditional Polynesian navigation, which enabled such people to travel across the Pacific from one far-flung island to another. The economic and environmental degradation of other parts of the world are also depicted, but Goonan’s attention remains focused on the survival of indigenous cultures and the possible knowledge that they may have to offer the rest of humanity. And yet, curiously enough, Goonan in the end has this knowledge and environmental sensibility brought to bear not on the

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reclamation and recovery of the Hawai’ian islands, but on the seizing of an interstellar spaceship. This spaceship becomes a new ark of sorts taking 5,000 human beings and various animals on a voyage of Polynesian navigation across the vast stretches of space rather than the vast stretches of the Pacific. Navigation through space is combined with navigation through time to enable them to travel to the stars. Earth is left behind as a new voyage of discovery is initiated, one in which an indigenous people will go off to find an uninhabited planet to call home. The implication is that such a voyage will be an inversion of European voyages of discovery and decimation, but I wonder. Left unsaid is how the new voyagers will know that they are not colonizing a planet already inhabited, perhaps by less intelligent self-conscious species, or ones so different that their intelligence cannot be recognized. Left unsaid, also, is what will come of Hawai’i as its most adventurous and most brilliant children leave the islands. While Goonan’s The Bones of Time may be the most multicultural SF novel of the 1990s, one that is sympathetic and respectful of indigenous cultures, it also presents a highly romantic assessment of the history of human impact throughout the Pacific. It ignores the devastation of the ecologies of islands, such as Rapa Nui, the extinction of species by first settlers, and the problems of population pressures, historically and in the present day. Invariably the image of a fresh start is at once highly appealing and deeply flawed if readers are to experience the kind of cognitive estrangement necessary to rethink their relationship to nature and culture in the present, on an Earth where no more locations remain for fresh-start new beginnings; unless, of course, they are being encouraged to believe that the solution to Earth’s environmental problems lies in human expansion, or departure, to other planets.

THE ETHICS OF COLONIZING THE DEAD In Kim Stanley Robinson’s massive Mars Trilogy, which runs to about 2,000 small-print pages in the paperback edition, he addresses in one way or another almost every major question of environmental ethics and does so from a variety of persuasive positions. And it appears very likely that many of these questions will move from the realm of “what if” to “we can but will we” in the lifetimes of most of the people who will read this chapter. The voyage of the landing party of 100 in Red Mars takes place in the year 2026, when I will be seventy-five years old and my current undergraduate students the same age as many of the characters depicted. That Robinson is generating an extrapolation more than a thought experiment is suggested by the fact that in 1998–1999 NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander,

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to analyze the climate and search for ice at a cost of $356 million (Dunn 1999, 3), and have followed them since with other missions. As Robinson’s trilogy depicts, the availability of water is probably the single most important factor in the determination of the viability of Mars colonization in the next century. One of the first ethical questions that arises among the 100 is whether or not to terraform the planet to adapt it to human inhabitation or to require that humans adapt to Mars in its current condition. These two become the extreme Green Mars and Red Mars positions until the ill-fated revolution of 2061. Although the exact scope and character of terraforming is debated for the next thirty-five years in rather dichotomous terms, it is initiated on the basis of the argument that Mars is an inorganic mass and therefore environmental ethics do not apply to it, since such ethics only apply to biospheres and without indigenous organisms there is no ecology—a crucial philosophical question that Robert Sparrow addresses in the fall 1999 issue of Environmental Ethics. But a second argument also develops, which could be depicted as one between terraforming and terragouging. In the former case, a Martian biosphere would be developed sufficient to sustain human life without people having to wear spacesuits, but higher altitudes would remain virtually unchanged. In the latter, whatever necessary would be done to facilitate extraction of raw materials for earthly consumption. Robinson employs throughout the trilogy a semi-omniscient narrator with the story told with different characters selected as focalizers for each chapter, so that various points of view are represented in internally persuasive discourse. Also the point of attention is adjusted to vary the attitude toward and concern with Mars, the people on it, and their activities in line with such shifts in point of view. As a result, not only do readers hear the debate over whether or not to terraform from opposing viewpoints, but also hear about debates about the relationship between terraforming Mars and at the same time changing the human culture on its surface, so that it does not become another Earth. One of the Russian characters, Arkady, for instance, argues for the need to have a new architecture representative of the physical, chemical, and mineral properties of Mars as part of a necessary social and psychic transformation of its settlers, so that they will become Martians rather than Russians on Mars, Americans on Mars, and so on (K. S. Robinson 1993, 59–61). In the context of the same general argument, an American, Sax Russell, suggests that terraforming will change the human beings on Mars in an evolutionary way. But Arkady disagrees by distinguishing evolution from history. He argues that the former consists of the environment plus the occurrence of chance, while the latter consists of the environment plus the making of choices (K. S. Robinson 1993, 88). In particular, he strenuously argues that the decisions about social change should be made by the people on Mars and

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not the people on Earth, declaring basically that the people must be transformed into Martians even as they transform Mars to have an earthlike atmosphere (K. S. Robinson 1993, 89). Later in the novel, about a decade or more into the settlement period, the term “aeroform” will be introduced to suggest this process by which human beings are transformed by and on Mars. This argument seems to run precisely counter to the kind of position taken by Sterling in Heavy Weather. Muddling through would mean a form of evolution in which society and individuals are subjected to chance determined by large scale fundamentally unplanned decisions and unintended results. Aeroforming would become a form of history in which conscious choices are made about fundamentally planned decisions with an effort to realize intended results at the level of social transformation. And in this context, such social transformation is interdependent and mutually interserving with environmental transformation. This argument is developed from a sociopolitical perspective by a Russian scientist in reaction against the pragmatic apolitical perspective of an American scientist. But Robinson also provides a third perspective, a mystical, groundbased spirituality spearheaded on Mars by a Japanese agronomist, Hiroko. It is perhaps telling that she leads the team establishing greenhouses because soil proves one of the most difficult materials to generate on Mars because it requires such interdependent action between the organic and the inorganic. Hiroko claims that Mars will tell them what it wants and then they will have to do it (K. S. Robinson 1993, 115). Terraforming, then, not only has to react to the specificities of the landscape, but also react to the particularities of the spirit of place. It may be that Robinson has chosen a Japanese character for this role, since she and other Japanese settlers who arrive later speak of Martian kami or local spirits in an application of Shinto to their locale (K. S. Robinson 1993, 229). And noteworthy here is that Shinto finds kami in both organic and inorganic matter, trees and rocks, animals, and rivers. Such a spirituality contradicts the argument initially made by the terraformers that Mars has no ecology since it has no organic matter (K. S. Robinson 1993, 205), even though it does not contradict the concept of terraforming in general. In the character of Nadia, readers begin to learn how one might appreciate Mars as Mars and be open to large-scale terraforming. Early in the novel Nadia suddenly realizes that she is learning really to see Mars when she recognizes how utterly alien it is (K. S. Robinson 1993, 141–43). To see it as such and not as analogous to Earth requires a fundamental shift of consciousness. And as the novel progresses, it is suggested that the people who have the ability to become inhabitants are the ones who learn to see the Mars environment as distinct from the Earth’s as much as possible, rather than those who are always trying to explain it through earth terminology, symbols, and metaphors.

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At one point Sax Russell takes the strong anthropocentric approach by claiming that human beings give meaning and beauty to Mars and that it has no intrinsic value. Ann Clayborne, his staunchest intellectual opponent, takes a radical biocentric approach and claims that Sax values science too much and rock too little (K. S. Robinson 1993, 177–79). And it is noteworthy that Sax is criticized by Ann and depicted by other characters as not really seeing the planet or even going outside much. Later in the trilogy, however, he does undergo a significant change in awareness and as he begins to get outside more and more and begins to moderate his position, even as Ann moderates hers over time, to the point where in the third volume they become a couple. Unfortunately, while the original 100 are having these marvelous debates about the degree of terraforming to undertake and whether or not to attempt to build a new civilization, the United Nations decides to support megaterraforming and announces that it is immediately sending 1,500 more colonists (K. S. Robinson 1993, 202). As the second decade of settlement proceeds, it becomes clear that the U.N. is little more than a front for transnational corporations who want to exploit Mars for resources and so send up temporary workers who are not settlers and will not become residents of the planet. Mars is to be a colony in the nineteenth-century sense of that term, rather than its usual usage in SF (K. S. Robinson 1993, 270–80). Such a position runs directly counter to considerations of settlement based on arguments about the carrying capacity of the extremely limited and fragile ecosystem and atmosphere being developed on the planet (K. S. Robinson 1993, 309). With such pressure and clarification of Earth’s view of their function, the 100 begin to talk about the need to establish a different kind of economic system on Mars, one that will work with the environment and contribute to cultural change rather than cultural and economic recidivism. Thus Robinson links the issue of inhabitation with that of environmental transformation and engineering, with that of cultural change, with that of political and economic change. The various factions within the 100 join with their children and later settlers and begin to form two major parties and a variety of lesser ones. The major two are the Red Mars Party, which seeks minimal terraforming, and the Green Mars Party, which favors large-scale terraforming for the benefit of the inhabitants not the metanationals. Both favor independence from Earth (K. S. Robinson 1993, 370–79). These political developments are accelerated by strong pressure from Earth to significantly increase immigration to Mars to relieve population pressures on Earth, while exploitation of Mars by the transnationals is facilitated by the large corporations taking control of smaller countries to utilize their political access to the planet. Members of the 100 realize that a place will change people if that place is given the time to do its work on people committed to learning to inhabit it and the place is not

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overwhelmed by settlers bringing the past with them in sufficient numbers to re-create the world they have left behind (K. S. Robinson 1993, 420–30). But with time appearing to run out, the Red and Green parties attempt a revolt and are crushed. The last 150 pages of Red Mars, then, are concerned with the failed revolt of 2061 and how the violence of its suppression results in unleashing major natural forces that accelerate terraforming beyond the wildest dreams of its most ardent proponents. The members of the original 100 who survive are forced into hiding. The first part of Green Mars, the second book of the trilogy, is titled “Aeroformation,” indicating that even though the revolt of 2061 was crushed the process of human adaptation to Mars will continue. That process, however, will necessarily develop in a complex way since the place itself is undergoing rapid and fundamental changes, with the altering terrain functioning as a genetic transformer (K. S. Robinson 1995, 2). This claim clarifies two points at the beginning of Green Mars. One, the planet has a biosphere now; it is an ecology and therefore environmental ethics have to be thought through differently from before. Two, while human beings make history through making choices, that history is made in the context of evolution, which means chance; therefore, while people have choices, plans, and intentions, they can enjoy no condition of control and reach no point of inevitability. Hiroko early in this part of Green Mars makes a crucial claim that bears acutely on the issue of human colonization of other planets, whether they are dead like Mars or alive like the planets that Brunner and Le Guin imagine and perhaps like the one discovered in the summer of 1998, 30,000 light years from Earth. She believes that there is a spontaneous process of patterning that promotes complexity and human beings are obligated to encourage that process of increasing complexity in whatever way they can (K. S. Robinson 1995, 9). How is this position fundamentally different from the pragmatist position that Sax Russell takes when he claims that humans impute beauty and give meaning to Mars? Robinson certainly seems to think a difference exists as their perspectives are clearly developed as nonidentical throughout the trilogy. And I think he is right. Hiroko does not claim that humans provide the beauty and the meaning, but rather that they are entities, and not necessarily the only ones, who recognize the beauty and the meaning and are able both to express it and to foster it. Our responsibility is not to do what we want with the Earth or with Mars but rather to determine who might best assume responsibility for fostering life on these planets in all its forms and permutations. The problem, however, is that such a position may lead to similar conclusions as the ones reached by the scientific pragmatists and the transnationals: explore and colonize other

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planets. Oh, certainly for different purposes, but colonize nevertheless. Is such colonization ethical? I think this question needs to be debated today, because colonization of Mars has already been placed on the drawing boards. If it is a potentially ethical action, then how do writers, critics, and philosophers help to develop the kind of public consciousness that may enable its enactment to be ethical in practice? As Green Mars develops, it will become clear that this ethic of fostering life wherever it may become rooted applies not only to Mars and how human beings from Earth treat life there, but also to Earth and how Martians treat the struggle for life on the home planet. And while a secondary question in the second part of the trilogy, it will become a primary one in the third part, Blue Mars. A significant portion of Green Mars is given over, on the one hand, to describing the transformations of the Martian landscape unleashed by the violence of 2061, particularly water flow, ice cap melting, and atmosphere development; and, on the other hand, to efforts to establish an alternative form of economics combining features of gift and barter economies to develop an ecological economics (K. S. Robinson 1995, 293–94), along with efforts to transform the transnational corporations on Earth into cooperatives in the post-nation-state decades. As a sidebar, it is important to note for people unfamiliar with the trilogy that Robinson has scientists on Mars discover a longevity gene therapy that enables him to keep some of his main characters alive through the approximate two hundred years that the trilogy covers. At the same time, Robinson introduces characters and their viewpoints from succeeding generations and how the perspectives of people born and raised on Mars can differ substantially from the first settlers as well as recent settlers. Also in Green Mars Robinson gives attention to the increasingly multicultural character of the new settlers populating the planet. As a result, even as he is working on the alternative economics to go along with a new biosphere, he also develops an argument about cultural syncretism (K. S. Robinson 1995, 335–56), concluding that survival requires cultural cross-fertilization. Robinson introduces, then, in this part of the trilogy, arguments for a sustainable prosperity rather than a sustainable development (1995, 389), and a form of government with the power vested most heavily at the local, cooperative, community level, and most lightly at the centralizing level. By the end of Green Mars, then, a fairly clear picture of the pace and character of terraforming emerges with an understanding to leave at least 30 percent of the planet as originally Martian as possible, to promote and develop an alternative economics, and to form a type of government that will best support an ecoregional, cooperative, and community-based sense of identity—a politics of place, centered around the locations that people call home. All that is needed is independence! And the opportunity for that comes when environmental

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cataclysms due to volcanic eruptions under Antarctica cause rapid sea level rise on Earth. With their attention diverted, the governments and corporations of Earth cannot prevent the second Martian revolution from succeeding in achieving the goal of planetary independence from Earth. And so, while volume one ended on a note of defeat and chaos, volume two ends on a note of triumph and also chaos (K. S. Robinson 1995, 559). Rather than struggle against it, the colonists need to read its patterns and deal with its cascading complexity through making appropriate compromises. Domestically on Mars that means negotiating the degree of terraforming that all parties on the planet can accept and the degree of immigration that will continue to be allowed from Earth. To protect what they had gained the new free Martians would have to work out the ways in which they would help Earth with its population and environmental crises. Otherwise, they could expect to lose quite quickly the freedom they had just gained. In a sense these two arenas of compromise become the background issues driving the plot of the third volume of the trilogy, Blue Mars. This volume also affords Robinson the opportunity to describe in detail the multiplicity of ennatured cultures and communities developing out of the environmental, economic, political, and cultural transformations occurring on Mars, cultures and communities that he believes could be developed on Earth with the right phase changes and the appropriate compromises. In Blue Mars Robinson also considers the problem plaguing almost every political revolution intent on creating a new society: what happens to the ideology when political power shifts from the revolutionary generation to the next one and the one after that, particularly when by the third generation the conditions of scarcity, pioneering experience, and intensity of collective self-sacrifice have dissipated and the heirs of the fruits of struggle experience relative prosperity. Robinson continues a strong focus on the development of political practice in a rapidly evolving postcapitalist era on both Mars and Earth. He also depicts the transition of Mars from being largely alien wilderness for the first generation to familiar garden for the second and third generations, who have known nothing else. With more and more of Mars becoming developed and populated, Robinson’s major characters representing the Red and Green positions continue to debate the issue of maintaining wilderness as enclave or park (K. S. Robinson 1997, 134). One of the key political innovations represented throughout Blue Mars is the establishment of an environmental court, which functions as the equivalent of the Supreme Court in deciding major cases about development, population, settlement, and terraforming—both its pace and its characteristics (K. S. Robinson 1997, 155). Clearly, Robinson does not envision such a court as applying only to Mars, but also perhaps an eventual step on Earth in establishing a world environment court to adjudi-

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cate disputes over the implementation of international environmental treaties, accords, and protocols. While Green Mars depicted acts of ecotage as part of the struggle for independence, it cast the most extreme forms of such action in a negative light. In Blue Mars arguments against ecotage are developed with Robinson’s position appearing to be to accept it tactically but not strategically and to favor the promotion of alternative communities instead (K. S. Robinson 1997, 271–72). The feasibility and sustainability of such alternative communities is seen to rest with the firm establishment of a cooperative dominated economy. Again, as it has been in the preceding volumes, Earth’s population problem and the pressures for immigration to Mars generate political crises. But, even though it becomes the critical political issue, Robinson demonstrates convincingly that human emigration to other planets will never address Earth’s population problems because of the logistics and equipment involved in moving large numbers of people through space (1997, 348). Mars functions, then, more as a symbol of possibility and as a safety valve rather than a practical solution to a problem that must be solved on Earth—the balancing out of human society in relation to the carrying capacity of the planet. As Blue Mars moves toward the third Martian revolution, Robinson trims down the successes and achievements of individuals, especially the original 100 to counter romantic tendencies to see individuals as heroes determining the outcome of events. He counters the romantic tendency to see technology and science as the determining force in the successful establishment of a new society on a new planet. For example, various scientists recognize that the genetic engineering of plants and animals on Mars has gone out of control and that what is developing, despite, and because of, human intervention, has become an evolution of contingency, that is, natural evolution (K. S. Robinson 1997, 412). Robinson also has major characters modifying their ideological positions, as when Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell, the antagonists in the Red versus Green debate, learn to engage in dialogue with each other and eventually become a couple in their old age. Aligned with this anti-dogmatism position is the depiction of zealots in a generally negative light as well as a critique of purist positions that refuse to engage in dialogue and compromise. What becomes key in the last pages of the novel is the development of the ability to love an entire planet, not just a locale or a bioregion (K. S. Robinson 1997, 639). That feeling must include a multigenerational perspective, as Ann Clayborne remarks about their responsibilities toward future generations to strive to shape the best world possible and avoid leaving a toxic mess behind for the great-grandchildren to clean up (K. S. Robinson 1997, 728). That closing point demonstrates with startling explicitness that SF can thematically be very much about the present time and the present place.

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CONCLUSION Some of the works that I have discussed in this chapter either briefly or in detail provide what I would call “alibis,” invoking Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “non-alibi” in Toward a Philosophy of the Act. By that I mean they provide loopholes and ways out to justify ethically questionable behavior or else to sidestep the ethical questions. Brunner, I think, does that with Bedlam Planet, so too Sterling in Heavy Weather and Goonan in The Bones of Time. David Brin in Earth, a novel I have not previously mentioned, does so also in three very damaging ways, although he tries to ameliorate those novelistic actions through a nonfiction afterword that calls on people to take responsibility for the planet and even provides the names and addresses of various environmental organizations. But the alibi is invoked when Brin uses a deus ex machina device to resolve the plot of the novel. First, it turns out that the black hole at the Earth’s core apparently threatening the planet’s very existence has been introduced there by a benign alien intelligence that has even sent one of its own to Earth to aid the protagonist. Second, through the aid of this alien force, a planetary Gaia consciousness is established as an all-powerful artificial intelligence that can henceforth limit and punish ecological destruction. Human beings, then, are not required to assume full responsibility for their actions in this novel. Third, the psychotic ecoterrorist, presented as the only truly evil person in the entire novel, annihilates millions of people before the Gaia consciousness destroys her, thereby ameliorating the population pressures on the planet’s ecology long enough for humanity to get its act together under granny Gaia’s guidance. In contrast, the strengths of such works as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Robinson’s Mars Trilogy are precisely that they provide no deus ex machina alibis. Human beings have to act in ethically responsible ways while realizing that they are not ever in control of the overall situation and that what they understand to be ethically justified or technically correct today may prove erroneous tomorrow. Such works as these can turns readers’ attention toward the major socioenvironmental issues facing humanity today. And in the case of Robinson’s work, SF can through near-future extrapolation orient readers to thinking about ethical questions just over the horizon but rapidly coming into sight, such as the colonization of Mars.

Chapter Seven

The Non-alibi of Pragmatic Utopianism and Wild Variability; or, Optimistic Variations on a Science Fiction Theme

CANCER, RESPONSIBILITY, AND THE NON-ALIBI On Thursday, April 24, 2003, the Orlando Sentinel ran an article by Janet McConnaughey, “Study Links Fat to Cancer Deaths.” It opens dramatically: “Losing weight could prevent one of every six cancer deaths in the United States—more than 90,000 each year” (McConnaughey 2003, A10). According to the article, lead researchers declared that “communities, workplaces, schools and transportation all need to change to make it easier to eat right and exercise,” because Americans are “‘kind of stacking the deck against ourselves.’” Three aspects of this short article stand out. One, it begins by placing the emphasis on individual action toward one’s own lifestyle—choosing to be fat or to avoid being fat. Two, the article ends by emphasizing larger social responsibility in relation to hindering or facilitating an anticancer lifestyle in terms of public attitudes and actions. Three, it never addresses the causes of cancer. Hence the primary cause of cancer, environmental pollutants created by industries, is never addressed. This kind of foregrounding of lifestyle choices and backgrounding of corporate responsibility and industrial sources of disease represents a major tendency in popular news about cancer, one of the major causes of death in the United States. Sandra Steingraber in Living Downstream points out the frequency with which average individuals like to believe that cancer runs in certain families, even though longitudinal and geographical studies tend to correlate rates of cancer primarily with the locations of a person’s workplace and habitat. Such behavior allows people to imagine that they are less at risk than their nextdoor neighbor or their coworker, who has developed some type of cancer. Other people like to treat cancer as some mystery, even though rates of skin 109

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cancer in relation to UV radiation exposure in such places as Florida are fairly predictable, or high rates of cancer among cigarette smokers. Such positions as ascribing the causes of cancer to fate, mystery, and genetics allow people to avoid taking any personal action. If no one is responsible, then nothing need be done. Similarly, if only individual lifestyle choices can be blamed for the high incidence of cancer in the United States then only those individuals at obvious high risk need to take action to change their own circumstances or alter their own environments, and everyone else can continue on his or her excessive consumption way. Exclusively blaming corporations as entities distinct from the human beings who incorporate them, manage them, and invest in them actually works in somewhat the same way. If it is only Monsanto’s fault, then nothing can be done until the corporation changes its practices or the government forces the corporation to change it practices. For instance, Lester Brown, while visiting the University of Central Florida, suggested that energy efficiency could be vastly improved if the government banned incandescent lightbulbs, thus preventing corporations from making them and consumers from buying them, thus precluding the practice of individual shortsightedness. Just as the Associated Press article on the relationship of fat to cancer identifies a need for social responsibility to facilitate individual improvements in lifestyle behaviors, Brown is looking for a “wake-up call” that will act as a catalyst to produce a profound shift in public awareness, government action, and corporate behavior that will result in a consensual sense of environmental social responsibility. It is important to note that both corporations and governments are actually comprised of human beings. So that, regardless of the sphere of action, any action in response to cancer and other perceived environmental problems will be performed by individuals, whether acting as social outcasts, members of society, government functionaries, or corporate officers and employees. Thus, one could argue that ascribing the problem of cancer to corporations, governments, or societies may very well reflect an act of bad faith by letting individuals off the hook who make decisions based only on the profitability and survival of their company or some concept of national security. This kind of narrow self-interest is routinely presented in articles that run regularly in the Business section of newspapers and magazines discouraging people from buying hybrid vehicles because from some imaginary purely economical perspective they will cost the individual more than they will save over a five-year period. Blaming a structure generates an “alibi” for a given individual to avoid taking action in his or her own best environmental interests, which in turn will often, although not always, be in the environmental interests of others, as in acting in a supposedly uneconomical manner when

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buying a hybrid. In contrast, the “non-alibi” of being that I introduced in the previous chapter will place emphasis on an individual’s responsibility within the larger spheres of human relationships with other human beings, other environmental entities, and aggregate human constructs, such as societies, governments, and corporations. For Mikhail Bakhtin, such a “non-alibi” fundamentally refers to the notion of individual ethical responsibility for one’s own position and actions in the events of the world. Serious science fiction invariably addresses the issue of the non-alibi through a variety of what-if scenarios. What interests me in this chapter are the scenarios that pertain particularly to near horizon technological developments, such as nanotechnology, but I also want to address some other settings for a philosophical position in literature that I will label pragmatic utopianism based on wild variability. Such a position seems widespread in recent science fiction and is distinctly optimistic, even as many environmentalist forecasts for the future become increasingly gloomy and pessimistic. Crises are, after all, the stuff of which novels are made. These crises may have galactic, planetary, national, or just local magnitude. Yet, when it comes to wild variability and pragmatic utopianism, the outcomes of the particular plots tend toward similar resolutions: common individuals can act heroically and the human species muddles through. Let’s take a look at how this optimistic plot of planetary resiliency and human innovativeness has been represented in relation to nanotechnology.

