Welcome to a new semester! Here is some important info for you about purchasing textbooks for your Fall 2024 classes.
Laker Book Bundle
Last year Roosevelt initiated a program meant to potentially save you money on your textbooks for your classes. The program is called “Laker Book Bundle” and all of you are automatically enrolled.
The way this works is that you will be charged $22.50 per credit hour you are enrolled this semester. For instance, 12 credit hours will cost you $270.00 for the semester.
You will receive rental books for all of your enrolled classes through the bookstore and then these must be returned by the last day of finals (which is Sat., December 14, 2024, but I’d go with Friday the 13th just to be safe).
If you want to stay in the program, you don’t need to do anything and your account will automatically be charged the designated amount on September 11, 2024.
Do the math for your book costs!
The purpose of this program is to streamline the book renting process and to save you money. For many of you, the Laker Book Bundle will be a good deal and will save you money as intended — some textbooks can be very expensive! However, depending on your class schedule and your textbook requirements, there is a chance that the Laker Book Bundle price could be more than the outright total for your books for the semester.
Two things to consider about cost:
Rent or Buy: Do you want to buy some of your books to keep, or do you want to rent all of your textbooks? Laker Book Bundle is only for rentals, though you have the option of buying your book(s) for an additional charge.
Total Cost: Add up the cost of your required books for the semester and compare against the Laker Book Bundle price. You can find the required textbooks for all of your courses through the University Bookstore website.
Opting out:
If you decide to opt out of the Laker Book Bundle program, you can do so at roosevelt.edu/lakerbookbundle and follow the prompts. Make sure you keep these important deadline mind!
The deadline to opt out is September 10, 2024
If you don’t opt out your account will be charged automatically on September 11, 2024
If you have any questions about this, let me know and I’ll try to track down answers for you!
Welcome to a new semester! Here is some important info for you about purchasing textbooks for your Fall 2023 classes. Things are new this year so read on . . .
Laker Book Bundle
This year Roosevelt has initiated a program meant to potentially save you money on your textbooks for your classes. The program is called “Laker Book Bundle” and all of you are automatically enrolled.
The way this works is that you will be charged $22.50 per credit hour you are enrolled this semester. For instance, 12 credit hours will cost you $270.00 for the semester.
You will receive rental books for all of your enrolled classes through the bookstore and then these must be returned by December 16, 2023.
If you want to stay in the program, you don’t need to do anything and your account will automatically be charged the designated amount on September 5, 2023.
Do the math for your book costs!
The purpose of this program is to streamline the book renting process and to save you money. For many of you, the Laker Book Bundle will be a good deal and will save you money as intended — some textbooks can be very expensive! However, depending on your class lineup, there is a chance that the Laker Book Bundle price could be more than the outright total for your books for the semester.
Two things to consider about cost:
Rent or Buy: Do you want to buy some of your books to keep, or do you want to rent all of your textbooks? Laker Book Bundle is only for rentals.
Total Cost: Add up the cost of your required books for the semester and compare against the Laker Book Bundle price. You can find the required textbooks for all of your courses through the University Bookstore website.
Opting out:
If you decide to opt out of the Laker Book Bundle program, you can do so at roosevelt.edu/lakerbookbundle and follow the prompts. Make sure you keep these important deadline mind!
The deadline to opt out is September 4, 2023
If you don’t opt out your account will be charged automatically on September 5, 2023
If you have any questions about this, let me know and I’ll try to track down answers for you!
Warm tidings on a cold December morning: “Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side,” an essay I co-wrote about Eden Place Nature Center with Michael Howard for the book Wildness: Relations of People and Place (U. Chicago P., 2017), has been reprinted in the Fall 2017 issue of The Leopold Outlook magazine.
Photo: Gavin Van Horn
Check out the magazine’s back issues here and learn more about the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s work. And many thanks to my co-author Michael Howard as well as the co-editors of Wildness, Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, for encouraging us to take on this project.
This March saw the publication of the new book Wildness: Relations of People and Place, edited by Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017), an environmental humanities project sponsored by the Center for Humans and Nature. Part 3 of the book, entitled Urban Wild, includes an essay I co-wrote with Mr. Michael Howard, a Chicago community leader, conservationist, and environmental educator: “Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side: Stories of People and Nature at Eden Place Nature Center.”
