Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Michael P. Cohen, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1092-1093.

READING BRECHT'S The Caucasian Chalk Circle the other day, I came across these lines:

Take note what men of old concluded:
That what there is shall go to those who are good for it,
Children to the motherly, that they prosper,
Carts to good drivers that they be driven well,
The Valley to the waterers, that it yield fruit.

I think this passage opens up as many textual, ideological, and historical problems as does evaluating the beautiful but problematic songs of Woodie Guthrie about the Tennessee Valley Authority and the dams on the Columbia River.

A particular piece of land, a valley, a homeland, may be of value to a particular person or community. But the love of the natural world in which human beings find themselves embedded is not a regional or local issue. Consider the obligatory scene in the proletarian novel where the immigrant mother leaves the sweatshop in an American city and reminds herself and her children of the green world of the old country.

Literary critics, like environmental historians, have been grappling with the social construction of the natural world for decades. In a modernist mode, this problem presents itself to historians of science with the changing conceptions of a complex of ideas known as ecology. There is not one ecology but a constellation of ecological ideologies, including that of a growing literature of the ecologies of cities.

Literary critics and historians have inherited the nature-culture duality as an ideological problem. Wilderness versus the city, nature versus nurture: these dualities are constantly breaking down and yet are surprisingly eternal in our discourse.

As a young student, I read few passages from Darwin and his supporters. But as Darwinian materials have proliferated in our own time, they have broken down categories of fiction and nonfiction. Ecology is, after all, a slice of evolutionary theory, or vice versa. The American literature requiring of the reader a sophisticated knowledge of ecological theory now includes scientists like Stephen J. Gould and E. O. Wilson; historians like William Cronon, Patricia Limerick, and Richard White; essayists like Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez; novelists like Wallace Stegner; and poets like Robert Haas, W. S. Merwin, and Pattianne Rogers.

I believe that writers like these require an interdisciplinary ecological criticism, and environment must be conceived of as more than their setting. Reading human beings into and out of texts is an activity that goes on in a real world humanity inhabits, a world undergoing, right now, significant climatic change as a result of concrete human activities.

It would be nice to believe, in the words of a late Borges poem, that "He who is grateful for the existence of music [...] / He who takes pleasure in tracing etymology / [...] These people, unaware, are saving the world." But it is not true that people, unaware, are saving the world. For most ecocritics, it is not sufficient to take pleasure in tracing an etymology. By definition, ecological literary criticism must be engaged. It wants to know but also wants to do.

I pursue case studies with my undergraduate students. Consider the following, not about literature, strictly speaking, but about the literature that counts to the people of arid regions.

We imagine most people living historically in temperate climates. Is this notion accurate, or does the language of climate distract us from human situations? This little case study involves global climate and our own, global conditions and the migration of human beings to particular places. I read to my students from a local environmental impact statement, for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, that "[b]ecause experience of stockmen was in more temperate climates, they knew little about the carrying capacity of these arid lands. Consequently, the range was stocked beyond its capacity, causing changes in plant, soil, and water relationships. Some speculate that the changes were permanent and irreversible [...]." When the document calls these people stockmen, it also calls their region rangeland. These men stocked my region during the era when the modern idea of climate evolved.

People don't easily adapt to changes in conditions. But what temperate climates constituted the previous experiences of these hypothetical stockmen? I tell my students that climate is referred to by zones, a term derived from a Greek word meaning "belt" and from classical ideas about the world's body. Ptolemy conceived global climatic differences in terms of "daylength," or differential illumination of zones. Climate, coming from the Greek klimata, indicates inclination of the sun, suggesting perspective.

I narrate the investigations leading to correlation of heat rather than of daylength with climatic zones. Beginning with Alexander von Humboldt's first isothermal map in 1817, maps of temperature were more accurately scaled to represent worldwide averages during individual months.

All these maps represent hot (tropical) and cold (arctic) zones, and the temperate falls between them. Students readily see that the classic idea of the temperate reads a human desire into global climate.

These human desires have been relational. Data on vegetation are used to infer temperature, and temperature data are used to infer vegetative growth. By the middle of the twentieth century, maps that correlated zonal climates and vegetative growth led to maps of growing seasons for such species as deciduous trees.

As we know, to our misfortune, climate is not historically fixed. Further, the Temperate Zone "contained some of the most extreme conditions on earth and was in fact highly intemperate in regard to temperature," as one climatologist puts it. In my region, the massive human response to extreme climate has included the Colorado River Storage Project, Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams, Lakes Powell and Mead, and consequently Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Consequently, a particular kind of culturally sanctioned reading by an interpretive community created the discourse that we now use to judge our past and create our future. But my brief survey leads to a set of questions for which I have no ready answers. Is there such a thing as a temperate climate? If so, what do we mean when we read or write about it? What reading or mapping of the world does our discourse create with that phrase?

How shall writers--these writers are quite possibly my students--now speak of their region and its recent human history or place this history in a global context? Some who continue to speak of wilderness argue with those who prefer the term rangeland. Neither term is rooted in local conditions or takes cognizance of changing global climates. Ought they? Is is possible that unexamined uses of language lead to careless decisions?

Someone might say that I am not, strictly speaking, teaching the study of literature, and that is true. Environmental impact statements are not belles lettres, and that is my point. Nature writing isn't just for the armchair hikers among us. My students will write the world and will need literacy for this endeavor.

Over the years I have taught many more classes in sophomore composition than in nature writing or in American literature. My students, who live in a state where about seventy percent of the land is federal land, write about their environment by choice. For my students' purposes, ecocriticism needs to inform personal and political actions, in the same way that feminist criticism was able to do only a few decades ago. As a teacher, I follow an old cliché; I "think globally and act locally," teaching local students how to read and write about the changes in their environments.

MICHAEL P. COHEN
Southern Utah University