NANOTECHNOLOGY Michael Crichton addressed the dangers of nanotechnology in Prey. He prefaces the novel with a nonfiction introduction, “Artificial Evolution in the Twenty-first Century,” clearly indicating his belief that the convergence of computers, biomedical technology, and nanotechnological research will eventually occur and he places this convergence in the context of the inherent wildness of the natural world (Crichton 2002, ix–x). His main concern is that arrogance and ignorance of past human folly will prevent the implementation of adequate controls prior to the production of self-reproducing biotechnological entities. Interestingly enough, these nanotech entities become so dangerous because they are developed using computer programs modeled on the wild variability of living organisms, particularly swarming insects (Crichton 2002, 10; for an ecstatic review of this convergence, see Kaku 1997). Computer programs are, of course, a kind of language and, as Gary Snyder has observed, “the structures of [language] have the quality of wild systems. Wild systems are highly complex, cannot be intellectually mastered—and they are

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self-managing and self-organizing” (1999, 329). The goal of nanotechnology is precisely to create self-organizing, self-replicating systems that unavoidably will contain wildness and unpredictability as a result of their necessary complexity. While Crichton casts doubt on human sensibility to prevail over human stupidity, his Introduction indicates that he believes in the benefit of cautionary tales. And, indeed, in the course of Prey readers find that two grounded individuals, one an agent-based program design supervisor and the other a field biologist, are able to overcome two very different nanotechnology threats. Not only does having two threats lengthen the suspense of the plot, but it also lets Crichton demonstrate two very different ways that organically grown nanotechs can evolve. In one they develop into a predator that chases down and feeds on living animals, including people, in order to grow and mutate. In the other, they become parasites living within people. In both cases they threaten long-term human survival if left unchecked. Now, key in Crichton’s argument is that the initial nanotech entity appeared benign and designed to benefit human beings through advancing medical technology. So, in their original form these nanotechs were not necessarily a bad invention. But then, military contracts and corporate desperation to demonstrate a profitable working product get the best of the designers and technicians. Reckless experimentation produces the mutations, which are by the end of the novel most probably defeated, through an all-too-typical Hollywood-style cataclysmic explosion. Is nanotechnology bad? Not necessarily. Is it highly dangerous and potentially apocalyptic? You better believe it. What should people do today? Crichton leaves that question unanswered in his fiction. But clearly, through his own pragmatic utopianism he believes that his readers will become more aware and concerned about nanotechnology research and some will participate in decision-making processes for generating or at least supporting stringent research guidelines. (I find it quite surprising that Crichton registers such alarm about a possible, but not yet functioning technology in this novel and then turns around an dismisses the threat of anthropogenically induced global warming being produced by existing technology.) Like many of the cyberpunk authors who preceded him, for Neal Stephenson nanotechnology represents a given in the world’s near future economy and environment, neither malignant nor benign per se. In The Diamond Age; or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, Stephenson emphasizes the economic, technological, and social changes that grow out of the increasing ubiquity of nanotechnology engineering and production. Many aspects of this lengthy, neo-Victorian novel are worthy of comment. For one, Stephenson agrees with such novelists as William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson, and such eco-

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nomic futurists as J. F. Rischard, that the newly emerging technologies that Crichton identifies—nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology—will initiate the veritable collapse of the nation-state as a socioeconomic regulating political structure. Social decentralization will take place, which in turn will facilitate the flourishing of cultural variation, which in turn will enable a tremendous expansion of social affiliation by means of intentional communities. Individuals will become more responsible for deciding their greater affiliations. For Stephenson, the technology will be developed and will enter the world marketplace unevenly and asymmetrically. Some will benefit greatly, others will suffer greatly. Thus the technology itself will not fundamentally alter the human tendency toward hierarchical social organization and self/other exploitative distinctions. It will, however, significantly reduce the length of time during which any particular group, organization, or economic unit can dominate. In Stephenson’s vision of the relatively near future, Finkle-McGraw, a leader of one of the wealthiest and most elite controllers and purveyors of centralized nanotechnology production, the Victorian Revival, realizes that any social organization is doomed to decline and failure if it becomes stale, repetitive, and noninnovative. Knowing full well that he does not want the New Victorians to go the way of the old ones, he wants his granddaughter to have a book that will promote “subversive” thinking and behavior. Naturally, to be as complex as he needs it, this smart book must be produced by means of nanotechnology. Thus Finkle-McGraw seeks the quality of subversive intellectual curiosity for his own granddaughter by designing a unique book for her. But of course, in the world of nanotechnology, no more than in the current world of global fashion, nothing can be designed that will remain unique. The design for the book is stolen and reproduced and stolen again and reproduced. Through chance, the wild variability of lumpen social elements, and the cunning of intellectuals from an oppressed people, the book falls into the hands of thousands of girls, who begin not only to educate themselves in being “subversive” but also begin to remake their world. As with Crichton’s Prey, Stephenson’s The Diamond Age does not base its plot on wicked, malevolent, or evil people. While Crichton keeps his circle of actors limited to designers and engineers, Stephenson expands his cast to include all types of people who are mainly trying to do one of two things: just get by in an incomprehensibly complex social world or make that world less incomprehensibly difficult. Human error, arrogance, and confusion represent the main threats to survival. Stephenson reveals his own penchant for pragmatic utopianism in his belief that educating young ladies to be “subversive” will produce a series of positive variables in social conflict that will promote less inequitable economic relations among people and facilitate greater self-determination at

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individual and group levels. Further, while he demonstrates that nanotechnology will damage the environment and generate environmental injustice in the relative short run, it will in the long run lead to more decentralized material production and thus less nonegalitarian political relationships among intentional societies. Unpredictable and unregulatable human inventiveness will level the playing field.

GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THE NON-ALIBI Unpredictable and unregulatable, that is to say, nonteleological, noneugeneic, nonsocial Darwinist approaches to creating better worlds sharply distinguish contemporary pragmatic utopianist writing from nineteenth-century European and American socialist utopian writing, as well as from fascist, dictatorial, and draconian conceptions of utopian social engineering. This distinction between teleological planning and organizing and wild variability is explicitly addressed in Hayao Miyazaki’s graphic Japanese novel, Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, which has been translated and published in a four-volume English language edition (it is also available as a Japanese-language anime movie, with a significantly abridged plot). As this novel develops the reader is led more and more to believe that Nausicaä is the embodiment of an ancient prophecy that has foretold the long awaited arrival of a savior who will lead the people of a postapocalyptic earth back to ecological balance, harmony, and peace. Yet her journey through the work’s 1,100 pages is filled with bloodshed, changing allegiances, and a growing recognition that all of the major sides in the military conflicts are wrongheaded and led by misguided people. Misguidedness becomes crucial for the plot, as even the most evil individuals are usually revealed either as having started out with the best intentions or as seizing the opportunity to atone for their evil ways through final generous actions. As Nausicaä moves toward the Crypt of Shuwa, she experiences a series of revelations. One, human beings limit their vision by trying to perceive reality in terms of dichotomies such as purity and impurity (Miyazaki 1995–1997, 4:178). Two, all life forms constitute a universal microcosm, thus having intrinsic value and a form of identity with every other life form (Miyazaki 1995–1997, 4:181). Three, all life forms are autodynamic and constitute a miracle of existence (Miyazaki 1995–1997, 4:220). These recognitions enable her to confront the last holdouts of a teleological, dictatorial social and environmental engineering caste guarding the Crypt. To them she announces that living equals changing; since they refuse to change they have set them-

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selves against the living world by denying death (Miyazaki 1995–1997, 4:246). The denial of death is the denial of wild variability and the quest to end death and to end what they perceive as corruption in the name of illusory purity invariably fails, just as such a quest backfires and creates monsters in the 2005 movie Serenity. Thus, Nausicaä triumphs by rejecting any master plan, any master narrative that tries to map the purification of her blighted world without leaving room for the positive effects of spontaneously arising problems (Miyazaki 1995–1997, 4:249). The ecologically hopeful pragmatic utopianism of Miyazaki’s graphic novel is exemplified in the concluding words that call for placing human trust in the life of the world (1995–1997, 4:271). In the face of tremendous death and the prospect that things will get environmentally worse for the planet’s inhabitants before they get better, Nausicaä calls for love for, and trust in, the unexpected outcomes of all types of nature, including the engineered, which will ceaselessly generate unexpected and unpredictable outcomes.

THE NON-ALIBI OF LEARNING TO LOVE THE WORLD Gary Snyder makes a point worth repeating and one that supports the popularity of pragmatic utopianism in literature: the condition of our social and ecological life is so serious that we’d better have a sense of humor. . . . The environmental movement has never done well when it threw out excessive doom scenarios. Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step . . . is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. (1999, 335–36)

Such is the major task that Nausicaä will have to undertake in the world beyond the novel’s closure, turning people away from the fear of the deadly aspects of wild nature and toward a love of the world that engenders trust. Likewise, that message appears in the young adult fiction series Animorphs. While the four youthful heroes of this fifty-four-volume series initially accept the alien-provided ability to morph into other animal forms out of fear of an alien invasion of slugs that will destroy the planet and enslave human beings, over the course of the novels the need to love this world and appreciate its beauty as a cause for action is repeatedly raised. These kids are too young to have any serious plans for how to defeat the aliens, but they rely on their own unpredictability and spontaneity, wild variables of the human

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personality, to outwit their adversaries. Despite the crises of every volume, these novels mainly teach readers about the animal and plant life of the planet, portraying them from inside the minds of various creatures from whales to ants. In the process the series counters anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism, and romantic and sublime notions of nature as either for us or against us, continually reminding readers that such a dichotomy relies on a fixed and biased viewpoint. Time and again, the unexpected aspects of a wild nature barely understood and too little studied come to the rescue of these rescuers of the world. For example, in the eleventh volume of the series, The Forgotten, the Animorph heroes find themselves fighting for their lives in a rain forest under attack from aliens. Ongoing encounters with aliens, both evil and good, have, of course, altered their anthropocentrism in relation to equally sentient beings. But their repeated need to morph into the bodies, and with them the senses and cognition of various animals on earth, has also altered their sense of species superiority. In this volume, Jake not only finds himself rethinking his perception of an alien species, but also the right to life of the entire rain forest in which he is traveling (Applegate 1996–2001, 11:122). When Jake and the others morph into jaguars, he realizes that he had never had any conception of just how much life existed within a rain forest, and is threatened by its clear cutting (Applegate 1996–2001, 11:144–45). No wonder his alien ally Ax comments on what an amazing planet is Earth (Applegate 1996–2001, 11:145). Here as elsewhere in the series, author K. A. Applegate works to get her readers to envision the world as it actually exists in its unfathomable diversity, and to learn to love that world enough to protect it, even at the risk of one’s own life. Clearly, many readers must come to realize that the animorph heroes are fortunate in that they only have to combat aliens, while in real life humans have to combat themselves to sustain biodiversity.

CONCLUSION We are continuing to live in a world filled with many strange and unforeseeable things, and an increasing number of them are of our own creation. While some writers present them as benign, some others as malignant, and others as intrinsically neutral, they contain the nature from which we and they arose. While we cannot exactly trust the wild variability upon which pragmatic utopianism is based to provide predetermined answers for every unanticipated occasion, we can assume responsibility for our actions moment to moment in relation to the results of those variables occurring in the world.

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Purveyors of pragmatic utopianism tend to believe that malignancy and benignity inhere not in objects but in humans, and often not as the result of calculated evil but of ignorance, desperation, and miscalculation. These traits will remain with us as long as we are human and alive. Thus, we cannot look to technology to save us, or even to destroy us, but we can trust that wild variability, spontaneity, and unpredictability in life will open numerous avenues down which to walk into the future.

Chapter Eight

Mysteries of Nature and Environmental Justice

At least from the time of Charles Brockden Brown, writing American fiction during the formative years of the early republic, mysteries have proven a highly popular genre of fiction with a strong fan base containing readers who often read every new book by a given author. In the United States they continue to sell millions of copies every year and are perhaps only outpaced by thrillers, which also often have a fundamentally mystery-based plot. In recent years, numerous authors working in this genre have increasingly made use of environmental justice issues and an emphasis on nature to deepen the intellectual and affective dimensions of their stories. For some authors, this use seems more or less a matter of using a convenient topical variation to change the setting or the backdrop for their formulaic plots. But for others, nature conservation and environmental justice appear as deep-seated beliefs held by the authors who have found ways to bring their causes into the production of commercially successful novels. For at least a quarter of a century, ecocritics have been entering pleas for their colleagues to increase their nature literacy by reading more widely beyond the canonically defined literary texts in realms of various types of nonfiction. In this chapter, as in some of the others in this book, I want to call on my colleagues to read more widely in the realms of popular genre fiction to understand better the ways that their neighbors and students are being exposed to ideas about nature conservation and environmental justice that raise their consciousness while entertaining them with tales in their favorite genre of pleasure reading. I place the word pleasure in italics because I do not want it confused with the notion of escapism, which is certainly one of the functions of all forms of pleasure. But, as with many other forms of pleasure experiences, the novels I will discuss here do not encourage their readers to 119

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escape anything, but rather educate them about the realities of various environmental crises and issues, while entertaining them with recognizable plots and characters. Further, they frequently rely on noncathartic or only partially cathartic conclusions, so that readers will not have the freedom to imagine that the environmental conflict or problem they raise has been solved by novel’s end, but remains a problem in the world beyond the fictional work. In contrast, we would have to label escapist those works that do leave the reader with such a sense of closure and completion, since such a cathartic release would work against environmental awareness and the potential for such awareness to lead to action in the world. For instance, when Clive Cussler reassures his readers near the end of Trojan Odyssey that, as a result of Dirk Pitt foiling a Communist Chinese plot, the Gulf Stream will never slow or stop in the future due to climate change, he both falsifies the climatological record and discourages any concern about the potential effects of global warming on the North Atlantic current, encouraging both escapism and passivity on the part of his readers. Cussler encourages a similar escapism in regard to the international trade in toxic waste in Sahara, by suggesting that deep burial in Saharan Africa will solve the problem of disposing of the world’s nuclear waste without contaminating any of the world’s water (2003, 539–40). Most writers of mysteries and detective stories rely on developing a series of novels built around a single character, or occasionally a team. These characters are usually long-term inhabitants of a particular locale, which facilitates the overlapping of this fiction with literary regionalism. Most intermittent readers and nonreaders of the genre would imagine such locales to be urban centers, such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Chicago. That belief arises more from televisions series and movies than it does from the novels themselves. Die-hard fans know that cities only account for a portion of the environs of their mystery heroes. And even for heroes who travel incessantly, they may find themselves in specific places defined by their regional particularities or disparate settings linked by some type of common features, as in the case of the novels of Nevada Barr. In fact, while Barr’s name has become synonymous with adventures in national parks, other authors’ names have become synonymous with other nature-emphatic settings. For John Straley the setting is Alaska, both urban and wild; for John D. MacDonald and Carl Hiaasen it is Florida, particularly coastal communities in the throes of environmental despoliation; for David Poyer the sea for one set of novels and northwestern rural Pennsylvania for another set; for Jane Langton New England towns, and Mary Morgan Puget Sound. Writers associated with cities who treat environmental topics include Sara Paretsky with Chicago and Barbara Neely with Boston. Then there are writers who turn to the mystery or

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thriller plot as just one more narrative experiment, such as Neal Stephenson, without making any long-term commitment to the genre. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to limit the discussion in this chapter to just four writers: John D. MacDonald, Nevada Barr, Judith Van Gieson, and John Straley. Their novels are clearly written as popular, and some would even say commercial, fiction. Their body of work is defined by a recurring major character, whose attitudes toward nature and environmental issues count thematically (although MacDonald’s best novels from an ecocritical perspective don’t use that character, his series established the readership and their expectations for such novels). They all write in the realist mode standard for the genre.

JOHN D. MACDONALD John D. MacDonald stands out as the most widely read mystery writer to date to consistently address environmental issues. Some two dozen of MacDonald’s novels are currently in print, many of them translated into other languages, and millions of used copies circulating throughout the country. In his lifetime he wrote seventy-eight novels, twenty-one of them as the Travis McGee series, with seventy-five million copies in print at the time of his death in 1986. The Travis McGee series provides detailed descriptions of the land, waters, locales, and weather of Florida. Although McGee has his houseboat docked near Fort Lauderdale, he travels the state on his many unsought adventures. With this series we do not get an overt attention to environmental issues or struggles for environmental values, although acts of degradation and the historical amnesia that facilitates their frequency are emphatically pointed out. Rather, McGee provides a consistent attitude of disdain for tourists, newcomers, and greedy Florida businessmen, who have no interest in experiencing or inhabiting the actual, geologically developed nature of Florida, but rather are bent on making and experiencing the entire state as one big combination of Disney World and Miami Beach. McGee and his buddies, from 1964 on, regularly remind readers of the Florida that is being bulldozed, filled, and redesigned for retirement housing and vacation resorts, all resting on unstable environmental and financial foundations. In other mystery novels outside the series, MacDonald also described Florida in vivid detail, as in the case of the 1956 Murder in the Wind that provides a frighteningly accurate hurricane as its setting. For those of us living in Florida who experienced the state’s being hit by four hurricanes in a matter of two months in 2004, followed by two more direct hits and one near miss in 2005, MacDonald’s depiction of a Gulf hurricane suddenly changing

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course and slamming into land far sooner than expected provides a chilling foreshadowing of the behavior of Hurricane Charley that significantly changed direction just six hours before landfall at Punta Gorda and drove up Interstate 4 through the middle of Orlando. The irony of that, as with the characters in Murder in the Wind, who thought they were heading north and away from that hurricane, comes with the knowledge that thousands of residents of the Tampa Bay area had fled inland toward Orlando based on the projected path of Charley. Instead of finding safety, they found themselves in the eye of a major disaster. Nearly fifty years later and with all sorts of meteorological technology advances, MacDonald’s warning about the unpredictability of catastrophic natural events ought to be required reading for anyone crossing the state line. If MacDonald had left his environmental awareness at Travis McGee’s level of attention or limited it to a graphically realistic portrait of one hurricane, however, his novels would not be worthy of anything more than passing ecocritical attention today. But he presented his ideas and his exposés beyond the sentiments of McGee in other novels, beginning as early as 1962 with A Flash of Green, developing his critique of developers further in Condominium in 1977, and continuing to rip corrupt real estate speculators up until his death with the publication of Barrier Island in 1986. Even before the invention of Travis McGee, MacDonald’s reputation sufficed for A Flash of Green to become a best seller. As Hugh Merrill, a noted biographer of MacDonald, observes, these environmental fictions represent a turning away from “assembly-line thrillers” (2000, 106). In particular, Condominium, which he published in 1977, and which stayed on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for twenty-seven weeks, weighed in at three times the average length of his formulaic mysteries. MacDonald’s first environmental novel, A Flash of Green, also longer than his Travis McGee novels, reflects the hard-boiled, antiheroic style prevalent in detective and mystery novels of the day. A novel filled with bitterness and failure, it exposes the complicity of local businesspeople, corrupt politicians, greedy good old boys, and opportunistic professionals in a housing development scheme that requires the substantial filling in of a natural Gulf Coast bay, and which will significantly increase population and traffic density in the locale, with an attendant expansion of strip malls and chain stores. MacDonald’s bitterness here does not arise from the desire for mere stylistic conformity, but reflects the reality of the losing battles in which he had begun participating in the late 1950s by writing a regular column that frequently focused on environmental topics in a Sarasota area monthly magazine and then writing occasionally for the Sarasota Herald Tribune (Merrill 2000, 103–4), which included opposition to efforts to fill in portions of Sarasota Bay. The

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true-to-life loss by the conservationist constituency of the community in A Flash of Green makes for depressing reading. But it also educates readers who may be thinking of taking up such a cause and organizing grassroots resistance to environmentally destructive development (is that a redundant phrase?) as to just what they may find themselves confronting when they question the development at all costs mentality prevalent in Florida and so much else of the United States. It also, in 1962 mind you, warns conservationist readers of the necessity to remain continuously vigilant, since the tragic heroes of the novel had previously prevented approval of a smaller development scheme a few years earlier and complacently imagine early in the novel that they can turn back another attempt just as easily—a complacency that proves disastrous for themselves and the bay they would protect. MacDonald, however, places the most fatalistic remarks in the mouth of the vicious local Floridian kingpin behind the development, who admits that newcomers to the state will never realize how much damage has been done to the local ecology because they will only see what remains and will dismiss the old-timers who lament the losses as just nostalgia for an imagined Florida golden age (1962, 95). Nevertheless, the tragic antihero, Jimmy Wing, who after initially selling out the conservationists, continues to the last page of the novel to resist the owner of those words. Long after any hope to reverse the local development has faded, his ongoing actions help to prevent the villain from realizing his larger political and economic ambitions. At novel’s end, Jimmy visits the bay where fill dredging is under way; when a security guard warns him away saying that he is trespassing on private property, he responds that that’s the whole trouble with the situation (MacDonald 1962, 335). The natural world is ceaselessly turned into a commodity for processing and profit. Need MacDonald say anything more? One would think not. But actually, MacDonald had been saying more in those occasional newspaper columns he wrote. As early as 1960, for instance, he wrote in The Lookout, a monthly paper, “Every zoning-buster, anti-planner, and bay filler is degrading us for the sake of his own pocketbook, be he individual or huge corporation, citing the holy name of progress on his terms. . . . There is no valid justification for filling one more foot of bay. Profit is not progress” (quoted in Merrill 2000, 103–4; emphasis in original). Unfortunately, one of those huge corporations decided to undertake just such a project, and planned to build it next door to MacDonald’s home on Siesta Key. Equally unfortunate, the outcome was little different from the one presented in A Flash of Green. The experience, however, did provide readers with MacDonald’s most accomplished novel, Condominium. Condominium served as MacDonald’s revenge against the Arvida Corporation, which had planned an eight-story condominium project for the lot next

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door to his house. When MacDonald prevailed on the local zoning commission to deny permits for the project, Arvida foiled the action by threatening to convert the project into an apartment building instead, which would meet existing zoning regulations. In October of 1974, a judge issued an order requiring the zoning board to grant the permits Arvida needed for its condominiums and fueled the indignation that drove MacDonald’s writing. Less than a year after the loss in court, MacDonald submitted a manuscript to his publisher triple the length of his typical Travis McGee story. When it was published in 1977, readers kept it on the New York Times hardback best-seller list for nearly seven months. The following year it spent three months on the paperback list (Merrill 2000, 187). This novel contains over twenty significant characters, most of whom have bought into the retirement-in-the-sun propaganda that drove much of Florida’s latter twentieth-century growth (in recent years low unemployment and rapid job expansion, especially in tourist and entertainment industries and construction, have formed the basis for population growth, significantly lowering the average age of new Floridians, at least in Central Florida). The dreams and the realities for such retirees usually prove painfully discordant, not only in terms of the day-to-day emptiness that many of them experience after having cut themselves off from former friends, family, and the communities in which they worked and realized most of their achievements, but also in terms of the economic hardships caused by the unscrupulous developer of the complex. These hardships range from a sudden, budget-breaking increase in monthly service fees to repairs resulting from substandard construction. They also include unexpected injuries and the deaths of loved ones, as well as the onset of senility, the resurgence of alcoholism, and a general loss of meaningful, self-defining activity. Of course, for the most part, both the victimizers and the victims would manage to muddle along and largely survive their day-to-day tribulations, if the sunshine state’s idyllic weather remained perfectly benign. But the novel’s epigraph warns against such naïveté through discouraging complacency by quoting Dr. Robert H. Simpson, former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The opening chapters are largely devoted to introducing readers to a majority of the characters and their personal tribulations and failings, as well as the corrupt management system of Golden Sands, the condominium building in which these characters live, and its substandard construction. The latter is revealed through the eyes of Gus Garver, a veteran engineer of commercial construction projects. His curiosity also enables MacDonald to educate his readers about the geology of the Florida Gulf keys, which makes construction flaws potentially more serious in this location than if they occurred on a more solid land base. Having established some empathy for the condominium in-

