Writing for an Endangeredworld

Writing for an Endangered World Lawrence Buell Writing for an EndangeredWorld LITERATURE, CULTURE, AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE U.S. AND BEYOND Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2001 Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an endangered world: literature, culture, and environment in the U.S. and beyond / Lawrence Buell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00449-3 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. Environmental protection in literature. 3. English literature—History and criticism. 4. Environmental policy in literature. 5. Nature conservation in literature. 6. Landscape in literature. 7. Ecology in literature. 8. Nature in literature. I. Title. PS169.E25 B84 2001 810.9′355—dc21 00–049796 For Kim Contents Introduction 1 “America the Beautiful,” Jane Addams, and John Muir 9 Environmental Imagination and Environmental Unconscious 18 Outline of This Book 27 1 Toxic Discourse 30 The Toxic Denominator 32 Toxic Discourse Anatomized 35 Toxicity, Risk, and Literary Imagination 45 2 The Place of Place 55 The Elusiveness of Place 59 Five Dimensions of Place-Connectedness 64 The Importance of Place Imagination 74 Retrieval of the Unloved Place: Wideman 78 3 Flâneur’s Progress: Reinhabiting the City 84 Romantic Urbanism: Whitman, Olmsted, and Others 90 High Modernism and Modern Urban Theory 103 Whitmanian Modernism: William Carlos Williams as Bioregionalist 109 Later Trajectories 120 4 Discourses of Determinism 129 Urban Fiction from Dickens through Wright 131 Rurality as Fate 143 Consolations of Determinism: Dreiser and Jeffers 149 Observing Limits in Literature and Life: Berry and Brooks 157 Speaking for the Determined: Addams 167 viii £ 5 Modernization and the Claims of the Natural World: Faulkner and Leopold 170 Faulkner as Environmental Historian 171 Go Down, Moses and Environmental Unconscious 177 Faulkner, Leopold, and Ecological Ethics 183 6 Global Commons as Resource and as Icon: Imagining Oceans and Whales 196 Resymbolizing Ocean 199 Moby-Dick and the Hierarchies of Nation, Culture, and Species 205 Imagining Interspeciesism: The Lure of the Megafauna 214 7 The Misery of Beasts and Humans: Nonanthropo- centric Ethics versus Environmental Justice 224 Schisms 225 Mediations 236 8 Watershed Aesthetics 243 From River to Watershed 244 Modern Watershed Consciousness: Mary Austin to the Present 252 Notes 267 Acknowledgments 341 Index 345 Writing for an Endangered World Introduction Everyone knows enough to pursue what he does not know, but no one knows enough to pursue what he already knows. Everyone knows enough to condemn what he takes to be no good, but no one knows enough to condemn what he has already taken to be good. This is how the great confusion comes about, blotting out the brightness of sun and moon above, searing the vigor of hills and streams below, overturning the round of the four seasons in between. There is no insect that creeps and crawls, no crea- ture that flutters and flies that has not lost its inborn nature. So great is the confusion of the world that comes from coveting knowledge! —Chuang Tzu, “Rifling Trunks,” trans. Burton Watson This is my second book about environmental imagination, written in the conviction that environmental crisis is not merely one of economic resources, public health, and political gridlock. Not by alleviation of these alone will the ingredient “missing from American environmental policy today” be supplied: “a coherent vision of the common environmental good that is sufficiently compelling to generate sustained public support.” As sociologist Ulrich Beck remarks about debates over species extinction: “only if nature is brought into people’s everyday images, into the stories they tell, can its beauty and its suffering be seen and focused on.” The success of all environmentalist efforts finally hinges not on “some highly developed technology, or some arcane new science” but on “a state of mind”: on attitudes, feelings, images, narratives. That the advertising budget of U.S. corporations exceeds the com- bined budgets of all the nation’s institutions of higher learning is crude but telling evidence that trust in the power of imagination is not a literary scholar’s idiosyncrasy. It is evidence too, of course, that imagination is not always a “force for good.” Hence in part the recurring desire to sequester art from the world of affairs. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” £ insists W. H. Auden’s elegy to fellow poet W. B. Yeats, reacting against what Auden took to be misuse of imagination in ways that abet- ted fascism. Shelley’s grandiose claim that “Poets are the unacknowl- edged legislators of the World” made Auden shudder: “Sounds more like the secret police to me.” But though his distaste for subjugating art to didacticism was understandable, it remains that acts of environmental imagination, whatever anyone thinks to the contrary, potentially register and energize at least four kinds of engagement with the world. They may connect readers vicariously with others’ experience, suffering, pain: that of nonhumans as well as humans. They may reconnect readers with places they have been and send them where they would otherwise never physically go. They may direct thought toward alterna- tive futures. And they may affect one’s caring for the physical world: make it feel more or less precious or endangered or disposable. All this may befall a moderately attentive reader reading about a cherished, abused, or endangered place. This book takes up a wide range of texts in light of these convictions. Its protagonists are largely U.S. writers from the late s to today. I stretch the category of “creative writer,” however, to include eloquent observers who did not think of themselves as artists. So my dramatis personae include not only Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mary Austin, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, John Edgar Wideman, and Linda Hogan but also Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Addams, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and others who have operated across the conventionally drawn border between “literary” and “nonliterary.” Most chapters are organized partly along historical lines, not as con- tinuous narratives but as episodes in the history of environmental writing since the beginnings of industrialization. Obviously concern for environment did not originate a mere two centuries ago, though the term itself apparently did not enter English usage until the s. Insofar as human beings are biohistorical creatures constructing themselves in interaction with surroundings they cannot not inhabit, all their artifacts may be expected to bear traces of that. It makes sense that the reach of “ecocriticism”—the omnibus term by £ which the new polyform literature and environment studies movement has come to be labeled, especially in the United States—should extend from the oldest surviving texts to works of the present moment. This is borne out by the sweep of such books as Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadows of Civilization and Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World, both of which start with a reading of the Sumer- ian epic Gilgamesh as an allegory of settlement culture’s triumph over hunter-gatherer culture, town over forest. Classic texts and genres rightly continue to exert influence. But with accelerated technosocial change has come greatly intensified anxiety about “the environment,” and with it a redirection of traditional discourses and a plethora of new ones. By “environment(al),” I refer both to “natural” and “human-built” dimensions of the palpable world. Though I shall also insist on the distinction, one must also blur it by recourse to the more comprehensive term. Human transformations of physical nature have made the two realms increasingly indistinguishable. Perhaps only the last half-century has witnessed what Bill McKibben apocalyptically calls “the end of nature”: a degree of modification so profound that we shall never again encounter a pristine physical environment. But Karl Marx was not far wrong in claiming that by the mid-s second nature (nature as re- processed by human labor) had effectively dominated first nature worldwide. What we loosely call “nature” has often long since become “organic machine,” as Richard White calls the painstakingly engineered, computer-monitored Columbia River of today. Indeed, the nature- culture distinction itself is an anthropogenic product, deriving in the first instance from the transition from nomadism to settlement that began millennia ago in southwestern Asia. Even those who know better can lapse into loose talk about the “natural” look of an exurban landscape. Few poets have been more aware than Robert Frost of countryside as historical artifact; yet one can also catch him at flat-footed moments of mental motoring, musing that “The mineral drops that explode/To drive my ton of car/Are limited to the road,” and “have almost nothing to do/With the absolute light and rest/The universal blue/And local green suggest.” Frost here seems oblivious to automotive effects, unless one gives a huge benefit £ of the doubt to that “almost.” Not that he should be too chastised for in- souciance. Doubtless this was a country road; and even if it had been the I- of today, which winds through miles of lovely Vermont and New Hampshire countryside, civil engineering has done its utmost to preserve the illusion of nature and machines peacefully coexisting in separate spaces. You have to make the effort to notice the bedraggled roadside trees, as well as the ecological studies of how bird and animal species avoid major highways, to gauge the impact. Even warier imag- inings of the early automotive era don’t see that far, though they resist binary naïveté in some arresting ways.

Load more