I’m fortunate to have been part of this wonderful project, which began with a writer’s retreat in September of 2014 in Crested Butte, CO, featuring writing workshops by the award-winning scientist and nature writer, Robert Michael Pyle (whose own essay follows a poem by none other than the legendary Gary Snyder). My interviews and writing sessions with Mr. Howard at Eden Place in 2015, and the three semesters I’ve worked there with my students each fall since 2014, have made getting a sense of this special place in the world an immensely gratifying experience. Thanks to Gavin and John for shepherding this project through its publication!
From the book’s promo page on the Univ. of Chicago Press website:
Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will to be, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild.
Eden Place Nature Center, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)
This book charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. As they show, far from being an all or nothing proposition, wildness exists in variations and degrees that range from cultivated soils to multigenerational forests to sunflowers pushing through cracks in a city alley. Spanning diverse geographies, these essays celebrate the continuum of wildness, revealing the many ways in which human communities can nurture, adapt to, and thrive alongside their wild nonhuman kin.
From the contoured lands of Wisconsin’s Driftless region to remote Alaska, from the amazing adaptations of animals and plants living in the concrete jungle to indigenous lands and harvest ceremonies, from backyards to reclaimed urban industrial sites, from microcosms to bioregions and atmospheres, manifestations of wildness are everywhere. With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.
Visit the Center for Humans and Nature’s Wildness website for upcoming events and a series of related short films, including one of Michael Howard and Michael Bryson talking about Eden Place.
Click on the image above to go to the video interview of Michael Howard (pictured) and Michael Bryson at Eden Place Nature Center.
Tomorrow afternoon my SUST 340 Policy, Law, & Ethics class at Roosevelt University’s Chicago Campus proudly hosts a special presentation entitled “City Creatures: Urban Biodiversity in Chicago” at 3:30 p.m. in Roosevelt’s LEED-Gold Wabash Building, Room 1214. Dr. Gavin Van Horn of the Center for Humans and Nature will discuss his recent book, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago Press), published in November 2015; and then engage in dialogue with my students and the RU community about urban biodiversity from the perspective of the environmental humanities.
Dr. Van Horn is the co-editor of City Creatures and is the Director of Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature, as well as editor of the widely-read City Creatures blog. His work focuses particularly on how place-based values are developed and strengthened in dialogue with local landscapes. He continues to explore cultural perceptions of wildlife; place-based ethics; endangered species recovery, ethics, and policy; and the values involved in ecological restoration projects, community gardening, and wildlife management.
This special event is free and open to the public, and is hosted by students in SUST 340 Policy, Law, & Ethics. A limited number of signed copies will be available for purchase ($30 cash) and discount order forms will be available.
Videoconference Option: For those who cannot attend in person, the City Creatures event will be video- and teleconferenced live via Zoom as well as recorded, so that you may watch and/or listen from anywhere in the world. Login information is here:
Topic: City Creatures at RU Presentation 11 Apr 2016
Time: Apr 12, 2016 3:30 PM (GMT-5:00) Central Time (US and Canada)
We usually think of cities as the domain of humans—but we are just one of thousands of species that call the urban landscape home. Chicago residents knowingly move among familiar creatures like squirrels, pigeons, and dogs, but might be surprised to learn about all the leafhoppers and water bears, black-crowned night herons and bison, beavers and massasauga rattlesnakes that are living alongside them. City Creatures introduces readers to an astonishing diversity of urban wildlife with a unique and accessible mix of essays, poetry, paintings, and photographs.
The contributors bring a story-based approach to this urban safari, taking readers on birding expeditions to the Magic Hedge at Montrose Harbor on the North Side, canoe trips down the South Fork of the Chicago River (better known as Bubbly Creek), and insect-collecting forays or restoration work days in the suburban forest preserves.
The book is organized into six sections, each highlighting one type of place in which people might encounter animals in the city and suburbs. For example, schoolyard chickens and warrior wasps populate “Backyard Diversity,” live giraffes loom at the zoo and taxidermy-in-progress pheasants fascinate museum-goers in “Animals on Display,” and a chorus of deep-freeze frogs awaits in “Water Worlds.”