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habitants, MacDonald introduces the developer, Marty Liss, and begins the process of educating readers about the inner workings of Florida land development, a project he had already undertaken at some length in A Flash of Green. Marty is sandwiched between profiles of other Golden Sands residents, many of whom are paying 8.5 percent interest on their mortgages, typical for the time period of the novel. As with contemporary Americans in 2005 living at the outer limits of their incomes, purchasing homes with interest only mortgages and other forms of creative financing that leave no room for unexpected adversaries, many of the Golden Sands residents living on fixed incomes find themselves in financial crisis. For some, the huge increase in maintenance fees and numerous repairs they must pay for themselves push them over the edge financially; others face unanticipated medical bills due to accidents and injuries to themselves or their spouses. We soon learn that Marty Liss has little interest in the Golden Sands residents because he has bigger development projects he is attempting to get under way, which require not only significant financing in a bad market, but also the bribing of commissioners and other local officials to short circuit the environmental and zoning review process. MacDonald introduces this element of the plot not only to present his withering view of developers but also because the rush job on this development will directly imperil, and ultimately contribute to the destruction of, Golden Sands. Many of the residents try to find ways to cope with their situations. With his wife in a nursing home, Gus Garver spends time studying construction and geology patterns on the key. Thelma Mensenkott, while her husband Jack is always sea fishing, explores a jungle ecosystem behind the condominium and becomes an amateur naturalist trying to catalog what she finds there. Howard Elbright, whose wife is quite happy in retirement, also enjoys this jungle area as he traverses it for fishing. He is the first to notice that surveyors are marking off this land that the residents have assumed is a protected conservation area. Rather than being protected, it turns out to be the site of Liss’s next big project and through illicit means he gets a wrecking crew out there on a Saturday to clear the land before anyone can attempt to stop him. The Messengers are another important couple at Golden Sands, an elderly and very wealthy invalid husband and his young, loving wife and caregiver. As a result of conversing with Gus about construction flaws, they arrange for Gus to bring in a hydraulic engineer named Harrison to analyze the situation at Golden Sands. Harrison’s research quicky reveals what most coastal Floridians and the Florida government perpetually deny: the beaches along both coasts of Florida routinely appear, disappear, and migrate. Natural weather patterns lead to the eventual replenishment of most beach locations over time, but that

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process is bad for tourism and development. Hence, developers, often encouraged by local governments, build right up to the beach edge, building retaining walls and other illusory forms of protection from ocean storms and surges, which actually contribute to beach erosion and circumvent natural processes. At the same time, such development also destroys the mangrove swamps and other thick vegetation that actually did provide some protection from the effects of a storm surge. The keys themselves are relatively temporary islands (MacDonald 1977, 241), rising, falling, and moving, with hurricanes and tidal processes splitting some apart while reconnecting others, raising up new ones and submerging old ones. Generally only a few feet above sea level the Gulf Coast keys and many other coastal areas are subject to hundred year storm surges several yards above high tide. In the case of the particular key in this novel, that would mean a hurricane-driven storm surge could create waves at high tide that were twenty to twenty-five feet high, which would wash over the entire key with a relentless pounding that would destroy any buildings in its way. Such has been the case with numerous Gulf hurricanes, such as Camille (1969), Ivan (2004), and Katrina (2005). But, it is important to remember that this novel is set at the end of a cyclical period of relative hurricane calm along the Florida coastline. Many of the recent arrivals in Florida had never experienced a hurricane, while others seeing the destructive force of Camille in 1969 would write it off as a rare event. And, in general, their acts of denial would be reinforced by the widespread policy in Florida, among politicians and boosters alike, of minimizing the impact of hurricanes on the state. As a result, when reports of hurricane Ella first start appearing on the news, most Golden Sands residents disregard them. As the intricacies of the plot accelerate as the hurricane approaches, readers learn that the FBI is creating a storm of its own investigating Liss and his various business partners and corrupted officials; some Golden Sands residents are preparing for the worst, while others are preparing for a hurricane party; and various factual information about the forces of nature are threaded through the story by MacDonald. For example, as a category 5 hurricane, MacDonald’s imagined Ella would be condensing 20 billion tons of water a day out of a cloud mass with an eye 35-miles wide and 40,000-feet deep (1977, 348–50), much like Hurricane Rita in 2005 at its peak, and spawning tornadoes, especially on its northeast side, a phenomenon not commonly known outside of hurricane territories. Further, MacDonald works to get readers to understand that the track and landfall of hurricanes can intensify their effects, especially when they encounter the Gulf Stream and if they make landfall at high tide (1977, 364). As has repeatedly been the case, even to some extent with Hurricane Rita following upon the heels of Hurricane Katrina, many people refuse to evacu-

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ate believing, as one character does, that his house has been hardened against hurricanes (MacDonald 1977, 399) or, as many in the Florida Keys like to think, that hurricanes never land where they live, or who believe they can ride it out if they just have enough supplies. One by one, MacDonald has each purveyor of such illusions experience the full fury of his hurricane, as well as various innocent bystanders who simply did not realize what was coming. MacDonald, in his efforts to get readers to recognize that the forces of nature can decimate any human-made construct is careful not to leave the impression that shoddy construction made the difference in the Golden Sands collapse. It made matters worse, but, finally, with a large enough hurricane no human structure built too close to the ocean can remain standing, no matter how well designed. The first recognition he has a character state in the novel’s denouement is a biocentric one: people don’t own land in any permanent sense but only temporally make use of it (MacDonald 1977, 476). The second one makes a comment on why, despite all of the previous hurricanes of the last hundred years or so in the Gulf, beginning with the one that destroyed Galveston, people continue to refuse to learn the lessons nature makes available because they are fooled by cyclical lulls in the frequency of hurricanes, seize short-term tax advantages over long-term risk, and remain generally optimistic in terms of personal exceptionalism (MacDonald 1977, 477). For the many readers who would know where MacDonald lived at the time of writing Condominium, the first recognition helps him position himself as one who understands the risks he takes by building and living where he does, but who does not as a result deny the realities of the natural world, but rather accepts them, knowing that nature may come to reclaim what he has borrowed at any time. The second recognition is directed against the developers who insisted on building a condominium next door to his home, who, like so many Florida developers, don’t even live where they build and most assuredly never educate their potential buyers about the ecosystems they have disrupted and the increased vulnerability they have generated. Throughout the novel MacDonald also makes a larger point about social ecology in regard to Florida. That point consists of his continuous critique of the American practices for the warehousing of the elderly that encourages them to dis-integrate from their communities, disintegrate physically and mentally, and define them as obsolete and useless. And, as a result of their social denigration they are routinely cheated and victimized. Although he does not explicitly draw the connections, an instrumentalist mind-set willing to commodify everything and everyone functions as the ideological villain linking the multiple plots of this novel. In reflecting on these novels by MacDonald I am struck by the power of the “hard-boiled” dimension of his realism for affecting readers’ perceptions

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about the environments in which they live. Unlike many works of nonfiction nature writing that end on idealistic notes of faith or hope or other mystery novels and thrillers that totally disempower common people, MacDonald’s novels refuse to depict nature as either benign or malevolent. Rather, it is phenomenal, with a certain degree of general predictability but with an even greater degree of unpredictability that constitutes an integral part of human engagement with our surroundings. While not preaching a particular scientific theory or interpretation, in Condominium he extols the virtues and the needs for amateurs to learn about botany, ecology, and geology, even in relation to the assumedly mundane task of picking out a condominium. His sensibility, then, would be far more affable, say, to my daughter and her generation, than many of the nature writers I so enjoy reading and whose visions of reality I would like to believe, even as I realize that MacDonald’s vision is far more likely to help me survive my stay in Orlando for however many years it may last.

NEVADA BARR Nevada Barr has become quite well known and popular for her Anna Pigeon series of novels, each of which is set in a national park, with only a few of the stories having her return to the same park for more than one adventure. As of 2005, she had written a dozen of these published over the same number of years, beginning with Track of the Cat in 1993. Her writing regimen results from a contract signed with Putnam calling for the production of a new novel annually and she has managed so far to maintain this pace without any apparent slackening of artistic quality, although she does appear to be using some retreaded plot lines. As must be expected, however, the amount of attention to the natural world and to environmental issues rises and falls from one novel to the next, appearing at this point to have begun to decrease once Park Ranger Pigeon moved to the Natchez Trace Parkway for Deep South, published in 2000. Nevertheless, nature always receives significant attention in every novel, even when the murder plot revolves around racial conflict, drug smuggling, or illegal immigration. It may be the case that the plot and theme of her first Anna Pigeon novel, Track of the Cat, established expectations that go beyond her own commitments. In various interviews, she has emphasized that her commitment consists of a celebration of America’s natural places and to the national parks system, as well as its individual parks, not only for their preservation of natural areas but also for their preservation of American history (see Barr 1999b). As a result, she can fulfill that commitment just as well by having Anna Pigeon

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working at the Statue of Liberty in Liberty Falling as she can by having her work at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas in Flashback, or Yosemite in High Country. While poaching does appear as a repeated plot device, even it does not take on the same sense of environmental urgency or nature conservation from one novel to the next. In Track of the Cat, however, poaching does represent a serious crime against nature that leads to a series of crimes, specifically murders, against human beings. Poaching also represents a consumerist attitude toward the wild that leads to the destruction of large tracts of wild land not protected by the national parks system. Her opposition to that kind of attitude and its attendant practices becomes immediately clear in the first few pages of Track as Barr introduces readers to the personality and mind-set of Park Ranger Pigeon. Resting in the wild, observing a nearby lizard, she remarks quite trenchantly the she is just a temporary visitor, acknowledging the lizard’s status as resident (Barr 1993, 2). By the second page readers know that she just as easily could have said “We’re just passing through,” meaning all humanity, and desiring it as much as believing it. Not surprisingly, Anna’s job this day in the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas, involves studying shit, or rather cougar scat. While the rangers seek to protect the species, the ranchers, Barr makes clear, would rather see them exterminated, and, in fact, twenty of the radio-collared ones had disappeared in fewer than thirty-six months (1993, 4). Shortly into the story, Anna Pigeon discovers a dead ranger who appears to have been killed by a big cat. That death provides the excuse for a cougar posse and the killing of another of the park’s allegedly protected animals. Eventually, in pursuit of the truth of the murder and the piling up of clues that contradict the official story, Pigeon exposes a poaching conspiracy, involving both a ranger and ranchers. The novel ends on a hard-edged note reminiscent of the hard-boiled detective stories from the pulps. Rather than showing Pigeon bringing the various criminals to justice, she leaves the guilty ranger in the desert with a broken ankle and a high risk of dying before anyone finds him. Barr seems to suggest by this ending a perspective that states that “turn around is fair play,” that nature has a right to exact its equivalent of revenge, even when its instrument is one human pitted against another. In her next several novels, nature invariably comes out looking better than civilization, whether Barr is writing about drug smuggling on Lake Superior or Georgia coastal islands in A Superior Death and Endangered Species or firefighting in California in Firestorm. Her novels do not necessarily focus on environmental justice, but do give considerable attention to accurate description of the natural world and the wonders and value of the national parks system. While most of the novels take Pigeon from one park to another, Deep

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South and Hunting Season, are both set along the Natchez Trace Parkway. In both, nature recedes relative to a focus on the history and legacy of slavery and racism, yet Barr does not allow them to appear unrelated. Attitudes toward the land and the concept of property affect the treatment of both wild and domesticated places and the people who inhabit and visit them. But in Hunting Season, Barr shows that she understands the difference between the poaching of endangered species that both benefits corporate ranchers and rich sport hunters and local, traditional poaching of a few deer from a healthy population for personal consumption. But, as in Track of the Cat, Pigeon’s wrath is reserved for the corrupt ranger who kills both people and other animals for his personal financial gain. It may be that Barr just finds herself terribly irritated by those few corrupt rangers who betray their calling to compensate themselves for their inadequate pay. But it may also be that Barr views these characters as metonymic figures for all of the government functionaries who betray their obligations to the national trust for money, corporate profits, and political expediency. I would express my only concern with such a representation as a fear that Barr demonstrates too much subtlety at times. In Blood Lure, Barr returns explicitly to poaching as a topic. But unlike her previous attention to the problem, in this novel she takes on the mistreatment of wild animals turned into performers in cheap roadside attractions. The bear as victim actually appears very late in the story, but like the plot of Track of the Cat, Anna will become involved in a murder investigation in the course of ranger work initially focused on species preservation. And in both cases, the murder of the human casts suspicion on the animal species as a perpetrator of murder rather than a repeated victim of it. Blood Lure opens with Anna having traveled to the Montana side of WatertonGlacier International Peace Park to participate in a bear DNA tracking project. Quickly, Barr educates her readers about the power and danger of wild bears, tearing down the romantic notions of bears harbored by wilderness park tourists. She also observes that this particular park has actually conserved an untrammeled portion of wilderness, in contradistinction to the majority of parks, which display a wilderness loosely termed as having undergone rehabilitation. Pigeon is working with Joan, the lead ranger on the project, and a twitchy volunteer assistant named Rory, whose father and stepmother are actually camping not far from where the DNA research team is working. In addition to Rory, a suspicious teen hiker named Geoffrey materializes briefly and then disappears into the forest. A few chapters later, Pigeon and company’s campground is rifled by a bear and Rory has either fled in panic or been carried off by the bear. Barr goes out of her way to have Joan, the bear expert, explain to Pigeon not only the rar-

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ity of such a campsite attack, but also, as they search for the missing Rory, the clearly out-of-character-for-a-wild-bear behavior of their attacker (Barr 2001, 55–59). Then, within ten pages a dead body turns up, obviously mauled and dragged by a bear: a woman with a significant portion of her face torn away, making identification difficult (Barr 2001, 69). But quickly, Barr thickens the plot by having Pigeon realize that the woman’s face has not been eaten by a bear, as initially believed, but cut away, thus suggesting the woman may have been murdered by human hands rather than killed by a wild force of nature. Clearly, for Anna Pigeon, the prospect of a human murderer poses a greater danger to all concerned than a deadly bear, perhaps because the corpse forces her to confront the fact that she, like almost everyone else, relies on that sheen of civilization she seemed to deride at the opening of Track of the Cat to provide a means for defining safe interaction between humans. And when that sheen slides away, people become far less predictable and far more dangerous to other human beings than wild animals who tend to behave more consistently than their human relatives. When Rory turns up with a story about getting lost in the woods while trying to flee the bear that ransacked their campsite, he comes under suspicion by Pigeon as a potential suspect in the still unidentified woman’s murder. Barr increases Pigeon’s suspicion and readers’ with her when they learn from Rory’s father, Les, that Rory’s stepmother has gone missing for two days and Pigeon has a fleeting thought that the stepmother and the dead woman may be one and the same (2001, 99). As the story unfolds and Pigeon learns that Rory’s father has been the victim of physical abuse at the hands of his nowdead wife and that she may have been cavorting with another camper named McCaskil—a petty criminal—something of a contest develops between which of the men most likely killed her. In addition, Barr reveals that Rory’s stepmother was wearing another man’s jacket, perhaps McCaskil’s, at the time she was killed (2001, 178). Typical of quality red herrings, this jacket points readers away from the real killer and keeps them focused first on Les, and second on McCaskil, who is clearly missing a coat (Barr 2001, 195). But then, the trail toward the killer takes a strange turn when Pigeon turns up evidence that the killer had gone up to very high altitudes to an area where bears search for army cutworm moths, but also where plants valuable enough for poaching also grow. This bit of evidence turns readers back toward bears and the marauding bear that had faded from the story for dozens of pages, but also provides Barr an opportunity for a little education about ecosystems: spraying crops against moths in Minnesota reduces the sources of food for grizzly bears in the Rockies (2001, 216). Pigeon’s encountering bears feeding on such moths lets Barr expand on her nature education narration, but the end of her trek brings her into contact with two hikers who put her on the trail of

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the mysterious Geoffrey introduced in the first fifty pages of the novel and then ignored for two hundred pages. Eventually, Geoffrey gets connected with an abandoned truck and trailer in the park that belonged to someone who had a roadside attraction in Florida, one that would have included a variety of wild and tame animals on display, perhaps including a bear. Typical of Barr’s mysteries and so many others, various clues and loose ends come rushing together in the final fifty or so pages. On page 301, Anna, Joan, and Rory spot a trophy-sized Alaskan grizzly in the park that attacks but only roughs up Anna. Meanwhile, a retreating Joan and Rory are captured by the now-armed petty criminal McCaskil, who is screaming into the trees that “Balthazar’s mine” and demanding that an unnamed someone come out of the woods (Barr 2001, 313), as Anna comes upon them after dark. With the bear soon upon the scene, Pigeon disarms McCaskil and she learns that Geoffrey and the bear grew up together in Florida. Geoffrey has been attempting to reintroduce the bear into the wild at the park, teaching him to search and hunt for food, while McCaskil has been attempting to recapture the bear in order to sell him to a trophy hunting resort where he would be killed as if he were a wild animal (Barr 2001, 325)—just the kind of exotic trophy ranch that Carl Hiaasen will ridicule in his novel Sick Puppy. But what of the murder that provides the main plot for the novel? Rory’s philandering stepmother had been wearing McCaskil’s coat when the two had stumbled upon each other, and the woman, instead of respecting the reality that bears are wild animals, wherever they may be found, began using a flash camera to take pictures of him. The bear killed her ostensibly in self-defense, thinking she was McCaskil based on the smell of the coat. Of course, despite Geoffrey’s best intentions, Balthazar cannot be returned to the wild, nor settled in a national park, no matter how much wilderness it contains, with any expectations for the animal’s survival. Fortunately, an animal trainer for Hollywood films takes both the bear and the boy. Unlike Track of the Cat and some of Barr’s other novels, then, Blood Lure proves to be a murder mystery in which no murder has actually taken place, but rather a killing, and an accidental one at that, although complicated by an intentional cover-up. She used a similar plot the following year, when writing Hunting Season. In each case, the murder investigation provides the opportunity for Barr, through Pigeon, to provide exposition on the natural beauty and complexity of the ecosystems of her settings. With Blood Lure the plot also allows her to reiterate statements in previous novels about the fundamental wildness of animals, whether found in parks or roadside attractions, and the foolishness of wilderness tourists who discount that innate and fundamental wildness, both in the park animals and the human park visitors.

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But not all of her novels give that much attention to natural lessons as Track of the Cat and Blood Lure, nor should we expect them to do so. While Hunting Season, for instance, takes up poaching, the local deer poaching by Mississippi residents who consume what they kill is not placed in the same category as the poaching of endangered species treated in other novels. Rather, race relations form the main topic for Barr’s commentary in this novel. Similarly, while smuggling has proven as convenient a plot-driving device as poaching, it is treated with differing degrees of relationship to the national parks system and to its environmental impacts. For example, in the 1997 Endangered Species, set on a Georgia coastal island, Barr educates readers about conservation work in support of sea turtles and the marshland particularities of Atlantic barrier islands, but the smuggling of drugs doesn’t especially endanger the environment any more than the deer poaching of Hunting Season. And in the 2003 Flashback, set at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, the smuggling involves Cuban refugees, who pose no threat to the keys or the ocean ecology. In fact, this novel devotes very few pages to natural description and environmental lessons. The 2004 High Country, however, set in Yosemite, does suggest the ways in which the drug trade is endangering the safety and ecology of national parks. Although the marijuana in this instance has been spread across the land during a plane crash rather than through cultivation, marijuana cultivation and its trafficking have become an increasing problem for the national park systems, as a recent article, “Sequoia Park Goes to Pot,” points out: “officials report five encounters between gun-wielding growers and visitors on national-forest lands in California this year. . . . The growers poach wildlife, spill pesticides, divert water from streams and dump tons of trash” (J. Robinson 2005, A31). While Barr clearly details the threat the drug trade poses for parks, her need to set the story in autumn in Yosemite and to have Anna Pigeon working in the restaurant at the historic Ahwahnee Hotel for plot purposes limits her opportunities for depicting the scenic grandeur of America’s first national park. Her 2005 novel, Hard Truth, with its focus on a sadistic religious cult, continues this reduced attention to nature and environmental themes. Perhaps future novels will return to a stronger emphasis on environmental education, more similar to the earlier novels rather than the more recent ones. But, then again, they may not, because unlike MacDonald, whose perception of nature-human relationships and sense of environmental crises developed over the decades, Barr’s view seems to remain static throughout the series. Pigeon becomes more adept at understanding human motivations and behaviors as the series proceeds, but she doesn’t seem to be gaining much of a deeper or more systemic knowledge of the world in which those behaviors are acted out.

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JUDITH VAN GIESON Judith Van Gieson’s first mystery novel with female lawyer Neil Hamel was published in 1988. North of the Border was followed by seven others published through 1998 before the author shifted to writing another series. Interest in Neil Hamel has led to the University of New Mexico Press reprinting the first three books. In addition to enjoying good mysteries, readers most likely read this series because of its rich depictions of the New Mexico landscape, rather than environmental issues. The plot of North of the Border, for instance, doesn’t focus on an environmental issue, but does include passing criticism of a plan to develop a nuclear waste dump in New Mexico. The same can be said of most of her other novels, such as The Other Side of Death and Hotshots. The environmental issues do, however, often contribute to Hamel and the reader focusing on the wrong suspects to heighten the mystery. Of these novels, Raptor, Parrot Blues, and The Wolf Path best held my interest because of the tight connection between plot and environmental themes. The plot of Raptor takes Neil Hamel away from New Mexico to Montana. She has been made the executor of her aunt Joan’s estate, and Joan turns out to have been an avid bird watcher, who was scheduled to take a trip to Montana. The organizer, who is affiliated with the Falcon Fund, invites Hamel to take her aunt’s place on the trip to see an Arctic gyrfalcon and she accepts in part as a type of fulfillment of her aunt’s wishes. Having the aunt as the expert and Hamel as an uninitiated novice allows Van Gieson to provide the reader with significant information on raptors as Hamel educates herself in preparation for and during her trip. For instance, Hamel’s reading from Joan’s journal allows Van Gieson to quote it at length, including a full-page description of raptors with information about the Arctic gyrfalcon (1990, 13). In the second chapter Van Gieson reminds readers about the damage that DDT did to falcons, particularly the peregrine (1990, 18–19). She also points out that some ranchers oppose the existence of any predators other than the human one, not only falcons and other raptors, but also wolves (Van Gieson 1990, 20), the animal that forms the focus of her third Neil Hamel novel. In contrast to the division the rancher claims between the human predator and all others, Van Gieson, humorously describes the participants in this Falcon Fund outing in terms of their resemblances to various birds. It soon becomes clear that some individuals have not come to view this particularly rare species of raptor, but to poach it for financial gain or to add to their personal collection. Early in chapter 3, one of the birders begins telling Hamel about contemporary falconry and the fact that falconers provided the breeding stock to reintroduce peregrines to the wild after the banning of DDT (Van Gieson 1990, 32–33). The plot thickens when the birding

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group finally arrives at the park location for sighting the Arctic gyrfalcon. While the veterans are watching the bird, Hamel accidentally witnesses a death, as a man falls from the ledge where the bird has its nest. The man who invited Hamel up and led the group to the site, March Augusta, is then identified as the prime suspect in the murder of known poacher, Sandy Pedersen, by the federal prosecutor. Neil, naturally, becomes involved in March’s defense. Through her discussions with March, Neil learns not only about the international trade in falcons but also the weak laws and lack of attention for prosecuting poachers. As Neil Hamel digs deeper into the case, readers are treated to her musings about the similarities and differences between the natural landscapes of Montana and New Mexico, as she travels out into the countryside for an appointment. There she meets an Arab prince who is looking for someone to steal the Arctic gyrfalcon for him, and hopes March will undertake the task now that Sandy Pedersen has been killed. This prince enables Van Gieson to highlight the international and high stakes character of illegal trade in the most exotic of birds, in contrast to the kind of smuggling she will document a few years later in Parrot Blues. This meeting also leads to an exchange between Neil and March about trophy hunters that encourages a thematic comparison with Barr’s Track of the Cat, published three years later. A couple of chapters later, Van Gieson has Hamel driving down the highway, meditating on the role of the hunter in culture and nature. The true hunter, according to this meditation, represents no threat to wildlife and has not caused the extinction of species because hunters appreciate the need to maintain the balance of a natural system, while cultivators tend to view all predators as threats to be eliminated (Van Gieson 1990, 89). This anthropological distinction will be addressed again in greater detail in Van Gieson’s next novel, The Wolf Path. But probably more important for her average reader than a consideration of humanthe-hunter versus human-the-farmer comes from Van Gieson having March emphasize the overall failure of the Endangered Species Act, which has few success stories to be told (1990, 78). While mystery readers may be satisfied with the revelation by novel’s end that the man committing murder in this novel also captures endangered species to collect stuffed specimens before they become extinct, many natureoriented readers will no doubt experience disappointment. As with several of Barr’s novels, we encounter the problem here that mysteries often work best when an insider or someone presumably on the same side of the unjustly accused is revealed as the murderer. Such a plot device, however, likely undercuts the potential for these novels to encourage their uncommitted readers to consider participating in environmental activism. The perpetrator of both the human murder and attempted raptor murder in Raptor, gives a brief, utterly

