Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Jean Arnold, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1089-1090.

A NUMBER OF converging imperatives have prompted widespread professional attention to environmental readings in the humanities recently, generating ideas that can only promise increasingly focused development in the future. One general response to greater awareness of environmental context in texts has been "Here is a truly workable opportunity for the humanities to revitalize their mission and to make significant contributions to the culture at large!" In fact, scholarly pursuits arising from ecocriticism do appear like a breath of fresh air, in contrast to the recent "consensus" about the humanities, in which our profession suffers from "insularity" and "defeatism" (Robert Weisbuch, Chronicle of Higher Education 26 Mar. 1999: B4). When humanities students put on their "green glasses" to look at texts, excitement stirs, as the classroom yields its discursive space to issues of pressing contemporary importance. Yet to say that a critical focus on nature brings significant rewards to students and the culture at large is to state what any careful observer would consider obvious, as valuable as that perception is. Here, then, are two other ways that cultural and academic imperatives come to bear on the study of nature: ecocriticism is a scholarly site that engenders fertile cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural analysis.

Looking at texts for their ideas about the natural world results in a cross-fertilization of the humanities with other academic disciplines: when literature combines with biology, cultural theory, biochemistry, art, ecology, history, and other sciences, any combination of these fields forms a cauldron of brand-new perspectives. Through ecocritical practice, the humanities can play a unifying role in creating a new form of knowledge. The core of this intellectual activity spills over from English departments into the increasing numbers of environmental centers on campuses across the country, where humanists and scientists collaborate.

Furthermore, "green reading" crosses ethnic and cultural boundaries, not only expanding awareness but also encouraging an understanding of a diversity of practices that could become a mutually beneficial form of knowledge with practical applications. Far from being American, ecocriticism encompasses the very earth it studies, assuming its size and shape. Imagine literature courses that explore readings of gender in relation to nature; imagine courses that cover Native American, Asian, African, Hispanic, or other traditions and draw on their literatures depicting views of nature. Studying diverse interactions with the natural world can expand cross-cultural understandings enormously.

If, in the past, ecocriticism has appeared tangential to mainstream literary criticism, that view expresses the conceptual gap between nature and culture that inhabits our reasoning apparatus. We must recognize an element of artificiality in this perceived separation, for nature and culture often overlap as twinned processes. Simon Schama, for instance, argues that when we imagine even the most pristine of wildernesses, "the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product" (Landscape and Memory 9). The view that culture is produced by human beings and is therefore separate from nature bypasses the fact that all human culture resides in the natural world, that every penny of economic worth ultimately draws on resources of the natural world, and that we owe our very existence to its processes. To disregard the fact that human cultural production is embedded in the natural world is to entertain a selective vision that places humankind in a pre-Copernican position of centrality it does not deserve.

Human beings are obligated to monitor the technologies they have the intelligent capacity to create out of natural processes. Herein lies a moral commitment that the humanities can engender among the best and brightest minds of the future. Indeed, with technological freedom comes responsibility. Western culture must increase its awareness of the consequences of its beliefs and actions and must recognize that any action toward the natural world is eventually an action toward oneself and toward one's culture. If a mysterious nature resides outside our expanding human knowledge, the natural and cultural whole we do understand must be seen for the enclosed system that it is. It is time for all of us together to examine through criticism of written texts our own attitudes toward nature and to engender a sense of accountability for the havoc the culture's left hand wreaks on its right hand through shortsighted technological practices.

How does literary criticism come to bear on this dilemma, which increasingly urges its data on our perceptions? At a time when our cultural awareness of natural systems has grown into ecological concern, a historical inquiry into past cultural relations to nature can form a vital basis for our understanding. What, in the conceptual relation between Western culture and nature, has changed, and why? And how does an understanding of the history of this relation affect current environmental thought? We can ask, for example, what culturally honed lenses have shaped Western perceptions of the natural world. Dealing with literary works formed by pastoral, Romantic, transcendental, evolutionary, scientific, bioethical, and environmental sensibilities, we can delve into works by authors representing each genre's period: Theocritus, Vergil, Sidney, Marvell, Shakespeare, Romantic writers, scientific writers such as Darwin and his scientific community, and American writers from Thoreau and Austin through Leopold, Abbey, Carson, Snyder, and W. S. Merwin, for instance. In the end, one may notice an evolution in this literary history that mirrors an ideological progression from the view of humanity as having dominion over the earth to humanity as the humble recipient of a bounty in the natural scheme of things. As ecocriticism takes on the task of reexamining a culture's attitudes toward nature through its history, a variety of texts become useful: plays, films, poetry, scientific treatises, stories, journals, essays, and novels have their place in this type of curriculum. What these representative lists of authors, genres, and sensibilities reveal is that "there is not a single literary work anywhere that utterly defies ecocritical interpretation," as Scott Slovic has recently pointed out ("Ecocriticism: Trajectories in Theory and Practice," MLA Annual Convention, Dec. 1998).

Is our profession interested in avenues toward expanded awareness for our culture? Are we interested in redefining our role as central to academic inquiry? Should we then embrace environmental readings of literature? Yes, yes, and yes.

JEAN ARNOLD
Harvey Mudd College