Although the book is rooted in Chicago’s landscape, nature lovers from cities around the globe will find a wealth of urban animal encounters that will open their senses to a new world that has been there all along. Its powerful combination of insightful narratives, numinous poetry, and full-color art throughout will help readers see the city—and the creatures who share it with us—in an entirely new light.
Leonard Dubkin (1905-1972) was a businessman, journalist, naturalist, and nature writer who lived and worked in Chicago.A contemporary of the much more well-known Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel, Dubkin is a long-neglected urban nature writer of the 20th century whose journalism and books provide a unique and fascinating window into Chicago’s environmental history and urban landscape during a period of immense social and biological change in America’s cities.
Dubkin’s life was both humble and extraordinary, rife with early obstacles and replete with fascinating episodes worthy of a melodramatic up-from-his-bootstraps narrative. His early years were marked by poverty and a dogged determination to make something of himself. Dubkin was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1905; his family emigrated soon thereafter to the United States and in 1907 they settled on the near West Side of Chicago, an area of the city that served as a portal for Jewish immigrants, particularly those of Eastern-European ancestry. One of seven children and the oldest boy of the family, young Leonard cultivated an interest in the natural world from the time he was nine years old, and spent a great deal of time exploring various neighborhoods in the city in search of birds, insects, and other wild creatures in the scraps of natural areas within the urban environment he would later recall as some of his “secret places.”[i]
An alley in a Chicago slum, c. 1908 (source: Chicago Historical Society)
Dubkin’s family knew poverty on a daily basis during his early years in Chicago, as did many in their tenement neighborhood characterized by overcrowding and economic hardship. Dubkin’s father was chronically ill with lead poisoning from his work as a housepainter in Russia, and was unable to work during his time in Chicago; his mother kept the family going by taking in sewing work and accepting the help of local Jewish charities. Though he left school before finishing eighth grade so he could work to help support his family, Dubkin nevertheless kept collecting animal specimens, exploring out-of-the-way pockets of urban nature, writing down his observations in a journal, and cultivating an ambition to become a naturalist. He also fought his own battle with a debilitating illness: around the age of 15, he contracted encephalitis and lapsed into a coma that lasted almost a year during which he resided at a sanitarium in nearby Winfield, Illinois. Awakening suddenly to the surprise of doctors and delight of his family, Dubkin built up his strength during a long recovery period by playing tennis — and such was his athleticism that he soon became a ranked player in the city public leagues.
From childhood onward, Dubkin worked a variety of jobs — from cleaning out taverns to driving a cab to starting his own businesses — to support himself and his family, and though a modest and relatively unassuming person in general, he possessed an undeniably entrepreneurial spirit. As a young man and aspiring author determined, in rather romantic fashion, to cultivate the attitude and garner the life experiences he felt were necessary to a writer, he left Chicago and traveled around the country by riding the rails, hobo-style. When he ran short of money, he would stop at a city of some size and drum up work as a reporter for one of the local papers for awhile, before catching another freight train for different pastures. In this way over a period of perhaps two years or so, he wrote briefly for papers such as the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Sacramento Bee, honing his journalism skills and soaking up impressions of different places and people. After his return to Chicago, he made the city his home the remainder of his life, despite the fact that his mother and six siblings all relocated to Los Angeles.
Dubkin once lost a job as Chicago Daily News reporter after blowing an assignment to cover a murder story (itself a fascinating and humorous anecdote he would later recount as the “Racine Case” in his two of his books) by watching squirrels in the attic of the primary suspect’s home while the latter returned to the scene of the crime and was caught by police. Ironically, he claimed to be grateful for being set free, as writing about human affairs bored him in comparison to his passion for chronicling the activities of the natural world. Yet the demands of paying the rent kept him hustling after work even as he nurtured his artistic inclinations and fascination with nature. After several months of fruitlessly searching for newspaper work, he started a one-man public relations firm which lasted a few years, and it was through his publicity work for a local radio station that he met actress and his future wife, Muriel Schwartz, at a radio industry party. During the early years of the Great Depression, he capitalized on (and further cemented) his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s streets and neighborhoods by working as a cab driver. In the 1930s, he started yet another business enterprise: a talent directory of Chicago stage and radio actors, which he updated and published yearly up through the mid-1950s.