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cynical defense of his actions on the basis that conservation organizations are uniformly failing to stop environment destruction. Fortunately, however, all of the other Falcon Fund members provide examples of right and even heroic behavior in defense of wild nature. While they may be fighting a losing battle, the novel seems to suggest, they have chosen the right path by going down fighting rather than capitulating to the commodification of everything in this world. This fight-the-good-fight mentality is not critiqued either by Hamel or by the author and indicates an unresolved dissonance between the foundational assumptions about justice posited by this and most other mystery novels and the disempowering conclusion that suggests injustice may rule the day. While the latter thesis would certainly make sense in the current political conjuncture, it is unlikely that readers need to read a novel to reach that conclusion or that they read in order to have that conclusion sustained. Van Gieson continues with the same issues in The Wolf Path that she introduced in Raptor, focusing on wolf reintroduction, a far more controversial project than peregrine reintroduction. As a result, she develops a broader cast of characters representing a greater range of opinions than in the previous novel. As with Raptor, Van Gieson has Neil Hamel representing a positive character on the environmental side of the divide who is wrongly accused of murder. Along the way Van Gieson educates us about the differences between Mexican wolves and northern wolves, and the alacrity with which New Mexican ranchers wiped out the wolf population in a matter of a few decades (1992, 10), as well as the virtues of wolf reintroduction. At the beginning of the story, readers are also taught about the differing landscapes of northern and southern New Mexico. Quickly Van Gieson lays out some of the formidable opposition that faces any wild animals trying to regain a foothold in land coveted for grazing, not only individual farmers but also the branch of the Agriculture Department known as the ADC, or Animal Damage Control, which shoots first and asks questions later (1992, 34–35). There are also the animals’ allies, which in The Wolf Path, includes a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bob Bartel, who unfortunately becomes the murder victim, while the champion of wolf reintroduction, a California radical self-named Juan Sololobo, soon becomes the prime suspect Hamel works to clear. Better than Barr in her novels, Van Gieson succeeds in The Wolf Path in establishing a politically and enviro-philosophically diverse range of characters as true speaking subjects, requiring readers throughout much of the novel to take their positions seriously, even when they clearly contradict the thematic thrust that the author develops. Bartel’s dialogues with Hamel before he is murdered are particularly compelling in justifying the actions of those who work from within the system. At the same time, Van Gieson also shows how the ranchers’ position

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often reflects genuine fears and sincere economic concerns, as represented by Don and Perla Phillips. Only the ADC man comes off, probably appropriately so, as nothing more than a caricature of the shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions school of environmental eugenics. Van Gieson’s success in this area results primarily from the unusual delay between the start of the novel and the actual murder around which the case revolves—not until page 96 of a 232-page murder mystery do we actually have a murder reported. After Bartel’s death, Van Gieson brings another character into the novel to aid Hamel in her investigation, an environmental activist named Charlie Clark, who becomes instrumental in helping her break up an illicit wolf breeding mill and catch the real murderer of Bob Bartel. A look at the political positions and environmental philosophies embodied by Bartel, Clark, and Hamel in this novel suggest that Van Gieson sees the need for a range of participants and a spectrum of activism, from governmental wildlife biologists, to radical activists, to aware and engaged public citizens who will support the previous two when needed. What I particularly like about this novel, which also appears to a lesser extent in Parrot Blues, is that Van Gieson has enabled her readers to choose from a range of characters with whom to identify, without always having to identify with the hero of the novel while at the same time not having to reject the hero in order to make an identification with another character. The murder mystery as a popular genre certainly does not facilitate this kind of multiple characters as speaking subjects and internally persuasive environmental discourse structure, but Van Gieson succeeds nevertheless in developing such a story within the standard middle length of the genre. At the same time, she is able to provide overwhelming support for wolf reintroduction programs through facts and statistics, as well as to denounce, once again, illicit trade in exotic and endangered species, which she will even more forcefully emphasize in Parrot Blues. Thus, unlike Raptor, The Wolf Path educates and empowers readers without trying to foist on them a singular philosophy of environmental activism. Parrot Blues lacks the range of characters as internally persuasively speaking subjects found in The Wolf Path, but it makes up for that with an increased amount of reader education about parrots and parrot smuggling, deftly interwoven throughout a plot with more switchbacks than a good mountain road. While again, the murder takes place later in the novel than usual for a murder mystery, the novel begins with an apparent kidnapping of both a woman and a parrot. When the husband hires Neil Hamel in order to ransom the parrot with little concern for the wife, reader attention focuses on the parrot and its relations. Extensive education about parrots becomes, then, quite appropriate and necessary, since Neil Hamel knows little about the animals. And, as with

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The Wolf Path, the education comes largely in the form of dialogue with various levels of expertise represented by a variety of characters. From an ecocritical perspective the real power of this novel comes primarily from gut-wrenching detailed description of parrot smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border. Through Hamel’s eyewitness account, Van Gieson describes the birds being removed from a hiding place behind the taillights of a car, with most of the ones removed already dead and the few left alive in miserable condition. She also implicates pet shop complicity in such smuggling by providing a retail outlet for the birds smuggled into the country. With Raptor and The Wolf Path the poaching and smuggling was done for the benefit of a small, wealthy clientele, but in Parrot Blues Van Gieson reveals that many pet owners of ordinary income also contribute to the problem through their interest in purchasing exotic species. At the same time, as with any good regionalist writer, Van Gieson provides strong descriptions of the New Mexico landscape that do not merely present its surface features but also inform the reader about geological history, local ecologies, and the particularities of flora and fauna. While smuggling often forms a standard plot for American mysteries, it too often is connected only with the drug trade, as Barr does in several of her novels, in such a way that the complicity of middle- and upper-class Americans in this environmentally and socially destructive business is ignored or only tangentially reported so that recreational users can overlook their role in helping to sustain it. Van Gieson’s Raptor suffers from the same problem in that only a handful of ultra-rich are indicted in that novel. In contrast, in Parrot Blues Van Gieson points her finger at many of her readers who have too often looked the other way and not asked where and how the objects of trade, whether animal or not, were obtained. She thereby reduces the comfort level usually felt at mystery’s end and increases the potential for the kind of cognitive dissonance that critical science fiction often generates.

JOHN STRALEY Many authors have chosen to write about Alaska, but none that I know of have done so with such a stubborn antiromantic position as that held by John Straley, a criminal investigator by profession. Between 1992 and 2001 he had published six novels featuring detective Cecil Younger, with his current website promising more novels in the future. As with Barr’s novels as distinct from Van Gieson’s, Straley’s works would have to be classified as more nature fiction than environmental fiction, although with at least one exception. By that, I mean the plots often do not revolve around a particular issue of en-

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vironmental destruction or necessarily even depict one with significant attention. Rather, the nature of Alaska, as realistically portrayed as possible, invariably constitutes more than mere backdrop, and often as much a character as any of the humans in a given story. Straley’s decision to have his hero, Cecil Younger, live in Sitka facilitates his antiromantic position, given its damp, rainy climate, and its lack of the awe-inspiring grandeur that the word Alaska evokes in most readers’ imaginations. Not that Straley never depicts sublime locations or nodes of experience, but these do not constitute the reality of most days and most individual daily lives. Straley begins the Cecil Younger series with The Woman Who Married a Bear; yes, a retelling of that widely told Northwestern native story. In the opening author’s note, Straley indicates that his novel is based on a story told him by a Tlingit woman. He also acknowledges the poetic and scholarly work on the subject that precedes his rendering of it in fiction, as well as pointing out that only one of the cities in the novel has been invented, while the others are real enough and can be found on any map. Thus, Straley situates his novel in several ways in his opening remarks, going beyond Barr’s use of national parks, by placing it in a regional location that has not only a geographic dimension, but also cultural, historical, and aesthetic ones as well. He implicitly claims this work as a localist, ecoregional one. Verisimilitude, then, can go beyond a simplistic, secular, American consensual reality, and participate in a regional realism with a dialogical interanimation of wild nature and civilized human nature. The interface between these along the last American frontier becomes the theme of the novel, while the plot is built around Younger’s efforts to solve a murder mystery. This distinction in types of verisimilitude is clearly represented in Younger’s remark to himself that, while the police take down oral histories, he collects folklore (Straley 1992, 9). In fact, the mother of the murder victim does not want Younger to solve the murder, so much as to learn the entire story wrapped around it. As Younger begins to piece together the murder of the Native hunting guide, Louis Victor, who apparently had both a white wife and family and a native girlfriend, he reflects frequently on the ways of the natural world around him, since the investigation takes him not only to several Alaskan cities but also out to a remote hunting camp and a small town. One such revelation comes from a memory of his deceased father who tells him that Nature, with a capital N, is an orderly system and while that system is not based on benefit to humans it does have purpose (Straley 1992, 55). The convicted murderer of Louis, Alvin Hawkes, tells Younger when he visits him in prison, that Louis comprised, in essence, more a part of nature than a part of culture: “I thought that Louis was a bear and he was going to kill me. And that his children were half-bear, half-human and they wanted me to kill him so they

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could eat him” (Straley 1992, 73). Although considered insane by others and by himself, Hawkes’s explanation begins to take on more than an allegorical truth. Particularly when Younger encounters Louis’s children. The son clearly views himself as half-wild, speaking of the back country where he and his sister are staying: “I see nothing. Nothing to get in my way, and nothing to stop me from doing exactly what the fuck I want to do. That’s what wilderness is for. That’s what brought the pioneers here” (Straley 1992, 141). But the son doesn’t understand the whole story of his own life, much less of the magnitude of the natural life welling up around him. Straley evokes, implies, and suggests this gap between human concerns and the natural immensity of Alaska in varied ways throughout the novel. Perhaps this gap appears no greater than when he pauses from the plot to describe two humpbacked whales feeding on herring, alive with that greater sense of purpose to which Younger’s father has alluded (Straley 1992, 194), but certainly that scene lacks the drama of his being attacked by a bear sow (207–8). And the gap appears again when Louis’s wife and daughter explain why Louis had to be killed and why the daughter—and not the man convicted of the murder— killed him. His wife explains that Louis was part of the world of Alaska of which she, a white newcomer from San Francisco, could never fully know, never completely inhabit. And the daughter came to face the contradictions experienced by so many mixed-race children in America, of identifying with one heritage and rejecting the other, of wanting to “pass” into the mainstream and being forever barred from it by visible ethnicity and biculturality. As in the mythic story, the wife and children must sacrifice the bear husband/father to save themselves from destruction at the hands of the wife’s brothers, at the hands of the dominant society. Straley treads carefully with a dangerous subject here, opening himself up to accusations of essentialist stereotyping, by identifying the Native man as being closer to wild nature than the white people of the story. But rather, through the interior monologues of Younger’s first-person narration and his dialogues with other characters, including natives and whites, he avoids this pitfall by positing that the conflict comes down to one between inhabitants and settlers, on the one hand, or, to phrase it another way, between ennatured cultures and denatured cultures. Certainly, one can read the original myth in this manner, by positing that the bear represents an ennatured culture, while the woman’s brothers represent a denatured culture that seeks to murder the bear rather than accept either the bear’s entry into their community or their sister’s entry into the bear community. On the other hand, the conflict can also be interpreted as one between destroyer cultures and coexistence cultures. By novel’s end it is revealed that the mother, the son, and the daughter, have committed murder, attempted to commit murder, or are prepared to commit

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murder to protect their existence, even though that has meant destroying ones they love. Straley emphasizes that all three identify with the destroyer culture rather than the coexistence culture through both their actions and their words, as when the son identifies with the “pioneers” and a false notion of wilderness as providing freedom without responsibility rather than with the culture of the father. In this novel, as with the entire series to date, Straley addresses environmental issues and nature/culture conflicts fundamentally from a philosophical perspective more so than from an activist or political one. In The Curious Eat Themselves, however, Straley does bring the philosophical together with the political and the activist in a plot that involves the murder of a woman named Lou seeking to expose environmental violations at a gold mining camp. Within the unfolding of the murder plot, Straley observes how Alaskan business and government interests treated the Exxon Valdez oil spill as a public relations problem rather than an environmental disaster that they did not want to deter other potentially polluting resource extraction, such as using cyanide recovery for gold mining (1993, 45). While the woman worked as a cook at such a gold mining operation run by a corporation called “Global” for short, she was secretly investigating its pollution output, in conspiracy with another environmental activist named Steven. Initially, we learn, she is raped at the camp in an effort to scare her off and then is murdered after going to Ketchikan. When Global employees seek to buy off Younger while he is investigating the murder, suspicion naturally falls on the company as the instigator of her murder, but, of course, the situation proves more complicated than that. Instead, suspicion begins to fall on the environmental activist that Lou was writing, Steven Mathews. Straley uses this character to criticize outsiders who show up on Monday and imagine they are inhabitants by Friday, especially in relation to the culture of Native peoples (1993, 108–9, 115). One of the Tlingits, for instance, remarks that “When white people argue about the land, it’s always about money. . . . In the end they don’t care what happens to the workers or to the land as long as they see the money coming in. There isn’t anything money can’t fix, but everything stays broke” (Straley 1993, 110). As Straley observes about Mathews in relation to the issue of inhabitation and culture: “The elders of Angoon were skeptical of development and placed a higher value on their cultural identity—that was perhaps what had attracted Mathews to the village. But they never sought his help” (1993, 117). While Mathews may be untrustworthy in several departments, he seems to know what happened at the gold mine in terms of environmental problems: a failure to build the polluted water retention pits up to specs (Straley 1993, 124). In addition to that, however, Cecil learns that Global has illegally been using oil tankers to haul the toxic water from Alaska to Long Beach to process

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it (Straley 1993, 160). The motive for Mathews’ murdering Louise Root is revealed some eighty pages prior to the end of the novel, suggesting that Straley’s main concern does not lie with exposing the vicissitudes of outsider environmentalist do-gooders, but rather with the larger issues of corruption, environment, and culture in Alaska. A Tlingit informant, for example, reveals to Cecil that Global has played a shell game with toxic waste, dumping oily ballast where the diluted cyanide was removed and then dumping most of that out at sea rather than taking it in for reprocessing (Straley 1993, 218). At novel’s end, Straley does return to Mathews, but only to show that egotism, the most extreme form of anthropocentrism, can be easily found on both sides of that environmental class war and that it leads to destruction regardless of an individual’s motives and intentions. As with The Woman Who Married a Bear, The Curious Eat Themselves sets up a contrast between ennatured cultures and denatured cultures and suggest that any environmental ethic or program needs to start with attention to the inhabitants and the particularities of place rather than with grand designs and idealist visions. After these two novels, Straley devotes less attention to environmental issues, but continues his contrasts of cultural values and ways of living, including the search for, and rejection of, inhabitation. For example, in The Music of What Happens, Straley repeatedly has Cecil Younger meditating upon and appreciating the beauty of the Alaskan landscape and the cities that have come to terms with that landscape and its weather. Yet, in a story ostensibly about a custody battle, Straley educates readers about another reality of that landscape and the development that has populated it with immigrants from the Lower 48: frontier litter. But while the word “litter” in the Lower 48 may conjure images of fast-food wrappers blowing along sidewalks and plastic six-pack holders wrapped around a duck’s head, in Alaska frontier litter includes abandoned weapons, dynamite, and old blasting caps left in a rusty can that a boy could pick up and accidentally explode. Straley points out through this novel that destruction occurs not only at the initial, active clearing phase of environmental exploitation but continues as an accumulated residue of unbalanced human daily life.

FURTHER DIRECTIONS All of the authors treated in this chapter have worked in the mode of traditional or consensual realism. But it is important to realize that traditional realism need not constitute the only mode for detective fiction. Certainly, any dedicated reader of SF can name a dozen novels in that genre built on a mystery plot and even entire series that might be said to be so constructed. In like

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manner, detective fiction abounds in postmodern writing, although little of the detective variant seems to have much interest in nature. Carl Hiaasen, although heavily indebted to his Florida predecessor John D. MacDonald, departs from MacDonald’s traditional realist hard-boiled mode by combining the kind of verisimilitude required by the mystery genre with a postmodern sensibility that includes improbable and fantastic characters and events that, nevertheless, are revealed by the daily newspaper as having been based on actual people and events. Even in his children’s novels, he shows a penchant for bizarre characters and outlandish actions. In another departure from the preceding authors, his mysteries comprise a loosely linked series based on the continuity of their Florida setting, the frequent appearance of specific secondary characters, such as the hermit ex-governor, a state trooper loyal to him, and various newspaper reporters or ex-reporters. Finally, he never presents a protagonist as hard-boiled as Travis McGee or Nevada Barr, but ones more like the recovering alcoholic detective of Straley’s novels. In addition to authors such as Hiaasen, who build on this popular genre but inject a postmodern sensibility and style, critics also need to look at the examples of nature-oriented mystery novels—with or without detectives, and perhaps even without murders—in order to understand the degree to which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated popular and commercial fiction in the instances of the single or infrequent natureoriented novel by a mystery series novelist. And then, someone also needs to take a look at the ever-popular science mystery thrillers, which often garner a larger audience as a movie than they do as a novel, that tend toward the threat of an apocalypse, either global or local, averted at the last possible moment. While some of these are based entirely on junk science, others provide solid, although limited, natural science education and should be considered worthy of critical scrutiny.

Part Three

CULTURALLY CROSSING THE FIELD

Chapter Nine

Nature-Nurturing Fathers in a World Beyond Our Control

SETTING UP THE PROBLEM It has always seemed a mystery to me that so many asymmetrical verbal formations exist in American English when it comes to the creation of an embryo, that embryo’s development as a viable organism, and his or her birth as a human being. A man impregnates while a woman becomes pregnant. These phrases sound as if people still held the same beliefs as the ancient Greeks: that only the male was the progenitor of another human being, while the woman was a passive receptacle for that being’s initial growth, placing each gender in distinctly different power and creative relationships to the next generation. Such inequality and distortion of contributions to life are replicated in the use of to mother and to father. The former takes a lifetime but doesn’t seem to begin until after the woman has given birth to a child, as if the nine months of pregnancy don’t constitute a part of mothering. With the male’s contribution, in contrast, every instant of his effort is credited, but apparently only up to the moment of birth. With human beings, it would seem that in contemporary American culture a man can father a child in a few minutes—a far cry from a woman’s lifetime of mothering. And yet, at the same time, if he is working on a project, such as inventing the atomic bomb, all of his work from the conception of the idea through the parturition of the object by means of a demonstration of its ability to function (or explode) is given due credit. Hence the amazing ability of the script writers for the 101 Dalmatians movie to have the male human owner credit the male dog with the birth of so many puppies in one litter while crediting the female dog only with being too exhausted to bring the last puppy live into the world. From popular culture through scientific and 147

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historical discourses our culture is riddled with such examples. Men are credited with creating but are not expected to nurture what they create, while women are expected to nurture what men create without being credited for participating in that creation. As a result of such language and the thinking it both reflects and continuously regenerates, nurturing remains a concept rarely applied to men and an area of male practice inadequately studied, discussed, and promoted. Responding to the early 1990s research of Sara Ruddick, which complained of the lack of analytical attention “to fathering as a kind of work,” Stuart Aitken noted that “Little is written or understood or problematized about fatherhood and domestic responsibility, whereas much more is understood about work separation, the productive capacities of men, and the power they wield over women and children” (1998, 69). Aitken goes on to paraphrase the claim of Victor Seidler that “men traditionally have great difficulty imagining the emotional space of child rearing, and their attempts are often fruitless because they have learned within a rationalist culture to deny that their emotions and feelings are a source of knowledge” (1998, 69). Charles Gaines confirms this insight in A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life, previously discussed in chapter 2: “No one had ever told me that men could have access to those particular emotions and, during that time” of his children’s infancy, “every day of my husbanding and fathering seemed to present me with some new impossible surprise of feeling” (1994, 33). Indeed, men do remain too removed from their own emotions, not only because we devalue them but also because we fear them as an indication of weakness and vulnerability—with these two words functioning fundamentally as synonyms, even though they need not be so understood (see Aitken 1998, 69). I can think of no other experience in our lives that generates such frightening emotions and feelings of vulnerability and, at times, helplessness and inadequacy as child raising, where we assume we are not the experts but the inferiors. In the negotiated space and process of child raising we have the greatest difficulty in retaining and confirming the identities and personae that we have cultivated in the public sphere. Why does such a strong disconnection seem to exist between fathering as procreating and fathering as nurturing; between men thinking about children in terms of our roles as providers, controllers, and patriarchs, and feeling about our children as care givers, emotional bonders, and interdependents? Carolyn Merchant and numerous other ecofeminists, such as Susan Griffin and Ariel Salleh, would tell us that historically, philosophically, and politically this disconnection is rooted fundamentally in the dualisms of mind versus body, reason versus emotions, masculine versus feminine, and culture versus nature. The chaos of child development and the situatedness and inde-

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terminate outcomes of child raising, as well as the strong emotional reactions in us fathers that children’s resistance and spontaneity elicit, contradict a rationalistic separation of mind and body, especially since these children arise from our own bodies. It is from deep within those bodies that our emotional reactions well up and overcome our fragile, mechanistic reasoning. And these emotions often intensify one such emotion, fear, in many fathers as not only do their children negate their rational, intellectual domination of the moment, but also fathers’ own bodies betray us as our emotions, most dangerously anger and rage, break through our veneer of logic. An especially powerful failure of the dualisms on which we rely is reflected in the rapid resort to violence to maintain control that so many fathers elect to use against children and spouses. These terrible—at least from the perspective of control—outbursts of emotion of any type can be particularly frightening to fathers because not only do they occur on the terrain of nurturing—traditional female territory—but also because we fathers find ourselves embodying the worst stereotypes laid on women in the man versus woman dualism: emotion, loss of control, ambivalence, self-doubt, viscerality. If fathers almost immediately become womanly in the face of infantile resistance, quickly surrender to all of the attributes used to define not-man, and succumb to the imperatives of their corporeality in feeling for their children, and thus let the body overrule the mind, then how on earth can male-dominated and codified culture rule over nature? The instability, being-in-the-moment, the non-separation of identities fostered by parenting expose the big lie of the illusion of control upon which men have built arguments for domination over nature, over women, and over their own bodily senses. No wonder we find such issues so hard to discuss, because the moment of parenting threatens us with so many realizations that few of us wish to face. But what a difference to our lives would it make for us to turn toward these contradictions of our cultivated sensibilities, to turn toward the son and the daughter, rather than toward the continuing darkness of disconnection. Robert J. Ackerman noted in his preface to Silent Sons: A Book for and about Men: “when I did seminars and lectures, consistently 90 percent of my audiences were women. Women made up 80 to 90 percent of those in dysfunctional family support groups. Where were the men, I wondered? What do sons from dysfunctional families do with their pain, their feelings, their potential? Did someone put up a ‘Men Keep Out’ sign, or did we put it up ourselves?” (1993, 11–12). Not only must we join Ackerman in asking, “Where were the men,” but continue to update the question: “Where are the men?” A 5-year study of 12,000 teenagers and sexual activity produced considerable information about teens and their mothers, but not about their fathers. Dr. Robert Blum, the study’s author, is quoted as saying that “Fathers are harder

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to come by.” In response, columnist Susan Reimer surmised, “if the fathers didn’t have time to fill out the surveys and they weren’t there when the interviewer arrived for the follow-up interview, then the whole ‘closeness’ thing isn’t happening, either” (2002, E4). Such closeness would require connection, emotional bonding, and vulnerability. I want to consider here, then, not only how we can meet these requirements to become nurturing fathers in a culture that still fundamentally expects men to create things and people (and destroy them as well), while women care for and sustain these things and people. I also want to argue that for men such nurturing cannot take adequate hold if limited only to a consideration of how to alter and reconfigure our relationships to other people, but must extend to an ecological sense of world interconnectedness and what that indicates for an altered relationship with the rest of nature. I see a way of promoting this necessary male orientation toward human nurturing grounded in a larger view of ecological nurturing. In order to do that, we need to embrace the other sides of the dualisms of culture versus nature and the masculine versus the feminine, and in particular accept our own emotions as part of our minds, our minds as part of our bodies, our bodies and those of our children as part of a natural world. Fundamentally, to undertake such an embrace means to accept interaction rather than strive to control. In order to accept how we are totally part of a series of multilayered processes and not some end product of either evolution or of culture, we will need to define ourselves as living in a world beyond our control. In other words, all men need to become fathers in the sense of assuming ongoing responsibility for the rest of the world, not through patriarchy and the logic of domination, but through heterarchy—mutually constitutive, nonhierarchical relationships. Through extending that reconstruction of men toward nurturant behavior ecologically, we can also embrace the belief and practice that nurturance constitutes a fundamental form of being in the world on this “symbiotic planet” (see Margulis 1998). Accepting the responsibility of nurturing others begins with the recognition, as Lynn Margulis points out, that “All beings alive today are equally evolved. . . . Human similarities to other life forms are far more striking than the differences” and “Physical contact is a nonnegotiable requisite for many differing kinds of life” (1998, 5). And yet, this physical contact seems increasingly estranged rather than intimate as we continue to deny and fruitlessly fight to destroy or control even the microorganisms that both keep us alive and threaten our lives in the daily order of the world. My father was an alcoholic who started drinking as a teenager and never stopped drinking completely until he died. He never joined AA, but if he had, he would have been confronted with the need to address this issue of control.

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If people know nothing else of AA, most know that it is based on a twelvestep program. Today, millions of people in the United States, as well as many other countries, participate in a variety of twelve-step programs, all of which are based on those steps worked out originally for Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s. The first step of all of these programs addresses a basic orientation that men need to adopt in the search for consciously nurturant behavior. It provides a vehicle for the personal ideological reconstruction of men as lifelong, rather than one-shot, fathers, whether they pass their DNA on directly to anyone else or not. In the foreword to Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the anonymous author observes that “Many people, nonalcoholics, report that as a result of the practice of A.A.’s Twelve Steps, they have been able to meet other difficulties of life. They think that the Twelve Steps can mean more than sobriety for problem drinkers. They see in them a way to happy and effective living for many, alcoholic or not” (Anon. 1996, 15–16). And it is in the spirit of these words that I introduce the first of those twelve steps here. Step One reads, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable” (Anon. 1996, 21). Certainly, anyone who believes that human beings are currently living in a period of ecological crisis, locally and globally, would agree that the second phrase of the first-step slogan describes the condition of existence for millions, if not billions of people. But often, those on any one of several sides of major debates about environmental threats or particular crises will see the solution as lying in exercising greater human control over other humans and, all too often, over particular aspects of the nonhuman participants of the natural world. In my experience such has also been the case with many people who have various addictions, predilections, or obsessive desires or compulsions. If we just exercise greater control, if we just further tighten down the screws, if we just tie up all the loose ends, shore up the ramparts, more vigilantly police our children, spy more extensively on our employees, and so on, we can eliminate the variables that threaten a human-ordered world or an individually ordered micro-world. For many men that effort to exercise control can only be practiced in the micro-world of the family home, with violence often the result, but for others it can be practiced in an entire nation or even the entire world, again with violence often the result. Such efforts at control prove devastating, whether creating the dysfunctional individuals that are Robert Ackerman’s primary focus or world leaders ready to incinerate millions in an effort to consolidate political power. As Gary Snyder so succinctly states, “It is not nature-as-chaos which threatens us, but the State’s presumption that it has created order” (1990a, 92). It is the presumption by men that they can wield any state apparatus to generate some kind of static, human conceived order over the natural diversity and processes

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of life that threatens all. Hence, we must admit that we are powerless over the power of domination and that it has made our lives unmanageable.

LEARNING FROM THE LITERATURE In The Blood of Paradise by Stephen Goodwin, originally published in 1979 and recently reprinted, Steadman, the protagonist, decides to turn his back on inheriting the management of a development company, a position of significant power with a legacy of patriarchal control, and returns to the land, buying a small, neglected farm in rural Virginia. He takes along—and the verb here is carefully chosen—his wife, Anna, and their daughter. As with so many gentrified homesteading and return to the rural life texts, Steadman not only sees his main career as creative writing but also has a sinecure through inheritance to cushion the financial uncertainty of his move. What arise time and again in this novel and provide the strength of the plot are uncertainty, instability, and unexpected events and actions. These contingencies challenge Steadman’s illusions of control and his benevolent domination of his family. Steadman can to a large extent continue to move in the direction he would like to go in terms of rural living, but he cannot control the unfolding of the path toward this lifestyle. Anna finds that her acquiescence in traveling this path cannot be maintained and is brought to crisis when she finds herself pregnant for a second time and not prepared to bear another child. She also realizes that she has let Steadman dominate her sense of reality and her sense of self, just as her twin sister had in childhood. Rightfully so, the novel ends on a positive note of possibility, but wisely does not end on a note of clear-cut resolution or guaranteed stasis. In terms of the farming that they will do and the relationship they will attempt to continue building, they both accept tentativeness into their lives. Probably evidence of the greatest likelihood of a positive resolution for the relationship can be found in the couple’s relationships with their daughter. Here Goodwin portrays a man able to spend time, demonstrate patience, and provide nurturing opportunities for his daughter, on the one hand, and a woman who involves her daughter in gardening and other outdoor activities around the farm, on the other hand. While, then, child raising receives a very positive representation in Goodwin’s novel, certain ironies about control over birth and death also appear. Goodwin presents birth control, irresponsible sexual activity, and abortion as part of these individuals’ common experience, but points out that the birth control often fails to control. Steadman imagines that he has both freedom and certainty in his sexual relations with his wife and another woman passing

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through, but he is wrong. His wife becomes unexpectedly pregnant and the result is a secret abortion. The infidelity and the abortion nearly destroy their marriage, even though both Steadman and Anna believed that they could control the outcome and impacts of these events. In particular, both of them somehow imagine that they can keep secret from the other such emotionally devastating events, with both repressing their emotions during their precipitate actions, but finding themselves overcome by emotion afterward. An additional unintended irony surfaces as a result of Goodwin’s particular portrayal of birth control. In The Blood of Paradise the women use the kinds of IUDs that caused irreparable harm, and in some cases death, to thousands of women in the United States. As with the side effects of the currently popular control device Depo Provera, the unintended consequences prove to be both injurious and destructive. It seems virtually a cosmic irony that men continue to expect women to assume primary responsibility not only for raising the next generation but also for controlling the population of that generation. And how often when their plans or illusions fail to maintain their control do they blame the victim or blame the technology, without assuming any responsibility? Another novel set in approximately the same area of Virginia, Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver, written twenty years after Goodwin’s, takes a somewhat different approach to pregnancy. Interestingly enough, Prodigal Summer also contains an accidental pregnancy that results from a failure of birth control. But Kingsolver’s character Deanna accepts the accident as part of the prodigality of nature and decides to see the pregnancy through to term, even though her lover has gone his own way unaware. Likewise, another female character accepts the responsibility of raising her dying sister-in-law’s two children, while an old man finally learns through love to accept his estranged grandchildren. Not just this grandfather, but other male characters learn valuable lessons about symbiosis that help them in their relationships with human nature, domesticated nature, and wild nature, from lovers to sheep to coyotes. In essence, they accept the connections Kingsolver identifies at novel’s end that solitude is something that only humans imagine because every step we take echoes throughout the lives of the rest of the world and alters, even if seemingly imperceptibly, the rest of the world. Certainly Goodwin would concur with Kingsolver, for such are the realizations of Steadman in The Blood of Paradise, but the noticeable discrepancies between the novels deserve attention. There are good, strong women in Goodwin’s novel, but they do not seem capable of articulating anything beyond an instinctive maternal caring in terms of Steadman’s rural retreat selfeducation. In contrast, in Prodigal Summer both male and female characters

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learn from each other, articulate ideas to each other, and engage in verbal and sensuous dialogues with each other and the interanimating world in which they grow, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. In accepting a world beyond their control, these characters act and interact in constructive, nurturant ways with the kind of responsibility that refuses the fanciful escape routes either of fatalism or autonomy, passivity or isolation, the escape routes that Steadman and Anna pursue but eventually must reject.

LOOKING IN THE MIRROR When I look at my history as a father devoted to promoting an ecological sensibility through my writing and teaching and at least some aspects of my lived experience, I have to admit my similarities to the real and fictional fathers I have been criticizing in this essay. Although I think I showed considerable attention to my wife in the later stages of her pregnancy and supported her during labor, I almost immediately began pulling away emotionally, quickly feeling jealousy toward our daughter, inadequacy in the face of her needs, and doubts about my identity. Like some of the fathers in Stuart Aitken’s study of San Diego families, Family Fantasies and Community Space, after our daughter was born I immediately buried myself even further in house remodeling and the next summer signed up for more summer teaching. For several years I would pit remodeling and doing things for my daughter against doing things with my daughter. Likewise, I would use the need for devoting time to financial and career success to provide economic security for our family as an excuse for emotional distance from, and a lack of time for, family activities. Gradually I became better, or at least less bad, at these activities. Bonnie, the woman to whom I am married, has commented on the basis of talking with other mothers that they tend to be the ones to shield and shelter the children, whether a boy or a girl, while the fathers tend to be the ones to expose them to risk and adventure. She often uses the image of fathers throwing their small children up in the air and catching them or swinging them in circles off the ground. Bonnie sees this difference as necessary for children’s early development and one of the differences that suggests the benefits, if not the need, for children to have more than one parent—if not in a nuclear model then in an extended one with people who represent some of the gender differences that typically appear in society. Along these lines, I decided when to take down the baby gate to the second story stairway in our house, even in the face of Bonnie’s concern. And it was our daughter who decided whether or not she was ready to have a sky fort with an eight-foot slide. I had built the contraption and had set it up with a chicken coop–style ladder, a railed plat-

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form, and a steep slope to the slide. While Bonnie and I were discussing whether or not Mariko was ready for such an adventure, our daughter took it upon herself to climb up the slide and then slide down. Was that adventurousness innate or at least partly a result of our raising her with early experiences of traveling, hanging around while I worked with power tools and put up stud and sheetrock walls, or what? Looking back not on my actions, but on my emotional reactions to our daughter, I find a lopsided reflection. Pride, anger, and jealousy more quickly come to mind than empathy, fear, and affection. But I began admitting that asymmetry a long time ago. So, which has been more important, that I expose her to adventures that her mother might choose to bypass, or that I have made a point of telling her that I love her every day? That after I have been angry, I apologize, and explain that I still love her and that sometimes anger arises from love? Why do I even need to think of these actions as dichotomies? Let me mention the areas where I have had the most difficulty with my daughter. One, when she challenged me about my helping her with homework, I proved more likely to become uncontrollably angry over that once she reached middle school than anything else she did. Why? I am an English professor, I have a Ph.D., and I know the answers. How dare she challenge my public identity and my authority, my control over the educational environment? Need I say more? Two, in fifth and sixth grade she became more feminine, less interested in football and basketball and being outdoors and more interested in makeup, fashion, and shopping. This behavior doesn’t anger me, but I tend to let it alienate me. The less she is interested in the kinds of activities a father would typically do with a son, the less she acts in gender neutral ways, and the more she engages in activities that emphasize her being a girl becoming a woman, the more distant I feel from her in that process of separation of the male parent from the female child. She is not mine; she is her own person; she is, as she always has been, beyond my control in terms of her personality, her gender, her desires and goals. One consequence of my actions for which I would like to take partial credit had been our daughter’s strong and fairly long-lasting desire to become a veterinarian. We would like to imagine that our decision to live on the edge of town with 2.5 acres of land, our appreciation for ecological diversity, our conversations about environmental problems in front of and with her, and our general eco-attitude influenced her in this direction (although we don’t live there anymore, we live on a smaller but similar kind of property in Orlando). My own role, however, I usually believe has been quite small. I think instead that it was Bonnie’s stubborn, painstaking, and prolonged care of the two cats we had who died of feline leukemia that probably propelled our daughter in that direction. Saying that, of course, makes me feel inadequate, especially

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since I felt jealousy toward those cats because of the attention Bonnie lavished on them. So, I asked Mariko a set of questions a few years ago about why she wanted to be a vet, what events might have influenced her, and if anything her parents had done played a role. Perhaps typical of a “tweener” at the time of the survey, no longer a child but not yet a teenager, she basically gave us no credit at all! Yet she clearly credited literature and games. I have decided to include her responses to the following three questions as an appendix to this chapter: “What events or actions in your life caused you to want to be a vet?” “What actions, ideas, or comments by your parents caused you to want to be a vet?” “Have any books or movies helped make you want to be a vet?” I had hoped for much praise from her for the various things that I think we have done, but then I realized that the way we have lived has to a large degree seemed fairly normal to her, except for our attention to organic food, which she knows is unusual among her peers. While she has not commented in her responses to our efforts to engage her with local wild nature, she does reveal a sense of an intimate contact with the nonhuman. Also, perhaps very typical of her generation, she credits books and movies with a strong influence on her thinking. And from my own view now, as indicated in chapter 4 of this volume, I see the necessity of not positing a dichotomy between direct experience and mediated experience, between practice and simulation, but rather of positing the need for more mediation and simulation to point her toward the intimacy that so many of us have lost or have had such a difficult time finding. As it turns out, Mariko as she approached her fifteenth birthday turned increasingly away from the dream of becoming a veterinarian toward the idea of studying psychology to become a teen counselor. It seems at this point in time that, as we might expect, her social circle and her peers’ experiences are shaping her more now than her parents’ influence. Whereas a year or two ago she would have poured her empathy and assistance into pet rescue volunteer work, she now seems to spend countless hours on the phone, in My Space, and on IM, providing empathy and assistance to her peers. It could be the case that she has just shifted her focus from one kind of animal to another, rather than changed direction. And, of course, animal psychology has been booming as a career field of late as well.

LOOKING AT ANOTHER LOOKING IN THE MIRROR In this light or reflecting on my relationship with our daughter, I come to look at Scott Russell Sanders’s writing about his daughter. Scott is one of the few

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nature writers I know who has actually treated this relationship. Even though many others also have daughters, they are far more likely to write about their sons. Such is the case also with Scott, but he has at least made the effort to include his daughter in his nature writing. In Writing from the Center, she has already reached college age, an adult child. While she is introduced in “The Common Life,” she provides only a springboard to a meditation on community. In “Voyageurs,” however, she remains a focus of the essay, which treats father and daughter participation in a group canoe trip. Scott treats her fundamentally the same as he depicts his treatment of his son on similar excursions, as in Hunting for Hope. But he does note that within the group there is a tendency for people to try to “coddle her” (S. R. Sanders 1998, 126), due more to her gender than her age. He reveals a sense of obligation to provide her with these opportunities to engage wild nature, to take risks, and to learn her own identity in relationship to the rest of the world. He provides a healthy lesson to learn about the maintaining of a certain familial intimacy while encouraging his daughter’s own relational individuation. Also, he clearly sees a causal relationship between her interest in the biological sciences and the study of birds with his own commitment to promoting such experiences as this canoe trip. In The Force of Spirit, Scott publishes a letter, “To Eva, on Your Marriage.” In it he emphasizes her developing relationship with nature as a member of their family, but frets about her coming of age in a world still riddled with sexism. And there arises a feeling of concern at letter’s end about his, in a sense, turning her over to another man, in a world of men: “And while I was making the world safer for you, I would work a few changes on men as well. The prospect of your wedding has made me worry afresh about my half of the species, with our penchant for selfishness and surliness, our insecurities, our aimless hungers, and our yen for power” (S. R. Sanders 2000, 133). A beautiful piece, it is followed by a similar letter to his son and I find it significant the different sense of burden that Scott expresses here in terms of his role as a father. This role is permeated by his own position of having been a son, a burden not carried in his relationship with his daughter, such that the fatherdaughter relationship actually allows greater freedom for his own personal growth with, perhaps, fewer expectations about particular outcomes than he feels in his relationship with his son. This difference comes out clearly in the differing ways he depicts his relationships with his two children in Hunting for Hope, where he focuses on the tensions between him and his son. While Sanders points out the cultural forces stacked against his daughter as a major concern, and rightly so, he displays an optimism about his daughter’s future and the possibility of her and her husband’s being able to “fashion [their] own history” (1998, 133). It is necessary to remind ourselves that no

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matter how cultured and acculturated they may become, our daughters remain, like all of us, a partial product of wild nature, genetically, intellectually, emotionally, and physiologically. Influence may be possible; control never. And as Mariko matures into adulthood, I have to struggle to relinquish the illusions, the ego gratification, the fear-driven desires, of exercising power over in order to help her through sharing power with her in order for her to realize her own interdependent existence. But I am afraid that I don’t find much in literature to help me with this task. Even in nature writing or natureoriented literature, I find mostly failed examples of distant, dysfunctional, and emotionally vacant fathers. Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, for instance, depicts just such a person.

FINDING NEGATIVES WHILE SEARCHING FOR POSITIVES Haruf opens Plainsong with the main character, Tom Guthrie, clearly in crisis at work and at home: trouble as a high school teacher with disaffected and bullying students; trouble at home with a wife suffering from severe depression unable to care for her children. Tom tries to maintain some connection with the natural world through helping old friends with their cattle and involves his two young sons in the work. Yet, in that scene the sons seem to bond better with the friends than with their father, who remains throughout the novel emotionally distant from them. Haruf depicts no scenes where Tom discusses their mother’s illness with them, where he shows them any significant emotional engagement, where he spends time with them away from town or ranch, even though the boys themselves are clearly interested in such adventures. Although Tom develops into a sympathetic character, at least for male readers, he remains emotionally dysfunctional and distant. He looks to me like a prime candidate for Ackerman’s workshops and a depressingly faithful rendition of far too many American fathers. Although not a fanatic for control or domination, we see him reacting with tremendous difficulty and poor judgment to the obvious loss of control he experiences in his home and in his classroom. Although his personal situation improves by novel’s end, Haruf chooses not to show Tom as developing any intimacy with his sons through the course of the novel and thus not developing into a nurturing father, perhaps because Haruf remains too committed to a typically realistic portrayal of the situation to do so. One suspects similar distance in the relationship between the protagonist of Brian Kiteley’s Still Life with Insects and his sons. And these novels focus only on a man dealing with his sons, not with daughters.

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When I look for literary representations, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, of father and daughter relationships, I find numerous examples of daughters writing about such relationships, but little from fathers. For example, one can look at the dismal relationship portrayed in Gretchen Legler’s All the Powerful Invisible Things, or the distant relationships depicted in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams and Teresa Jordan’s Riding the White Horse Home. Jane Brox provides a portrait of a loving father of a farming family in Here and Nowhere Else, but one who cannot break out of a patriarchal mind-set to invest his daughter with the authority she craves, and which she eventually assumes in the sequel, Five Thousand Days Like This One. A rare exception to the absence of fathers’ depictions of father-daughter relationships in nature-oriented literature would be Chris Bohjalian’s Water Witches. In this novel, the protagonist father initially embodies the male stereotype of dichotomous thinking. A lawyer, who is also an outsider to the community, he emphasizes dispassionate logic, admissible scientific evidence, litigation, and rules, while his wife, a member of the Vermont community in which the novel is set, represents empathy and intuition through her family’s history as dowsers. Initially the father sides with the ski resort industry and its expansion plans, which while boosting the economy also threaten the ecology of the area. The novel reaches its crisis when the daughter claims to have seen an endangered species on the mountain slated for expansion and the father finds himself having to believe in the truth of his daughter in contradistinction to the facts he has at hand. Refusing to place career, logic, and science first, the father accepts into his heart the primacy of nurturing. To reinforce the significance of the daughter’s role in the father’s transformation, Bohjalian ends the novel with a coda spoken in the firstperson voice of that daughter, which emphasizes not the father’s education, control, or logic, but his “heart” (1995, 340).

WISHING I wish that more fathers would take the risks that Sanders and Bohjalian have taken in writing about father-daughter relationships in both nonfiction and fiction. Especially, I think, we need the nonfiction works that can match the willingness of daughters to write about their fathers. Critics also will have to begin to give this subject more attention. In the meantime, fathers would do well to read the works by daughters, to learn from the many negative and the few positive models they depict. If nothing else, both the negative and the positive fathers portrayed in the literature by both male and female writers can help me learn to relinquish the illusion of control—the same illusion that

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Bohjalian’s depicted father relinquishes—but I have to join that relinquishment with an engagement and enlargement of my own emotions in a nurturance based on interanimation, dialogue, and an acceptance of continuous ignorance, while all the while having to make decisions and take actions that have consequences beyond any horizon I can envision.1

APPENDIX: MARIKO’S RESPONSES (SIXTH GRADE, 2002) 1. What events or actions in your life caused you to want to be a vet? When I was younger I wanted to be someone who helps people or things. Since I didn’t know what a veterinarian was I wanted to be a doctor or a nurse. Then when I was six I saw a veterinarian. Then I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a veterinarian or a doctor. I knew though that I was born to love animals and I never met one that didn’t like me. Since I loved animals so much I wanted to be a veterinarian. As I got older I loved animals even more. When I was born I already had a cat. When I was one I got another cat. I have always had animals that I loved. 2. What actions, ideas, or comments by your parents caused you to want to be a vet? My parents never really do anything to make me want to be a veterinarian. They did do things though that helped me want to be a veterinarian after I already knew I wanted to. They bought me a book called Emergency Vet, which is written about real life veterinarians. Also they bought me veterinarian play equipment, which I use on stuffed animals. My parents also bought me a CDROM for the computer called Emergency Vet, which is a game where you try to save animals that is created by real life veterinarians. They also helped me keep my dream strong. 3. Have any books or movies helped make you want to be a vet? Yes, I have books and have seen movies helping me want to be a vet. I have a book called Emergency Vet that really inspired me. The way they (veterinarians) dedicate their lives and time to saving animals. I have seen millions of movies about vets. Two of my favorite movies are Dr. Doolittle and Dr. Doolittle 2. I thought they were so funny. I have seen another movie. I can’t remember the title but it was about a vet who loved animals and dedicated her

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life and time to saving and helping animals. There are so many books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen I can’t name them all.

NOTE 1. I found it an unfortunate situation that not long after I completed the original version of this chapter, I put out a call for a collection of critical and creative essays on this subject and received too few abstracts to put together a book proposal. Further, I heard from more women than men who were willing to address the subject. If not yet, then when will the time arrive for men to engage in such a discussion?

Chapter Ten

Scenarios of Disaster Crying Wolf, Scaring Away the Elephants, and Heading ’Em off at the Pass

WHO’S KIDDING WHOM Let me start with one variation of a well-known little story. A young woman walking in Central Park in New York City came upon an older man tearing up newspapers and scattering the pieces around the bench on which he was sitting. Concerned about this obvious act of littering, she accosted him and demanded to know what he was doing. He answered politely, “I’m scaring away the elephants.” “But there are no elephants here in Central Park,” she responded. “That’s right,” he said. “See how well it works.” Some people believe that environmental writers and activists these days and in decades past are just as crazy as this old man: taking and calling for unnecessary actions that may do more harm than good. President Bush, for instance, who does not believe in evolution, thought that taking action against global warming will unnecessarily harm the U.S. economy and rejected the widespread consensus of scientists. Someone who probably was deemed more trustworthy than President Bush, the late popular novelist Michael Crichton, who has produced his own cautionary tales of environmental disaster in such books as Jurassic Park and Prey, also warned Americans against scaring ourselves to death, claiming that many predicted disasters have not come to pass (Crichton 2004a). The people who warned us about them were all wrong, he said, creating unnecessary anxiety, and calling for dangerous, counterproductive measures. Crichton claimed that the dire predictions he singles out, such as those about population, pollution, resource scarcity, and even causes of cancer, by scientists and others were false alarms, a matter of “Crying Wolf.” But were they? Here I want to look at a variety of scenarios of disaster in nonfiction, 163

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fiction, and film to consider whether or not those works were (1) meant to be predictive or cautionary; and (2) did their dire assessments constitute shrill over reactions or rather warning beacons that contributed to the aversion of crises looming on the horizon? Then, I want to consider various recent novels, movies, and nonfiction works on global warming in the same vein to assess their function.

POPULATION A PROBLEM: TRUE OR FALSE On the population front, we can think of novels such as John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, nonfiction books such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and various movie and television shows, such as Soylent Green, and the original Star Trek episode, “The Mark of Gideon.” Writing in the 1960s Paul Ehrlich was convinced that global population was increasing so rapidly that famine was inevitable by the 1970s. Since that time the United Nations, the Club of Rome, and other organizations have made various predictions about global population both in terms of rates of growth and absolute numbers. According to Crichton, no disasters associated with population growth have come to pass because of declining fertility rates and expanded food production. Since we are actually not likely to hit the worst-case scenario figure of 14 billion people by 2030, but rather only about 9 billion by 2050, and have only “6 billion today,” according to Crichton, then everything is just fine (2004a, 6). Actually, the current estimate is a little over 6.3 billion, but apparently Crichton doesn’t think an extra 300 million people make any difference. But if we are talking about 300 million people living like Americans, then they make a huge difference when we look at rates of consumption. In contrast to Crichton, James Gustave Speth observes that “The fourfold expansion in human numbers in the twentieth century, from one and a half billion to six billion, has been a huge driver of environmental decline” (2004, 120). He further notes that the recently revised lower population projections of under 9 billion people by 2050, which is still a nearly 50 percent increase over the present number of people, are based on estimates of potential declines in fertility rates that depend in part on “international population programs, which could either get stronger or weaker depending on political decisions” (Speth 2004, 153). In fact, if current fertility rates do not decline, then the global population will actually double by 2050 (Speth 2004, 153). Let’s stop for a moment and ask: were those predictions in the 1960s and 1970s just a matter of crying wolf or attempting to scare away nonexistent elephants, or were they a matter of heading ’em off at the pass? Invariably, cautionary tales tend toward the extreme. In “The Mark of Gideon,” Captain

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Kirk is lured to a planet so overpopulated as a result of scientific advances and hygiene breakthroughs that they must kidnap him in order to have him infect one of their people to spread disease across the planet to reduce the population to supportable numbers. In Soylent Green, population growth coupled with increasing levels of pollution is causing the death of vegetation and, as finally recognized, the death of the oceans, the last major source of food. In response, the government tries to cover up not only the information about pollution and dwindling food supplies, but also to disguise the fact that they have begun providing a new type of food called “soylent green.” With a name that makes it sound vegetable rather than animal based, it is only at the film’s end that people learn that the new food is made by processing human bodies. The message is clear: overpopulation will lead to cannibalism as the only means of short-term survival. While Ehrlich did not predict the end of the species in his nonfiction study, he did predict widespread famine. None of these terrible predictions/warnings have come to pass, and in part they have not become reality precisely because cautionary tales helped raise global consciousness about the dangers of runaway population growth. These books and films contributed to an international dialogue about population that contributed to widespread, vigorous family planning campaigns worldwide, most noticeably and most extreme in mainland China—with the one family, one child program—and in India with all sorts of public actions, both normative and coercive, including free vasectomies. In the United States, Zero Population Growth became a prominent nationally recognized organization that sponsored debates, forums, and educational programs, and remains active today as the Population Connection. Claims that population growth spontaneously and naturally abated as a result of industrialization, education, and prosperity ignore the significant role that consciousness raising played internationally in persuading many individuals to forgo having children or to rethink their ideas about the “ideal” number of children in a family. Stephanie Mills, author among other works of In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land, for example, made headlines in 1969 when she announced at Mills College in her commencement speech that she would give up the personal opportunity to have children because of the environmental impact of human overpopulation. A strong argument against the spontaneity explanation for population growth rate declines can be based on the observation that such trends are today being reversed by the conscious political and social efforts of large national and international institutions, such as the Roman Catholic Church, Islamic Fundamentalism, and the Bush administration, which has seriously undercut U.N. family planning work by withholding funding due to its opposition to abortion. Yet, between now and 2050, the U.N. expects eight countries to contribute to half the

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world’s increase in population: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, the United States, Ethiopia, and China (Associated Press 2005). Significantly, with several of these countries the absolute numbers are not nearly as important as the rates of consumption relative to population. Each new American will consume many times more global resources than individuals in such countries as Ethiopia and Uganda. Likewise, India, Pakistan, and China have rapidly escalating standards of living, particularly in the area of energy consumption, that mean a far greater impact for their population increases today than increases of twenty years ago. Particularly problematic beyond the increased competition for energy resources is the need for vast additional quantities of clean, fresh water. And while significant, although far too meager, efforts are being made in the field of alternative energy and new energy-efficient technologies, precious little is being done to increase the availability of clean water to people in rich and poor countries alike. Further, this recognition about the problem of potable water in relation to existing populations and a far more intense crisis for additional populations reminds us that the majority of world population increase in the next forty years will occur in “less developed countries.” We should recognize and admit that world population has risen more slowly than feared in recent decades in part because mortality rates have remained so high due to water pollution and waterborne diseases. For the past decade and continuing today the USAID has noted that at least 31 countries with 8 percent of the world’s population face “chronic water shortages”; by 2025 the number is expected to rise to 48 countries and 35 percent of the world’s population, or 2.8 billion people (“When the Well Runs Dry”). In addition, part of the allaying of the surge of global population has also resulted from death and destruction due to warfare and the creation of the greatest number of refugees the world has ever known. And let us add to this counterbalancing factor, the wide array of plagues chipping away at population growth, most prominently AIDS and Ebola, but also numerous others. AIDS alone, for instance, has reduced life expectancy in southern Africa from sixty-two years in 1995 to forty-eight years today, and it is expected to decrease further (Associated Press 2005). The population crisis, then, remains a real crisis. The dire warnings of the 1960s and 1970s were not predictions so much as scenarios that formed a web of cautionary tales that contributed to efforts to avert the most stunning and overwhelming rapid manifestations of the problem. Because the world is in few ways a better place than it was thirty years ago, and in many areas of the world a far worse place to live and die, world populations have not had the necessary conditions to reproduce or survive as rapidly and successfully as they might have done under more salutary conditions. But because the growth is slower than feared and the world limps along letting millions of infants and

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children die each year of preventable diseases worldwide, some would have us imagine that the Ehrlichs of the world are just crying wolf. But those who are suffering know better. A 2002 study, for instance, by Manuel Gallego III, notes that for the Philippines to have the possibility of an annual individual Gross Domestic Product by 2050 that matches the world’s current individual GDP that country would need to implement immediately a Zero Population Growth family planning model. The absolute number of people in the world might not be too high in relation to resources, but that would only be the case if those resources were equitably distributed. But even as millions of American children face an escalation of chronic illnesses connected with rising rates of obesity, 170,000 Ethiopian children faced imminent starvation in the summer of 2005 without an immediate increase in U.N. food aid (“170,000 Ethiopian Children”), and nothing indicated that the situation would improve. Apparently, there is famine in various parts of the world, even though food production has increased. Evidence indicates, however, that it has not increased as quickly as consumption (see Heinberg 2004). Besides, production and consumption don’t line up. Also, part of the expansion of food production in many areas has resulted from a decrease in agricultural production for nonfood goods, such as flaxseed for linoleum, soybeans for ink and glues, cotton and wool for clothing, and so on. Synthetic products have increasingly taken the place of organic products. If David Goodstein and other scientists are right about Hubbert’s Peak in relation to oil stocks and consumption rates, such synthetic substitutions will not be able to continue, since so many of them rely on oil for their building blocks. As the gap between rising demand and falling supplies of oil intensifies over the next four or five decades, less and less oil will be available for nonfuel purposes, and a segment of the global agricultural sector will have to be returned to growing crops for nonfood commodities and for producing various types of ethanol. Pressure will be placed on developing nations to intensify the growing of crops for export rather than for local subsistence. It is highly likely, then, that outbreaks of famine will continue to occur, and may even intensify, but nature will have little to do with it. Rather, as they are today, famines in the rest of the century will result from the unnatural disasters of a badly skewed global marketplace.

NUCLEAR CRISES: ONCE UPON A TIME OR CONTINUING TODAY To date there has been no war involving more than one side using nuclear weapons. The use of such weapons by the United States in 1945 almost immediately initiated a campaign against their future use. That campaign expanded

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internationally even as other states acquired the technology and began building nuclear arsenals. Sixty years after the first and only uses of nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation continues, and the danger of someone acquiring a nuclear weapon on the black market and using it, or making a dirty conventional bomb to spread radioactive materials, is taken very seriously. Does sixty years without a third nuclear strike mean that all of the novelists and essayists writing alongside of all of those activists were just crying wolf and trying to scare away elephants? Hardly anyone would say so, especially given that the United States developed an entire series of bombs referred to as “tactical nuclear weapons,” deployed them in Europe and considered deploying neutron bombs alongside of them. Thus we need to think about the role of novels such as Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, written against the strategy of MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction; Günter Grass’s The Rat, specifically written against deployment of the neutron bomb; Australian Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, made into a powerful movie with a host of American actors aimed specifically at an American audience; and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, published in 1959 about American survivors of a U.S.-U.S.S.R nuclear war. On the Beach and Alas, Babylon are worth comparing. Already in 1957, Shute projected that there would be no human survivors of a strategic nuclear war due to radioactivity gradually making its way around the globe, eradicating the entire human population. Two years later, along with numerous other writers to follow, Frank projected an America in which some people do survive and work to build a new, different, and better society than the one that preceded a clearly pointless war. Frank at least projected that it wouldn’t matter who won, since MAD would in fact occur and both states would be decimated beyond the ability to function. Reviewers at the time did not write about the terrible costs of winning a nuclear war but rather followed the line of the Chicago Tribune in referring to the novel as depicting “nuclear catastrophe.” And yet, while pro-nuke and anti-nuke sides debated the winnability of a nuclear war, scientists gradually improved their computer simulations and modeling projects to develop the theory of nuclear winter, which indicates quite clearly that radiation doesn’t have to kill everyone, as Shute had speculated, but rather that the attendant disruption of ecological systems would decimate all life, and lead to an extinction scenario for nearly all mega fauna. The nuclear-induced environmental catastrophe would eradicate species even if the weaponry did not. These distinctions in scenarios that comprised the efforts of writers to help head off nuclear war at the pass, and which have contributed and continue to contribute to a general resistance on the part of the majority of Americans to first strike use of nuclear weapons—despite the refusal of their government to make such a renunciation—are important beyond just the threat of war. Some Americans, for instance, inside and outside of the government pro-

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moted the use of tactical nuclear weapons during the first Gulf War, and there was a strong undercurrent of racist desire for retribution that led various groups to promote the use of nuclear weapons in the second Gulf War, specifically the use of tactical neutron bombs in order to be able to kill people and still be able to access oil. At any rate, it can be said that in the United States, particularly after the near disaster of Three Mile Island and then the actual disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear energy facility, many Americans are wary of expansion of even the peaceful nuclear energy industry, despite the successes of such programs as those of the French and the Japanese. Writers and filmmakers have continued to remind us of the possibly disastrous effects of the so-called peaceful atom, both in terms of its threat to human safety and its long-term threats to the rest of the biotic community. While the 1950s films about irradiated giant insects served to warn people that experiments cannot always be confined to the laboratory, but have a way of leaking out, no one really expected something as dramatic as a horde of ninety-feet-long locusts to eat Chicago. People understood the very real and appropriate warning about the irresponsibility of unbridled experimentation and its unintended consequences on the natural world. This message has continued to be reinforced at a variety of levels, not only about nuclear power, but also about biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetic research, cloning, and so on, with Michael Crichton being one of the novelists penning such warnings. And while it may be the case that occasionally the specific danger is a matter of crying wolf—the very reason why zombie films such as Resident Evil are classified as horror rather than science fiction—most adult viewers know very well that cautionary tales serve a vital purpose in curbing the most reckless of human behaviors, behaviors that are most often attributed to the government and its agencies rather than independent scientists and homegrown villains. Nevertheless, increasingly, even movies such as Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse warn their viewers that the dangers facing humanity from continuous biotechnological, chemical, and nuclear manipulations cannot be vanquished by a few heroes within the space of two hours; catharsis is increasingly only partial and clearly limited in scope.

GLOBAL WARMING: FACT OR FEAR Perhaps what was most startling to me about Michael Crichton’s lashing out against the alleged cult of fear in the United States was his effort to dismiss global warming as an invention of fearmongers, who, according to the libertarian Cato Institute, are just seeking new ways to get grant money (see Michaels 2004). With nuclear war, either you prevent it or you don’t, and as

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long as nuclear weapons exist nuclear war must be prevented. Right now, relatively few people fear a strategic nuclear war, but there is rising fear that a nuclear device will be detonated by terrorists within the decade and the level and the kind of U.S. military response remains entirely unknown. With global warming, we have a significantly different situation. The only way to prove that scientists are right about global warming is to refuse to head it off at the pass and let it enter town and wreak havoc. If, instead, through consciousness raising and the pressure of a variety of nongovernmental organizations worldwide, we succeed in getting the majority of states to take preventive measures, then we will never know for sure whether or not the most dire predictions regarding global warming would have come true. But who really wants to wait to see if the film The Day After Tomorrow is prophetic science or fearmongering horror? European states were taking all kinds of steps that could have been taken by the United States, even while the Bush administration continued to drag its feet (Speth 2004, 157–58). That is precisely what Kim Stanley Robinson seems to be predicting in the first installment of his trilogy on global warming, Forty Signs of Rain. After Washington, D.C., has been flooded by a convergence of weather patterns that various characters ascribe to global warming, a U.S. senator riding in a boat remains noncommittal about what Congress might do to address the problem. Clive Cussler has alerted his readers to the fact that the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic current if disrupted could cause a sudden northern hemispheric climate shift in Trojan Odyssey, along the lines of the depiction in The Day After Tomorrow. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier in this book, he also leads them to believe that only terrorists or the Chinese Communists might undertake such a diversion for their own economic and political gains, and discounts the idea that the country likely to be most responsible for such a “natural” disaster would be the United States merely by continuing its course of inaction. But what about the idea of invoking the precautionary principle? I was actually alerted to the issues raised by Crichton in State of Fear, shortly before reading his newspaper essay, by my mother’s telling me that Crichton claims that deforestation, not global warming, is to blame for the melting of the ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro. As I pointed out to her, a dispute about that specific detail is really beside the point, since reforestation is an ecological restoration activity that needs to happen in any case, with or without concern about global warming. Reforestation can reverse desertification, can increase rainfall and can reduce surface temperatures, which ought to help restore some of the ice and snow lost from Kilimanjaro. In turn, a reversal of melting or an increase in the amount of permanent ice on the planet would increase the amount of solar radiation reflected back out into space, thus helping to coun-

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teract global warming resulting from the buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. There is no down side to reforestation in East Africa. Yet is Crichton’s argument persuasive? Hardly, since ice cover is retreating generally over the entire planet, including areas where there has been no significant logging activity, or where there have never been any trees to log, such as Greenland and Antarctica (Associated Press 2006a; Boyle 2006; Brown 2002).

WHICH WAY TO THE PASS The greatest environmental disasters in the previous century were human initiated rather than naturally occurring, not only in terms of loss of human life but also in terms of loss of biodiversity. One of the two greatest threats after World War II to the natural world has clearly come from the explosive growth in the human population worldwide and its devastating impact particularly on forests and everything living in them. Although absolute numbers are looking less deadly than they did a few decades ago, human population growth remains a major threat to human beings and to the rest of the natural world. The second of the two greatest threats has come from the arms race, specifically the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which follows an explosive growth curve similar to that of human population. Strategic nuclear war seems highly unlikely at this point in time, yet with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads still scattered around the globe the possibility of a major nuclear weapons disaster remains a distinct possibility, which could not only kill hundreds of thousands of human beings, but also wreak havoc on the ecosystems within its fallout radius. Even without the use of a nuclear warhead, U.S. warfare contaminates the world and increases human and animal cancer rates through all types of pollution, including the scattering of depleted uranium shell casings in war zones, such as Iraq, and artillery practice ranges from Puerto Rico to Okinawa. The writers and activists who have addressed both of these concerns, population growth and nuclear warfare, have not been crying wolf, nor have they been scaring away nonexistent elephants; they have been trying to head human disasters off at the pass, and should be recognized for their contributions. Global warming is no less a possibility than either a human population crash due to excessive growth or a nuclear war due to nation-state competition. Steps that could be taken to counteract global warming ought to be taken, and will benefit the planet regardless of whether any of the worst-case scenarios come to pass or only the most benign effects are felt. Writers who address the problem of global warming and other potential anthropogenic natural disasters

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need to be supported and taught, not dismissed or ignored. And that is true whether or not they get the science quite right or even if their scenario turns out to be too extreme, because they are voicing concerns that promote social engagement, reader research, and critical consciousness. Critically conscious readers have the ability to evaluate what they read, consider its degree of accuracy and plausibility, and do follow-up reading, if they so choose. Anyone following the reports of global warming research and policy positions, even if only summaries in the popular press, knows it is a complicated issue full of quandaries, complexities, and contradictory proposals. The incoherence of the discourses and the ability of various people to cherry pick the information doesn’t make it any less real, regardless of what Michael Crichton has said.

Chapter Eleven

Hurricanes and Hubris American Responses in Literature and Culture to Natural Weather Extremes and Their Human-Driven Intensifications

Between August of 2004 and September of 2005, eight hurricanes, including several that attained strength levels of 4 and 5, struck the southern United States, in some cases striking more than one location along their path. All eight impacted Florida, where I live; three of these came through my city. Hurricanes have long been represented in American fiction, sometimes as a plot device but at other times as a major focus of the literary work. Despite the educational potential of these novels, along with the many nonfiction studies of hurricanes over the past century, the American people and the various levels of its government have shown an amazing degree of denial and an overwhelming display of hubris in regard to hurricanes and their consistent, although cyclical, destruction of American shorelines and habitats. Clearly, scientists and journalists alone cannot be expected to educate the American people about the realities of this recurring natural phenomenon and the ways that American cultural values, lifestyles, and government policies intensify its destructive effects. Literary authors, critics, and educators must also play a role. When President Bush reiterated at various press conferences that the destruction of New Orleans and the northern Gulf Coast and the humanitarian challenges it generated had been “unprecedented,” “unimaginable,” something that not “anyone anticipated,” and beyond any government official’s ability to prepare adequately for it, his remarks veered far from credibility and truthfulness. Rather than having been unimaginable and beyond anticipation, the destruction of New Orleans had been predicted and envisioned numerous times in scientific studies and investigative reports. Not only that, but virtually every other city in the path of Katrina had been destroyed or severely damaged in previous hurricanes, such as Waveland, Pascagoula, Biloxi, and Mobile. 173

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The history of American hurricanes is, in fact, so well documented that only willful ignorance and solipsistic idealism could claim that any of the hurricanes that hit the United States during those two years deviated from the “normal.” And Hurricane Ike in 2008 traveled a well-worn path when it devastated Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula. For example, in the 2001 book, Hurricane Watch, Bob Sheets, former director of the National Hurricane Center, and coauthor, Jack Williams, stated “Among the experts, the vulnerability of New Orleans is legendary and scary.” Further, quoting the emergency management director for the parish that includes New Orleans, they point out that with 3 days’ notice, only 60 percent of the metropolitan area’s population could be evacuated, leaving 400,000 people in harm’s way (Sheets and Williams 2001, 214–15). Mandatory evacuation orders for New Orleans were actually issued less than twenty-four hours before it made landfall. And, Katrina, for instance, fits the profile of such previous hurricanes as Hugo, Camille, Andrew, and another dozen recorded category four and five hurricanes that hit the United States in the past century. Severe flooding from either extensive rainfall or from the undermining of levees, dams, reservoir walls, and riverbanks has also resulted from much weaker hurricanes as well, depending on their size and speed, often inundating cities hundreds of miles from where a given hurricane makes landfall. For years scientists, government inspectors, and journalists have noted that New Orleans has remained for decades susceptible to destruction by the force of even a moderate hurricane, if one were to make a direct hit. Both hurricanes Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969 gave ample evidence of what a massive near miss could do. Hurricane Betsy, for example, came ashore to the west of New Orleans, not too far from where Hurricane Rita landed in 2005. It had already caused severe damage and flooding in Florida from the keys up to the panhandle The rains and storm surge flooded much of southwestern Louisiana with the Mississippi River rising more than ten feet in New Orleans and overtopping the levees. As Jay Barnes reports, “Over 300 city blocks were submerged, and many residents waited on rooftops for up to twenty hours in driving rain for rescue teams to find them” (1998, 228). Although no separate figures for New Orleans seem to be available, Betsy destroyed or severely damaged 27,000 homes in Louisiana alone and injured 17,000 people (Barnes 1998, 228). Based on interviews with academics, government officials, and common people, Christopher Hallowell reached a prescient conclusion in his book, Holding Back the Sea, that, as for New Orleans, “the luck is bound to run out. And when it does, tens of thousands of people may find themselves trapped in a sunken city. . . . Even worse, the city may not exist as we know it” (2001, 173).

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In this chapter, I will comment on the lessons that could be learned by readers of hurricane literature and discuss the arrogant complacency of American culture. The majority of Americans, including those in hurricane zones, repeatedly deny the validity of these lessons and refuse to learn from the consistent, scientifically predictable behavior of the natural interactions of sun, wind, and water. They ignore the ways in which American industrial expansion, such as oil and gas exploration, drilling, and pipeline delivery, canalbuilding for maritime commerce, and coastal development for housing and tourism intensify the effects of natural phenomena by eradicating the natural barriers that would otherwise reduce the effects of hurricane storm surge (Hallowell 2001, 177). Further, this same majority ignores the raging debate among meteorologists and climatologists as to whether or not global warming is increasing the number or the intensity of hurricanes, or possibly both (see Gelbspan 2007). In surveying some of the books that could be promoted for public reading and classroom teaching, I want to start with literary nonfiction, since it has the appeal of fact, evidence, and documentary authority to make it often more convincing than its frequently more sensational fictional counterparts. Five mass market paperbacks stand out in this category, one more scientific and the other three more historical: Hurricane Watch, Isaac’s Storm, Sudden Sea, and Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America’s Most Violent Hurricane.

POPULAR SCIENCE I have already quoted from Hurricane Watch. Published in 2001, its authority comes from its having been coauthored by Dr. Bob Sheets, former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, from 1987 to 1995, who experienced Hurricane Andrew firsthand in 1992. Divided into eleven chapters and a dozen appendixes, this volume provides an overview of hurricane forecasting within the larger developments of meteorological science. Since hurricanes are primarily a western Atlantic phenomenon, occurring almost entirely north of the equator, it comes as no surprise that the history of Western engagement with them begins with Columbus’s growing knowledge of tropical storms on each of his voyages to the so-called new world. In 1502, the seasoned sailor recognized the portents of a hurricane bearing down on Santo Domingo and he and his other ships ran for cover on the western side of the island. The new governor of the Spanish colony, however, took little interest in Columbus’s superstitions and let thirty ships depart for the homeland. When the hurricane hit that fleet, it sent twenty-one of the ships to the

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bottom, killing five hundred soldiers. Eight ships returned to port and only the one with gold due Columbus made it safely to Spain. Columbus had observed slow deep swells rolling in from the southeast as the main warning. Ironically enough, four hundred years later, the chief meteorologist for the city of Galveston, Texas, would take the same attitude toward such swells as the Spanish governor. Only then thousands rather than hundreds would die. Hurricane Watch continues with such education up through a detailed discussion of the 1992 category-4 Hurricane Andrew that devastated south Florida, with a brief chapter on “The Future,” which emphasizes three key points. One, we have entered a heightened period of hurricane activity that will last for at least another decade or two with more frequent and more powerful hurricanes most probable. Two, “Coastal populations are growing so rapidly that no likely forecasting improvements will make it possible to predict landfall in time to evacuate only the areas that surge will flood, and not evacuate nearby locations that turn out to be safe” (Sheets and Williams 2001, 280). In other words, people are wrong to view evacuation orders such as the one for Houston when it was in the path of Hurricane Rita as a false alarm. Three, Americans, Mexicans, and others have failed to learn what the pre-Columbian Mayans living in the Yucatan Peninsula knew: don’t pile up your population in hurricane-flood prone coastal areas (Sheets and Williams 2001, 6). The book’s appendixes are highly valuable as stand-alone pieces, as well as reinforcing the key points of Hurricane Watch. One demonstrates clearly that hurricanes such as Andrew, Floyd, and Katrina, are not unimaginable, not flukes or freaks, but part of the normal and easily anticipated weather patterns of the Caribbean–Gulf of Mexico region. Another provides the probability ratings of various locations for the frequency and intensity of hurricanes that will make landfall there. New Orleans, for example, can expect 12.5 hurricanes per century, a quarter of them attaining level 3, 4, or 5 status, all of which are capable of overflowing the city’s levee system. By contrast, the most rapidly growing and densely populated regions of southern Florida, on both coasts, can expect on average between seventeen and twenty-seven hurricanes per century with a third of them on the upper end of the hurricane scale. The vast majority of Floridians who moved into my state during the lull period of hurricane activity in the 1960s through the 1980s blithely buying and building right up to the waves if allowed know nothing and, it would seem, wish to know nothing of these probabilities. They continue to pretend that we are “a city on a hill,” a beacon for the world, and that through the doctrine of American exceptionalism will be spared what science accurately predicts and history repeatedly foretells. Extending the American doctrine of individualism to the nation-state and then to the land on which it has been

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established, they believe that every natural disaster is an exceptional event, disconnected from any other. Hence, many Americans tend to dismiss the idea that natural disasters can be anthropogenically intensified through global warming’s raising of ocean temperatures and sea levels. Such thinking combines with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) issuing flood maps for New Orleans based on the concept of a one-hundred-year flood, requiring people in some areas to raise their houses three feet higher than their current elevation (Associated Press 2006b). Many people hear that phrasing and pretend that the city may have a century between now and the next major inundation. But instead of preparing for a flood from any natural cause, the city ought to be preparing for a major hurricane within the next twenty-five years, given statistical probabilities, and elevating their property according to Katrina’s high water marks, which would mean at least another five to seven feet higher than FEMA requirements. Of course, declaring the lowest lying areas no-build zones would also address the threat. Such a move, however, would remove the preferred urban site for housing the poorest New Orleans residents and force the city to rethink the ways it exploits its black population (see South End Press Collective 2007). As long as Americans treat hurricanes as “unimaginable” events, then they will not prepare for their inevitable appearance. Nor will they be willing to rethink what the word “preparation” means. No-build zones would be one form of long-range preparation, for instance. These would also make sense not only in terms of historical experience, but also in terms of geological data about delta subsidence and projections of sea level rise due to global warming.

HISTORICAL HURRICANES Numerous nonfiction books in English treat the most famous early twentiethcentury hurricanes. Two that I heartily recommend are Isaac’s Storm and Sudden Sea. The first treats the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the second the 1938 hurricane that devastated New England. More than the descriptions of the physical devastation, we should be interested in the myriad ways that weather service supervisors, government officials, and otherwise educated and intelligent citizens ignored, denied, or disregarded the evidence of approaching disaster. Repeatedly, officials and citizens deluded themselves into believing that they could determine the direction of these hurricanes despite the evidence at hand, or that they could overcome or ride out the effects of these hurricanes disbelieving the historical evidence about the destruction potential of these seasonal and predictable natural events.

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For example, Erik Larson, in Isaac’s Storm, points out that in 1900, Isaac Cline, the resident meteorologist of Galveston, lived at a time of tremendous national egotism: “The nation in 1900 was swollen with pride and technological confidence. . . . In this new age, nature itself seemed no great obstacle” (1999, 5). And so Cline disbelieved the meteorological evidence increasing daily that 400 years earlier Columbus had recognized and believed. But Cline was not alone. Galvestonians in general ignored the fact that hurricane waves had washed entirely over the land on which the city sat in the previous century and that they were vulnerable from both ocean waves and bay waves due to the pinwheel spin of the winds (Larson 1999, 76–77). They conveniently forgot that fourteen years earlier a hurricane so ravaged Indianola, Texas, only 150 miles to the south that residents abandoned the city forever (Larson 1999, 83). In the end when the category 4 hurricane did strike, it ruined Galveston and killed over 6,000 people, including Isaac Cline’s wife, who instructed his family that they could ride out the storm in his allegedly hurricane-proof house. Three lessons for New Orleans come out of this disaster. One, Galveston rebuilt the city by elevating every building that remained standing and filling in the space beneath them and constructing a sixteen-feet-high seawall (but only on the Gulf side); two, Galveston never regained its former glory after 1900; three, despite the desire of many to view the hurricane as a “freak of nature,” the city has been hit or nearly hit by another eleven hurricanes in the past ninety years (Larson 1999, 272). The most recent, Ike, had a storm surge that overtopped the sea wall, raising the question of whether it is possible to design sea walls that can anticipate maximum surge in a warming world where hurricanes are likely to become more intense even if less frequent. Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938, by R. A. Scotti, reminds readers that Atlantic hurricanes do not only hit the Caribbean and Gulf Coast regions but, like The Perfect Storm, can lash any area of the United States coast all the way from Florida to Maine. Even more vivid in its detailed depiction of the impact of this hurricane on the lives of ordinary people than Isaac’s Storm, Sudden Sea also reveals the hubris of entire government agencies, while the previous book focused on the hubris of Galveston’s senior meteorologist. Scotti writes that “Hurricane was a foreign word in New England. People . . . didn’t know what it meant, and . . . they were sure it couldn’t happen to them, until September 12, 1938” (2003, 23). That denial existed despite a historical record that indicated quite explicitly that two powerful hurricanes had hit New England in the previous three hundred years. In fact, the 1938 hurricane came ashore just ten miles from where the devastating 1815 hurricane had come ashore on Long Island (Scotti 2003, 81). Despite a hurricane watch beginning in Jacksonville, Florida, a week before the storm hit New England, the U.S. weather service senior leadership

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insistently downplayed the storm’s threat to land. On September 19th, the storm had become a category 5 hurricane and was aimed at Miami Beach, and local forecasters were duly concerned given the terrible damage of previous hurricanes in the same decade. But the next day it began to curve northnortheast away from making landfall; it also began to accelerate. A junior forecaster in Washington, D.C., realized that the Bermuda High was in an unusual location, and, as a result, would hold the hurricane on a northerly course toward land rather than its usual action of steering the hurricane out to sea, but the director of the weather bureau was not interested in the scientific knowledge of a junior staffer and refused to issue any advisories with the word “hurricane” in them, even as the storm raced at 60 miles an hour straight toward the New England coast (Scotti 2003, 86, 93). Basically, the 1938 hurricane outran the scientific ability of the day to track it, covering 425 miles in just seven hours, passing Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in the morning and striking Rhode Island in the afternoon. In the city of Providence a wall of water nearly twenty feet high swept through the downtown business district. Approximately 700 people died, far fewer than from Katrina, due no doubt to far less population density along the coast at the time; 20,000 buildings were destroyed and 75,000 damaged (Scotti 2003, 226). But also, the coastlines of Rhode Island, Long Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts were permanently reconfigured with entire barrier islands and beachfront communities completely washed away. In relation to New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, three points stand out about the 1938 hurricane that parallel contemporary experience. One, there was tremendous denial by everyone from citizens to senior civil servants that such destruction could occur, or that people could have been adequately warned, despite the historical record of previous occurrences. Two, almost immediately government bureaucrats denied responsibility, shifted blame, and defended their failures, while the government personnel on the ground struggled to address the immediate needs of destroyed communities without any kind of a master plan or significant federal leadership. Three, the areas most heavily hit had their landscapes permanently altered and made more vulnerable to future storms, while the tourist communities in those places never recovered economically.

THE WARNING BEFORE KATRINA’S STORM Holding Back the Sea was written five years before Katrina by Christopher Hallowell in order to warn the American public and its government about the inevitable fate awaiting southern Louisiana and New Orleans. Hallowell

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writes in the post-Katrina introduction to the new edition that “changes to the environment . . . threatened to destroy the entire Gulf Coast. . . . Many of the causes were manmade—based on special interests and short-term thinking” (2001/2005, xv–xvi). Holding Back emphasizes how economically and financially driven development and exploitation, primarily from oil and gas interests, and ill-conceived water and river control projects have caused the subsidence and sinking of southern Louisiana, including its cities. He points out that in the 1998 study Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana a consensus of interests determined how to restore the state’s ecology and reduce the impact of future hurricanes at a cost of 14 billion dollars (2001/2005, xix, 202–8). The federal government considered the price tag too high. The effects of Katrina will probably cost 100 times that. Like Holding Back the Sea, Category 5: The Story of Camille, by Ernest Zebrowski and Judith A. Howard, has become an extremely painful and infuriating book to be read because it too so frequently shows where Americans might have gotten it right before Katrina arrived. The authors were finishing up the manuscript for publication when Katrina hit. Although they have made a few revisions to address it, they observe that we have purposely limited our analysis of the responses to Katrina, on the assumption that it will take several years to sort out the responsibility for the tragic blunders of that effort. The main focus in the pages that follow is Camille, and the many lessons learned—some, sadly, later unlearned—from that terrible storm. We have decided to let the story of Camille speak for itself, essentially as we wrote it prior to the ravages of Katrina. We leave it to you, the informed reader, to draw your own conclusions. (Zebrowski and Howard 2005, ix)

Such a decision works well since many of the locations that receive the authors’ focused attention also repeatedly appear in the news about the recovery efforts following Katrina, with one notable exception. This notable exception should give every reader pause because it indicates the amount of additional damage that could have resulted from Katrina if the rainfall pattern from its dissipating swing through the continent had been different. After Camille came ashore in 1969, weather patterns converged to keep it from dropping most of the 108 billion tons of water it carried from the Gulf. That is, until the storm unloaded the majority of it in rural western Virginia and destroyed entire communities with flood waters eight times any previously recorded peak (Zebrowski and Howard 2005, 174–75). Like other hurricanes that make landfall more than once, Camille also struck twice. The authors set up the book to tell the story of three areas destroyed by Camille: Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana; the Mississippi Gulf Coast, particularly Waveland and Pass Christian; and Nelson County, Virginia. The last lo-

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cale contains important lessons for the entire eastern portion of the United States, since Gulf hurricanes, after landfall spin their way in a right curving arc that takes them from the Mississippi River valley all the way to the Atlantic. Anywhere along those paths, they can spawn tornadoes and dump flooding rains. Communities in Virginia or Maryland are as likely to get flooded by rain from a Gulf hurricane as they are from an Atlantic one. For New Orleans that means that the city can be flooded by rains released by hurricanes that miss the city by hundreds of miles but dump their rain on the thousands of tributaries that flow into the Mississippi River and eventually must pass through the city on their way to the Gulf. As for Plaquemines Parish, much that Zebrowski and Howard relate reinforces the arguments made by Hallowell in Holding Back the Sea. They, however, do discuss Hurricane Audrey that hit the area in 1957 and point out that the weather service was too timid in issuing their hurricane warnings and the people too complacent in their belief they could ride out the storm. Over 500 people drowned as the result of flooding from a surge of 18 feet and another 5,000 people were left homeless in a sparsely settled rural area (Zebrowski and Howard 2005, 21–22). The authors conclude their discussion of Audrey with the remark that forecasters hoped that “the whole central Gulf Coast would remember at least one two-word lesson from Audrey: storm surge” (Zebrowski and Howard 2005, 22). But as Camille demonstrated, they didn’t. But as Katrina demonstrated, they didn’t. In fact, Zebrowski and Howard reveal that ignorance and confusion about storm surge and its relationship to the topography of the sea bottom near land, a factor of ignorance that had doomed Galveston in 1900, continued into the hours leading up to Camille’s making landfall. The importance of accurate predictions of landfall and determinations of when to order evacuations and how extensive to make them take on added urgency when a hurricane approaches areas in which the topography facilitates significant storm surge, as is the case in the Bay of Bengal, and, as could be the case if a hurricane hit west of Biloxi, Mississippi. The day before Camille’s landfall, Chester Jelesnianski, a meteorologist, showed Robert Simpson a computer model that indicated that a hurricane making landfall where Camille did could produce “a storm surge of twenty-five feet above normal sea level” (Zebrowski and Howard 2005, 66). And, it did at a location that had not been included in the National Weather Service’s evacuation warnings less than twenty-four hours before that landfall. As Zebrowski and Howard note, “Hurricanes in and of themselves are not disasters. It’s when they catch people by surprise that such storms become disasters” (Zebrowski and Howard 2005, 84). That seems the basic point in the title of Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires’s edited book about New Orleans, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina.

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Category 5 contains too many lessons for New Orleans to repeat all of them here, but one stands out to me and that one pertains to evacuation routes. As the debacle of people trying to drive their way out of Houston ahead of Hurricane Rita demonstrated, the United States still has not yet learned how to evacuate a large city. Along the Gulf Coast matters are even worse for many smaller cities than they are for Houston, because the cities tend to be linked by roads that parallel the coastline rather than leading inland. Even when routes inland can be found, they unavoidably become quickly clogged by automobiles, the most inefficient form of transportation for moving large numbers of people. Without mass rail transit inland, many coastal cities will remain sitting ducks into the indefinite future. Fifty thousand cars remained in New Orleans when it was finally evacuated in the face of Katrina, and once the flooding started it quickly became too late to navigate the roads out of town, some of which had already suffered significant hurricane damage to bridges and overpasses. Fortunately, New Orleans did learn a lesson from Katrina in this regard. Local and state governments organized a successful, orderly evacuation of the city prior to Hurricane Ike’s landfall, since its erratic path made it unclear if it would hit Louisiana or turn toward Texas.

MORE TO COME AND PREPARATIONS TO MAKE John D. MacDonald’s Condominium remains the best novel I have found about hurricanes. Since I have already discussed it and his earlier hurricane novel, Murder in the Wind, in the chapter on mysteries, I won’t repeat that discussion here. But in ending this chapter I do want to return to the closing lines of that novel because they promote a humility sadly lacking across the entire range of American cultural attitude. MacDonald there has a character note that we don’t actually own the land ever, but only make use of it temporarily (MacDonald 1977, 476). Fortunately, numerous authors continue to write in an effort to dispel such an arrogant and ultimately self-destructive illusion. But they face an uphill battle. As the months after Katrina turn into years after Katrina, the country refuses to undertake public dialogue about long-range national planning. Hubris is mistakenly promoted in numerous “human interest” stories emphasizing individual courage. Too often, however, that courage is based on ignorance, denial, and misinformation. For example, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was severely flooded by Camille in 1969. A majority of the residents rebuilt not only in the same places, but also following the same building codes, which should come as no surprise. After Hurricane Andrew devastated southern Florida it took a decade to work stronger building codes through the state

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legislature, and they apply only to houses built since they went into effect. A considerable portion of Bay St. Louis residents’ behavior combined arrogance with denial of the reality that, while Camille may have been exceptionally strong as hurricanes go, the city would be hit repeatedly in the future by hurricanes because of its location and because hurricanes are part of the natural cycle of Gulf of Mexico weather. But another portion of that approach to rebuilding reflected justifiable ignorance. As Kathleen Koch reports, “most Bay St. Louis residents did not have flood insurance, in part because 20-year-old FEMA flood maps showed the majority of the town was safe from storm surges.” By all indications, FEMA continues to underestimate hurricane dangers to communities on the coast, not simply for political reasons but also because such underestimation reflects a nationwide mentality. After all, what is the value to talking about hundred-year flood levels, when, as Zebrowski and Howard note, “In the 50 years prior to Camille, fourteen hurricanes and twenty-seven tropical storms made landfall in Louisiana—an average of one hurricane every 3.6 years and one tropical storm every 1.9 years” (2005, 26). In addition to authors writing books and critics writing about them, such literature needs to become the basis for ongoing letter writing campaigns, and it needs to work its way into the classroom. Here at the University of Central Florida, in an area repeatedly raked by hurricanes along the eastern coast and in 2004 through its very center, no courses that I can find to date have been offered that provide a holistic approach to hurricanes. Knowledge about aspects of hurricanes are sequestered in various courses for majors and treated as discrete units of different kinds of knowledge. What is needed, instead, is a general education course open to students from all majors so that they can begin to become environmentally literate about the largest weather phenomenon of the place where they live. To that end, I have tried to design in collaboration with professors from other departments two different kinds of hurricane courses. The first course would focus on hurricanes and the people they affect and would combine the kind of literature I have discussed in this chapter, along with fiction, and material drawn from public history, including interviews conducted with New Orleans refugees staying in central Florida. The second course would combine this chapter’s materials and fiction with scientific and business analyses of hurricane damage and mitigation. Despite some initial interest following the heavy hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, the intervening milder years and university cutbacks have resulted in a decrease in interest in the offering of such courses. Clearly, such courses will not suffice. Here as elsewhere academics need to avoid the current kind of artificial divisions of knowledge that would place the study of hurricanes solely in the context of scientific, historical, or economic

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understanding. Rather, we need to combine these with literary and cultural studies in order to help students understand that analyzing a phenomenon externally often tells us little about how or why a government, a people, a community, or an individual will respond to that phenomenon. We absolutely must work across disciplines to eliminate the basis for an author to pen the following words: Katrina was in many respects a replay of Camille, which had made essentially the same landfall back in 1969. And while the historic catastrophe of 1969 had supposedly awakened everyone—Congress, meteorologists, civil engineers, relief workers, and emergency response specialists—to the multifaceted complexities of disaster management, many of the lessons learned from the experience about the hard work of disaster preparedness, evacuation, and emergency response seemed to have been forgotten. (Zebrowski and Howard 2005, ix)

As I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, it has not been merely a matter of forgetting, but also one of denial, arrogance, and exceptionalism. Deeply ingrained American values, indeed, but ones that must be abandoned for a new way forward to be found that can enable the United States to end its role as an environmental destroyer and become, alongside other nations and cultures, an environmental sustainer; or else end itself as part of a larger process of allonational reorganization.

Chapter Twelve

Ranging Widely in the Classroom

In 1982 a single book turned my attention toward the study of nature-oriented literature, which in turn has become the major field of study throughout my teaching career. That book was The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which coincidentally enough I began discussing in a course on modern American literature the day before I began revising this chapter for publication. At that time during my M.A. course work at California State University, Northridge, a visiting professor from Humboldt State offered the English department course on the American novel and ended the semester with Kerouac’s roman à clef focused on Gary Snyder. Rather than exciting me about Kerouac’s career, the novel excited me about Snyder’s, and once I learned that he stood behind Kerouac’s character, Japhy Ryder, I began reading everything I could find by him. That reading turned up the collaboration and exchanges between Snyder in those days and Wendell Berry. Their interaction led me to the topic of my M.A. thesis, a comparative study of the two men’s poetry. My interest in Snyder, in turn, attracted the attention of the doctoral program at the University of California, Davis, when I applied there. In what may be one of those moments of cosmic irony, after arriving in Davis in September of 1983, my wife and I drove up to Nevada City, California, to see the landscape in which Snyder lived, and learned that the very next weekend Snyder and Berry would be doing a joint new book signing at Grimblefinger’s. So, we returned the following weekend and met both of them there. Over twenty years later, I continue to write about and teach the works of both of these environmental activist authors. So, while one can only hope that nature-oriented literature will be bought and read by individual readers on their own without any prodding or requiring, I also know that a nudge in that direction through

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assigning a book or teaching an entire course in such literature can, to echo Robert Frost, make all the difference.

LOWER DIVISION COMPOSITION From first-year composition through advanced doctoral seminars, I have included or focused on environmental literature in a wide range of offerings over these past twenty years. My theoretical work and research have focused on notions of international and multicultural environmental literature, ecofeminist dialogics, interdisciplinarity, and genre configurations across poetry, fiction and nonfiction, as should be evident by the previous chapters in this book. In the following paragraphs, I will link these research areas to a variety of courses in order to demonstrate some of the myriad ways that anyone wishing to present to students nature writing, nature-oriented literature, environmental writing, or whatever else one might like to call it, can do so either as part of a larger topic or as a focused course subject. First- and second-year general education composition courses generally work with the premise that for students to write well they must have a serious topic about which to write. Nature as a topic often seems too static or too vague for many students, but environmental issues frequently have more immediate meaning, especially when linked to specific local issues. As a result, I regularly teach a composition course titled either “Toxic Topics” or “Everybody Lives Downstream,” and have recently emended it to a local/global emphasis with the energy crisis and global warming. With the first topic, instructors can run into the problem of students quickly finding the subject matter uniformly depressing, especially if all of the readings focus on disasters, such as Love Canal. Hence, I usually include a book such as Ted Bernard and Jora Young’s The Ecology of Hope (1997). There students can read positive examples of American community accomplishments, which in turn encourage them to write about actions being taken and possibilities for future improvements rather than just defending the status quo or painting doom-andgloom scenarios. Or one might use Bill McKibben’s Hope, Human and Wild (1995), for an international rather than national emphasis The second topic title for the course comes from Sandra Steingraber’s, Living Downstream (1998), which teaches students about collecting evidence and arguing from data. Students can learn much from attending to the way in which it is written and discussing and writing about how they might adapt or adopt structures and strategies from this text. Of particular benefit for students is an assignment that calls on them to analyze the differences in strategies employed when Steingraber is building an argument based on data and when she is

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building an argument based on personal experience. One could also use her more recent book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2001), especially if teaching students majoring in human and health services. These kinds of books and upbeat journal articles provide more effective models of nonfiction environmental writing for students than relentless exposés that students tend to dismiss as “downers.” Invariably, I find that students tire quickly of litanies of negative critique and long to hear about possible solutions and implemented actions. I found that particularly the case with the recent incarnation of this course using David Goodstein’s Out of Gas and James Gustav Speth’s Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. Students praised both of these books for recommending solutions. In a summer course I varied the readings a bit and tried this research writing course with Stephen Leeb’s The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel (2006), and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006). In this way, I can compare a version of the course using academic books versus one using nonacademic, but well-researched books. Leeb is a well-respected investment analyst with interesting credentials: a B.A. in economics, an M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in psychology. Kolbert worked as a reporter for the New York Times before becoming a staff writer for the New Yorker, and won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award for the articles she used as the basis for her book. In the latest iteration of this course, I substituted Richard Heinberg’s PowerDown for the Leeb book, since I knew most of the students would be engineering or molecular science majors. This small class split evenly between those who preferred the more personal and affective way that Kolbert used and the more logic-driven, impersonal style that Heinberg chose.

THE HONORS SEMINAR When an opportunity came along for me to teach an upper division interdisciplinary seminar in the honors college where I previously worked, I took the basics of my composition course and enlarged and developed it. Knowing that the students would come from a cross section of disciplines, I wanted books and topics that could engage people in dialogue across their differences. “Other and Another: Ecology, Gender, Culture” became the title of this course, allowing me to mix together environmental issues, gender issues, cultural studies, and applications of the theory of dialogics developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. This course began with reading and discussing Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather (1969). Set in Botswana it includes attention to environment, gender,

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and culture a few decades and a continent removed from my students’ experiences. This distancing allowed for less defensive discussion of gender issues and students got to know each other in the class. The novel allows for students to talk about scientific issues in relation to agricultural experimentation and to social science and humanities issues in relation to the depiction of social interaction. It also lets the students see the different terms of the course title working out in an interactive environment, including the distinction between “other” and “another” in terms of alienation, familiarity, and difference. Other readings for this course have varied over time, but include Ecofeminism and the Sacred (1993) edited by Carol Adams, The Circle of Simplicity (1998) by Cecile Andrews, Reflections on Gender and Science (1985) by Evelyn Fox Keller, and All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999) by Winona LaDuke. The course allows for students to tackle a wide variety of assignments, ranging from creative writing, theatrical performances and short films to debates, from reading journals to formal research papers, from community activism outings to gender and environmental critiques of students’ career plans.

UNDERGRADUATE ETHNIC LITERATURE Undergraduate and graduate literature courses have provided me with the greatest opportunities and greatest variety of teaching environmental literature. With courses in minority and ethnic American literature, one can incorporate individual works of nonfiction nature writing or novels about environmental justice. With Native American literature, this is so easy it is hardly worth mentioning. With Chicano literature, one can use a novel such as Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1994) or Edna Escamill’s Daughter of the Mountain (1991). Certain poetry volumes fit in well, such as Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín (1987) or Pat Mora’s Borders (1986). With Asian American literature, a significant portion of the writings about Asian American experience are set in Hawai’i, as with the poetry of Juliet Kono in Hilo Rains (1988) or Kiana Davenport’s novel Shark Dialogues (1995). There is also the environmental justice fiction of novelist Karen Tei Yamashita, whether one uses the magical realist black comedy, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), or the postmodern multinarrated novel set in Los Angeles, Tropic of Orange (1997). Environmental justice fiction and poetry can be paired with overviews of the field, such as The Environmental Justice Reader, edited by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein; The Quest for Environmental Justice, edited by Robert D. Bullard; and New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, edited by Rachel Stein.

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REGIONAL LITERATURE Other areas in the undergraduate English curriculum would be regional literature and nature writing. Various ways exist to define the word “regional,” but virtually any of them allows for a course that will focus on human relationships with the natural world. The one time I was able to teach “regional American literature,” I chose agrarian and ranching prose as my terrain, treating rural farm and ranch life as an American region out of which develops consciousness and social-nature interaction affected by geographical location but determined more by the intensity of human relationships with land, animals, crops, and climate. Using a chronological approach, I began with Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and then turned to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913). Students noted how little attention Cather gave to the details of farming compared with Norris’s attention to the entire process of crop production and marketing. Frank Waters’s People of the Valley (1941) allowed me to introduce students to Southwest fiction and a neglected author they probably would otherwise never read. This novel immersed them in the geography that was also the setting for a contemporary nonfiction work, Stanley Crawford’s Mayordomo (1988). While strongly satisfied with the balanced attention given to people and place in Waters’s work, students felt that Crawford skated over the surface of character portrayal in his book. They did, however, appreciate the representation of water rights issues and the communal acequia culture that still survives in New Mexico. We then moved northeast to Massachusetts and another nonfiction work, Jane Brox’s elegiac Here and Nowhere Else (1995). This book reinvigorated discussion of the dynamic tension between agricultural life and gender roles, particularly in the nuclear farming family. This issue of gender was augmented by attention to race when we read Dori Sanders’s Her Own Place (1994), the fictional story of an African American woman making a life out of farming in the post–World War II South. Curiously enough, as with Cather’s novel, the actualities of farming fall far into the background in Her Own Place as the novel progresses. The class concluded with two works of nonfiction devoted to ranching life, Teresa Jordan’s Riding the White Horse Home (1994) and Linda Hasselstrom’s Going Over East (1987). The former is a reminiscence focusing on childhood memories and the eventual loss of the family ranch. The latter makes a striking contrast because it focuses on a woman who comes into ranching as an adult and is very much a part of a viable economic family activity. This focus on farming and ranching ranging over a hundred years of literary production reminds students that a large portion of this country is neither totally wild nor totally domesticated, and remains very much part of the present and not just a matter of reminiscence.

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NATURE WRITING Many college English departments have nature writing courses. When initially worked into the curriculum, they usually focused on the then-neglected genre of literary nonfiction. These courses tended to emphasize wilderness experiences undertaken by lone white males, such as Thoreau, Burroughs, and Muir. There continues to be a place for such courses, but if students may get introduced to only one course in nature writing, I would prefer they experience it from a multigenre, multicultural perspective. When teaching this course in the fall of 1990, I began with John Muir and then turned to Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces (1987), enabling a contrast between traditional nonfiction works in which the first focuses on the heroic actions of the author while the latter focuses on the heroic and nurturing actions of others. In contrast to their traditional style, Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) introduced students to a postmodern text that has been used mostly as a critical work, even though it is a fundamentally creative, innovative text demonstrating the power of double voicing. From there students read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1986) and developed team projects around it. After her novel, we focused on poetry by Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, and Gary Snyder. We then looked at another science fiction novel, Strieber and Kunetka’s bleak Nature’s End (1987), which is written as a pseudo-documentary piece. After the Thanksgiving holiday we studied an anthology of Native American poems and Linda Hogan’s collection, Savings (1988). We ended the course by returning to Le Guin and reading her mixed genre collection, Buffalo Gals (1990). I particularly wanted to end with this volume because so many of the pieces treat shifts in perspective and narration by nonhuman entities. Through this type of eclectic reading, students can be introduced to the variations among genres of nature-oriented literature and still have an opportunity to treat one author’s work with some depth and sustained attention, rather than engaging solely in whirlwind survey-style study.

GRADUATE STUDIES At the graduate level, courses often have vague, general catalog descriptions allowing instructors enormous leeway in topic and title selection. For example, in teaching “Topics in Women’s Literature,” which would be taken by both M.A. and Ph.D. students, I have taught “Woman and Nature in 20th Century U.S. Poetry and Prose” and “Literature of Inhabitation and Travel.” In the former, I began with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (written and se-

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rialized in 1915) and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) and concluded with Joy Harjo’s poetry volume In Mad Love and War (1990). In the latter, I included Sharon Doubiago’s book-length poem, South America Mi Hija (1992), and Molly Gloss’s science fiction novel of homecoming to a new planet, The Dazzle of Day (1998). A book included in this course that works well for undergraduates and graduates addressing the issues of homecoming is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1991). Also included was Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1999), which is written in a documentary style and provides an excellent example of how to blend plot, character development, and a strong environmental theme into a well-crafted work of fiction. At a more advanced level of theory-based seminars open only to doctoral students, I combined a heavy dose of theory with many of the same texts I have used in other courses. With “Ecofeminist Dialogics and Environmental Literature,” I introduced students to the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and some of the key foundational essays on ecological feminism. I again used works by Snyder, Le Guin, and Hogan, and added in Robinson Jeffers, including his book-length poem, “The Double Axe,” written in the 1940s. Jeffers’s pessimism contrasts nicely with Snyder’s general sense of optimism. A more popular advanced doctoral course, however, turned out to be “Dialogic and Cultural Constructions of Self and Community in 20th Century American Poetry.” Here we began with a mixture of Bakhtinian theory and essays on the concept of the “self,” including feminist philosophy. The readings started with Edgar Lee Masters’s critical look at American community at the start of the twentieth century, Spoon River Anthology (1915), then continued with some agrarian poetry by Wendell Berry, conflicting images of the search for identity and community by Native American poet Chrystos in Not Vanishing (1988), Snyder’s poetic sequence Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), and Simon Ortiz’s massive poetry collection Woven Stone (1992). We wrapped up with Cathy Song’s School Figures (1994), which is set in Hawai’i and addresses the issues of self as they pertain to a multiracial, multigenerational extended family. While I have often worked science fiction novels into many of these courses, I did have the opportunity in 1999 to focus an advanced doctoral course on that genre exclusively. “The Irruptive Ground of Contemporary SF: Ecocritical Theory and American Science Fiction” took students through various works on science fiction theory, particularly essays by Darko Suvin. We also read literary theory about ethical criticism and a small group of essays on ecocritical theory. The course included some classic novels, such as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1975) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1977), but also included Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994), which creates a highly ecological model of a future San Francisco Bay woven into

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a weak plot line, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1993, 1995, 1997). While the most sophisticated discussion of ecological issues of which I am aware, the trilogy comprises 2,000 pages of small print and is not to be recommended for undergraduate courses unless it were the sole text for a class—which might work very well in a course geared toward science majors who could do a variety of scientific research papers in relation to topics raised in the trilogy.

GLADLY LEARN, GLADLY TEACH I have tried in this brief survey of actual courses to indicate the freedom and the range of possibilities available to anyone who wants to take up natureoriented literature as a course topic or to inject it into other courses, both writing and literature ones. Many literary works can do double or even triple duty in different courses, where various aspects might be emphasized in one course and not another. In composition courses, the right text can be studied as much for its style as for its content. Such is also the case for many novels, where authors have used innovative narrative, character, or setting techniques. I also have tried to emphasize that one need not be restricted by narrow definitions of nature writing as nonfiction; while entire courses can be built around nonfiction, they can also be built around poetry, novels, and mixed genre subjects. Also, nature need not be the topic of the course to have it be devoted to nature-oriented literature; homecoming, inhabitation, travel, community, identity, self, future societies, gender relations, alienation, and otherness all work equally well to generate a compelling and stimulating course of study. For me the possibilities for course development continue to expand and unfold, and I hope the same will be the case for my students and readers.

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Index

101 Dalmatians, 147 The Accident (Masters), 84 Ackerman, Robert J., 149, 151, 158; Silent Sons, 149 Aitken, Stuart C., 148; Family Fantasies and Community Space, 154 Alas, Babylon (Frank), 84, 89, 91, 168 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 150–51 All Over Creation (Ozeki), 86 All the Powerful Invisible Things (Legler), 159 American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 82 Andrews, Cecile, 18; The Circle of Simplicity, 188 Appadurai, Arjun, 11, 35, 61; Modernity at Large, 11 Applegate, K. A., 116; Animorphs, 115–16 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 69, 74, 75, 108, 109, 187, 191; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 75; Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 3, 34, 108 Barr, Nevada, 120, 121, 128; Blood Lure, 130–32, 133; Deep South, 128, 130; Endangered Species, 129, 133; Firestorm, 129; Flashback, 129;

Hard Truth, 133; High Country, 129, 133; Hunting Season, 130, 133; Liberty Falling, 129; A Superior Death, 129; Track of the Cat, 128–30, 133, 135 Barth, John, 85 Basso, Keith H., 10; Wisdom Sits in Places, 10 Baxter, Charles, 55–56; Shadow Play, 55–57, 59 Bean Blossom Dreams, 32 Berry, Wendell, 18, 32, 41–42, 65, 66, 84, 87, 185, 191; Another Turn of the Crank, 41; The Gift of Good Land, 42; Home Economics, 41; The Memory of Old Jack, 85; A Place on Earth, 85; Remembering, 85; The Unsettling of America, 41; What Are People For?, 41 Blake, William, 66 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya), 87 Blum, Robert, 149–50 Bohjalian, Chris, 160; Water Witches, 159 Bolter, David Jay, 52–54; Writing Space, 52 Bookchin, Murray, 54 Brin, David, 108; Earth, 104 Brown, Charles Brockden, 119 209

210

Index

Brown, Lester, 110 Brox, Jane, 32, 66, 159; Five Thousand Days Like This One, 159; Here and Nowhere Else, 159, 189 Brunner, John, 94–96, 104, 108; Bedlam Planet, 93–94, 96, 108; The Sheep Look Up, 94–96; Stand on Zanzibar, 94–95, 164; Total Eclipse, 94 Buber, Martin, 65 Buddhism, 75 Buell, Lawrence, 6, 20, 80; Writing for an Endangered World, 7 Buffalo for the Broken Heart (O’Brien), 71 Burroughs, John, 190 Bush, George W., 163, 173; Bush administration, 165 Butala, Sharon, 26, 29–31; Luna, 70; The Perfection of the Morning, 26, 29–31, 71 Cajete, Gregory, 10–11, 71; Look to the Mountain, 10, 71 A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), 64, 84 Carroll, Joseph, 8 Carson, Rachel, 65, 67 Castillo, Ana, 74; So Far from God, 74, 188 Cather, Willa, 81; O Pioneers!, 83, 189; The Song of the Lark, 191 Catherwood (Youmans), 84 Cato Institute, 169 Chow, Rey, 6, 7; “The Interruption of Referentiality: Postructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism,” 6–7 Chrystos, 191; Not Vanishing, 191 Coast 2050, 180 The Coming Economic Collapse (Leeb), 187 The Coming Global Superstorm (Bell and Strieber), 92 Communicative Practice (Schrag), 74 Confucianism, 67, 71 The Contract Surgeon (O’Brien), 84

The Country of Pointed Firs (Jewett), 81 Coupe, Laurence, 5; The Green Studies Reader, 5 Crawford, Stanley, 189; Mayordomo, 189 Crichton, Michael, 111, 113, 163, 169–72; Jurassic Park, 163; Prey, 111–12, 163; State of Fear, 170–71 Cussler, Clive, 120, 170; Sahara, 120; Trojan Odyssey, 120, 170 Daughter of the Mountain (Escamill), 87, 188 Davenport, Kiana, 60; Shark Dialogues, 74, 188 The Day After Tomorrow, 92, 170 The Deerslayer (Cooper), 81 Deleuze, Giles, 73 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 75, 92; différance, 5 Descartes, René, 66 Desert Solitaire (Abbey), 65 Dillard, Annie, 21; A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 65 diPrima, Diana, 65 Dr. Doolittle, 160 Dr. Doolittle II, 160 Duane, Diane, 58–59; Deep Wizardry, 58–59; The Wizard’s Dilemma, 59; Young Wizards Series, 58, 87 Dune (Herbert), 90 Earth Day, 64 Eckersley, Robyn, 34, 36–39, 41, 44; The Green State, 36–39, 76 Ecofeminism and the Sacred (Adams), 188 ecofeminists, 89, 148 Ecological Literary Criticism (Kroeber), 3–4 Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Ray), 71 The Ecology of Hope (Bernard and Young), 186 Ecotopia (Callenbach), 89

Index

Edelman, Gerald M., 71; Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, 8 Eldredge, Niles, 8–9, 61; Dominion, 9, 61 Elgin, Duane, 18; Voluntary Simplicity, 18 Eliade, Mircea, 66 Emergency Vet, 160 Emerson, Caryl, 75 The Environmental Justice Reader (Adamson et al.), 188 Erdrich, Louise, 60; Tracks, 82 Erlich, Paul, 164, 165; The Population Bomb, 164 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Robbins), 86 Evers, Larry, and Felipe Molina, 40; Yaqui Deer Songs, 40 Extrapolation, 89 Fabian, Johanes, 7 Feminist Political Ecology (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari), 11–12 Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Kolbert), 187 Final Fantasy, 9 Finding Flow (Csiksentmihalyi), 3, 4 The Ford (Austin), 81 Forsyth, Tim, 1; Critical Political Ecology, 1 The Freshman Diaries, 48 Frost, Robert, 180 Gaia hypothesis, 9 Gaines, Charles, 21, 22–24, 25, 26, 30–31, 148; A Family Place, 21, 22–24, 148 Gallego, Manuel, III, 167 Gee, James Paul, 53–54; What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, 53–54 geopiety, 71 Gibson, William, 112 Gifford, Terry, 5, 80

211

Ginsberg, Allen, 65 Girard, René, 75 global warming, 163–64, 169–72, 177, 186 Gloss, Molly, 58, 84; The Dazzle of Day, 57, 58, 191; The Jump-off Creek, 84 Goodstein, David, 167; Out of Gas, 187 Goodwin, Stephen, 152–53; The Blood of Paradise, 89, 152–53 Goonan, Kathleen Ann, 99–100, 108; The Bones of Time, 99–100, 108 Grass, Günter, 80; The Rat, 168 Gray, Chris Hables, 60, 62 Green Fires (Mueller), 85 Greenpeace, 73 Gregg, Richard, 19 Griffin, Susan, 148; Woman and Nature, 190 Guattari, Felix, 73 Habermas, Jürgen, 76 Hallowell, Christopher, 174, 179–80, 181; Holding Back the Sea, 174, 179–80, 181 Harjo, Joy, 67; In Mad Love and War, 191 Harvey, David, 12 Hasselstrom, Linda, 32, 66; Going Over East, 189 Havel, Vaclav, 41 Hawk Flies Above (Norton), 71 Hayles, N. Katherine, 60–61; “The Seductions of Cyberspace,” 60–61 Head, Bessie, 42; When Rain Clouds Gather, 42, 187–88 The Heart of a Distant Forest (Williams), 85 Heinberg, Robert, viii; PowerDown, 187 Herland (Gilman), 81, 190–91 Herzog, Arthur, 72; Heat, 72 heterarchy, 150 Hiaasen, Carl, 132, 143; Sick Puppy, 132 Hilo Rains (Kono), 188

212

Index

Hogan, Linda, 10, 40, 67, 69, 85, 86, 191; Dwellings, 69; Intimate Nature (Hogan, Metzger, and Peterson), 69; Mean Spirit, 84; Savings, 190; Solar Storms, 40, 74 Home! A Bioregional Reader (Andruss et al.), 43 House, Freeman, 26–29, 30, 31, 43; Totem Salmon, 26–29, 30, 31, 43, 66 Hubbert’s Peak, 167 hurricane: Andrew, 174, 182; Audrey, 81; Betsy, 174; Camille, 126, 174, 182; Hugo, 174; Katrina, 126–27, 173, 174, 179, 180, 182; Rita, 126, 182 Icons of Loss and Grace (Hanson), 71 Indigenous Environmental Network, 38 In the Falcon’s Claw (Raymo), 84 Irigaray, Luce, 73 Islamic Fundamentalism, 165 Iwasaki-Murphy, Bonnie, 154–56 Jackson, Wes, 32, 42, 66; Becoming Native to This Place, 42 James, Henry, 82 Jeffers, Robinson, 65; “The Double Axe,” 92, 191 Jelesnianski, Chester, 181 Johnson, Barbara, 20 Jung, Hwa Yol, 69–76; “Difference and Responsibility,” 75; “The Ecological Crisis,” 64; “Ecology, Zen and Western Religious Thought,” 65; “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition,” 75–76; “Gary Snyder’s Ecopiety,” 68, 70; “Marxism and Deep Ecology in Postmodernity,” 70–71; “The Paradox of Man and Nature,” 66; and Petee Jung, 67, 68; “Phenomenology and Body Politics,” 74–75; “The Splendor of the Wild,” 65; “The Tao of

Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth,” 73; “Toward a New Humanism,” 67; “The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective,” 68, 71; “The Way of Ecopiety: A Philosophic Minuet for Ecological Ethics,” 68, 70; “The Way of Ecopiety: Holistic Education for Ecological Ethics,” 68, 69; “Writing the Body as Social Discourse,” 74–75 The Jungle (Sinclair), 81, 82 Kauffman, Janet, 85 Kerouac, Jack, 65; The Dharma Bums, 185 King Coal (Sinclair), 82 Kingsolver, Barbara, 57, 153; Animal Dreams, 159, 191; Prodigal Summer, 57, 85, 153–54 Koch, Kathleen, 183 Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen, 51, 52; Multimodal Discourse, 51 Kristeva, Julia, 75; Strangers to Ourselves, 75 Kuehls, Thom, 11, 39, 40; Beyond Sovereign Territory, 11, 39 Kumin, Maxine, 190 Kunstler, James Howard, viii LaBastille, Anne, 21 LaDuke, Winona, 10, 11; All Our Relations, 10, 188 Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still (Nelson), 85 Lang, Susan, 84; The Jump-Off Creek, 84; Small Rocks Rising, 84 Langton, Jane, 120 Larson, Erik, 178; Isaac’s Storm, 175, 177–78 The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), 81 Leaving the Land (Unger), 87 Le Guin, Ursula K., 68, 87, 89, 94, 95–96, 104, 191; Always Coming

Index

Home, 190; Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 71, 190; Dancing at the Edge of the World, 68; The Dispossessed, 95–96, 108, 191; The Lathe of Heaven, 64; The Word for World Is Forest, 94 Lem, Stanislaw, 93; Solaris, 93 Leopold, Aldo, 66; A Sand County Almanac, 81, 92 Lethem, Jonathan, 57–58; Girl in Landscape, 57–58, 87 Level 7 (Roshwald), 168 Levinas, Immanuel, 74–75 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 93 Liu, Alan, 5 The Lookout, 123 Lopez, Barry, 6, 80; outer mimesis, 6, 20, 31, 80 Lord, Nancy, 24–26, 27, 66; Fishcamp, 24–26 MacDonald, John D., 120, 121–28, 143, 182; Barrier Island, 122; Condominium, 122, 123–28, 182; A Flash of Green, 122–23, 125; Murder in the Wind, 121–22 Mama Day (Naylor), 86 Manning, Richard, 43; Inside Passage, 43 Margulis, Lynn, 8, 9, 10, 150; Symbiotic Planet, 9 “The Mark of Gideon,” 164–65 Martín & Meditations on the South Valley (Baca), 188 Marxism, 66, 70–71 Masumoto, David Mas, 32, 66 McConnaughey, Janet, 109; “Study Links Fat to Cancer Deaths,” 109 McKibben Bill, 72; The End of Nature, 72; Hope, Human and Wild, 186 The Meadow (Galvin), 85 Meeker, Joseph, 68 Moby-Dick (Melville), 81 Merchant, Carolyn, 19, 148 Merrill, Hugh, 122

213

Micheaux, Oscar, 82; The Conquest, 82; The Homesteader, 82 The Milagro Beanfield War (Nichols), 73–74, 86 Mills, Stephanie, 165; In Service of the Wild, 66, 165 Mimesis and the Human Animal (Storey), 8 Mitchell, John Hanson, 21 Miyoshi, Masao, 35, 38, 40 Momaday, M. Scott, 67 The Monkey Wrench Gang (Abbey), 73 Moore, Ruth, 83 Mora, Pat, 69; Borders, 188 Morgan, Mary, 120 The Mosquito Coast (Theroux), 85 Motherlines (Charnas), 90 Muir, John, 21, 190 Murphy, Mariko, 155–56, 158, 160–61 Mutual Assured Destruction, 168 My Year of Meats (Ozeki), 54, 86, 191 Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature (Goodbody), 81 The Nature of Cities (Bennett and Teague), 7 Nature’s End (Strieber and Kunetka), 190 Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind (Miyazaki), 114–15 Neeley, Barbara, 120 Neopets, 50 New Left, 73 Newman, Russell, 81 New Perspectives on Environmental Justice (Stein), 188 The Octopus (Norris), 81, 189 Oil! (Sinclair), 82 Oliver, Mary, 190 On the Beach (Shute), 89, 168 Orion, 45 Orion Afield, 13 Orr, David, 45

214

Index

Ortega y Gasset, José, 64 Ortiz, Simon, 10, 35, 59, 67, 69; Woven Stone, 191 Owens, Louis, 10 Paradise (Morrison), 86 paramodernist, 85 Paretsky, Sara, 55, 120; Blood Shot, 55 Pellow, David Naguib, 11; Resisting Global Toxics, 11 People of the Valley (Waters), 189 The Perfect Storm (Junger), 178 Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson), 3 Pikmin, 54 Plainsong (Haruf), 158 Planet Drum Foundation, 26 Poyer, David, 120 The Quest for Environmental Justice (Bullard), 188 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan, 83; South Moon Under, 83; The Yearling, 83 Reflections on Gender and Science (Keller), 188 Resident Evil, 169 Resident Evil: Apocalypse, 169 The Rest of the Earth (Henderson), 84 Riding the White Horse Home (Jordan), 71, 159, 189 Rischard, J. F., 36, 38, 113 River of Light (Peterson), 84 The River Why (Duncan), 85 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 101–7, 112, 170; Blue Mars, 39, 74, 96, 105, 106–7; Forty Signs of Rain, 170; Green Mars, 39, 74, 96, 104–6, 107; Mars Trilogy, 39, 74, 90, 96, 100–108, 192; Red Mars, 39, 74, 96, 100–104 Roman Catholic Church, 165 Romantic poetry, 66, 69 Rose, Steven, 89; Lifelines, 9 Rothenberg, Jerome, 67

Ruddick, Sara, 148 Ryden, Kent S., 20 Salleh, Ariel, 148 Sanders, Dori, 32; Her Own Place, 83, 189 Sanders, Scott Russell, 156–58, 159; The Force of Spirit, 157; Hunting for Hope, 157; Writing from the Center, 157 Sarasota Herald Tribune, 122 School Figures (Song), 191 Schumacher, E. F., 71 Scigaj, Leonard, 5–6; référance, 6 Scotti, R. A., 178; Sudden Sea, 175, 177, 178–79 Seed, John, 44 Seidler, Victor, 148 Serenity, 115 Sheets, Bob, and Jack Williams, 174, 175; Hurricane Watch, 174, 175–77 Shepard, Paul, 31 Shiki, 66 Shiva, Vandana, 11; Soil Not Oil, 111; Stolen Harvest, 11; Water Wars, 11 Siebert, Charles, 21–22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29; Wickerby, 21–22 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 10, 86; Almanac of the Dead, 40, 74, 85 Simpson, Robert H., 124, 181 Sims, 53 Smith, Annick, 32 Snyder, Gary, 32, 41, 42–43, 44, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 111–12, 115, 151, 185, 190, 191; “Coming into the Watershed,” 42–43; Earth House Hold, 64, 67, 70; Mountains and Rivers Without End, 191; No Nature, 68; The Old Ways, 67, 70; A Place in Space, 70; Regarding Wave, 70; Turtle Island, 70; “A Village Council for All Beings,” 44 The Solace of Open Spaces (Ehrlich), 190 The Soul Unearthed (Adams), 6 South America Mi Hija (Doubiago), 191 Soylent Green, 164, 165

Index

Sparrow, Robert, 101 Speth, James Gustave, 164; Red Sky at Morning, 187 Spoon River Anthology (Masters), 191 Starhawk, 45, 90; The Fifth Sacred Thing, 45, 90, 91 Steinbeck, John, 82; The Grapes of Wrath, 83; The Red Pony, 83 Steingraber, Sandra, 23, 56, 109, 186–87; Having Faith, 109, 187; Living Downstream, 2, 56, 186 Stephenson, Neal, 56, 112–13, 121; The Diamond Age, 112–14; Zodiac, 55, 56–57, 59 Sterling, Bruce, 97, 102, 108; Heavy Weather, 96–99, 108 Stewart, George R., 92; Earth Abides, 64, 83, 89, 92 Still Life with Insects (Kitely), 158 St. James, Elaine, 18; Simplify Your Life, 18 Stone, Christopher, 44 Straley, John, 120, 121, 138–42; The Curious Eat Themselves, 141–42; The Music of What Happens, 142; The Woman Who Married a Bear, 139–41 Stratton-Porter, Gene, 81, 83; Daughter of the Land, 83; The Harvester, 83 Suvin, Darko, 191 Suzuki, D. T., 65 Tagore, Rabindranoth, 66 Taoism, 67 Tapscott, Don, 52; Growing Up Digital, 52 The Temple of My Familiar (Walker), 86 That Water, Those Rocks (Haake), 81 There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (Hartman and Squires), 181 Thomashow, Mitchell, 40–41; Ecological Identity, 40–41 Thomson, Amy, 75; The Color of Distance, 75; Storyteller, 75; Through Alien Eyes, 75

215

Thoreau, Henry David, 19–20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 32, 65, 69, 190; Walden, 19–21, 23, 65, 81 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 10, 35, 39 Turner, Frederick, 8 Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (Anon.), 151 Van Gieson, Judith, 121, 134–38; Hotshots, 134; North of the Border, 134; The Other Side of Death, 134; Parrot Blues, 134, 137–38; Raptor, 134–36, 138; The Wolf Path, 134, 135, 136–37, 138 Vizenor, Gerald, 86; Bearheart, 85 Walk to the End of the World (Charnas), 90 War Day and the Journey Onward (Strieber and Kunetka), 91–92 Welch, Lew, 65 Wells, H. G., 83 We Who Are About To . . . (Russ), 93, 96 Whalen, Philip, 65 Wild Earth, 45 Wild Game (Bergon), 85 Williams, Raymond, 11 Wilson, E. O., 8 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 90, 191 Wordsworth, William, 66 World Environmental Organization, 39 Wright, Harold Bell, 81 Wright, Will, 61; Wild Knowledge, 61 Yamashiro, Shin, 81 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 188; Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 86, 188; Tropic of Orange, 39, 188 Zebrowski, Ernest, and Judith A. Howard, 180–81, 183; Category 5, 175, 180–82 Zero Population Growth/Population Connection, 165, 167

About the Author

Patrick D. Murphy, professor of English at the University of Central Florida, is the author of Farther Afield in the Study of Nature Oriented Literature and Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques; editor or coeditor of various ecocritical books including The Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook and Ecofeminist Literary Criticism and Pedagogy; and founding editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. His recent essays include “The Varieties of Environmental Literature in North America,” “Whose Planet Is It, Anyway? Environmentalism and Science Fiction,” and “Subjects, Identities, Bodies, and Selves: Siblings, Symbiotes, and the Ecological Stakes of Self-Perception.”

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