Undated photo of Dubkin in his office at Lerner Newspapers in Chicago (source: P. Dubkin Yearwood)
Finally, from the late ’50s onward, he worked full-time as a reporter and columnist for Lerner Newspapers, which produced a diverse offering of neighborhood weeklies for various Chicago neighborhoods. This great variety of experiences and jobs exemplifies not just his industriousness and entrepreneurship, but also the scope and depth of his creative energies. While his day jobs limited his natural history and creative writing activities to being after-hours pursuits rather than his primary focus, they provided him a measure of middle-class economic stability and even supplied him with a narrative theme he would explore in several books — the ongoing tension between the impulse to observe and commune with urban nature and the demands of earning a living in modern America.
As his keeping of a childhood nature journal indicates, Dubkin carved out an early identity as a naturalist-writer, and his facility with language earned him a journalism gig as a young teenager when he started writing a weekly nature column in the Saturday children’s page of the Chicago Daily News. Not only did this employment eventually lead to life-long work in journalism as a reporter, columnist, and urban naturalist, it provided the occasion for a transformative meeting between young Dubkin and one of Chicago’s greatest historical figures. As Dubkin recounts, he would take his handwritten drafts to nearby Hull House to type them up, for the staff allowed him to use their office equipment. When one of these times the “head lady” asked him what he was working on, he stunned her by replying he was typing up his articles for the Daily News and showed her a copy of his latest column which he happened to have in his pocket for just such an auspicious occasion.
She read my article, which was about migratory instinct in birds. “Do you always write about nature?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m going to be a naturalist when I grow up.”
“Don’t you think you need a typewriter to be a naturalist?”
“Sure I do. And some day I’m going to be able to afford to buy one.”
She asked me where I lived, and after I told her she walked away. A few days later a man delivered a package to our house, addressed to me. Inside was a brand new typewriter from the kind lady at Hull House. Her name was Jane Addams. (My Secret Places 17)
Because his formal education was cut short, Dubkin never became a professional scientist as he once fantasized; instead of fretting over this missed opportunity, though, he transformed it into a narrative theme. His writings are peppered with amusing encounters between himself, as the amateur naturalist/narrator, and professional scientists from Chicago-area institutions. The contrasts he drew between the two perspectives illustrate not just his respect for (and, to some degree, insecurity about) the authority of science as arbiter of knowledge, but also his view that institutionalized science could be cold and detached.
Nevertheless, Dubkin was as much enthralled by science as he was by nature itself, and from an early age steeped himself in the writings of naturalists from Darwin to Ernest Thompson Seton. He also held scientists such as Darwin, Mendel, and Einstein in the highest regard — not just for their technical acumen and writing ability, but for their ability to think critically and experimentally, to “come to . . . [nature] with a question, with just the right question, and who have the kind of minds that know how to go about getting an answer” (Natural History of a Yard 55). Consequently, Dubkin always grounded his observations of the natural world in his extensive reading of both popular and technical scientific literature, which he accessed not through formal training but in the diverse collections of Chicago’s public libraries — his substitute for a university experience.
In contrast to his experiences with science, Dubkin’s literary ambitions were much more fully realized and he carved out a singular niche as an urban naturalist-writer. His early dreams of becoming a naturalist and a writer were fulfilled most resoundingly by his string of urban nature writing books, published between 1944 and 1972, which creatively fused autobiography and natural history. These works included The Murmur of Wings (1944), Enchanted Streets (1947), The White Lady (1952), Wolf Point (1953), The Natural History of a Yard (1955), and My Secret Places (1972). Dubkin was a dedicated and prolific writer who kept a daily journal throughout his life; wrote hundreds of letters to family and friends, most notably to his wife, Muriel, who was both his muse and sounding-board; published hundreds of newspaper columns and scores of book reviews; and developed a variety of creative projects that never saw the light of day, including novels and a natural history from the viewpoint of the family dog amusingly entitled “Letters from Pepsi.”
As a journalist, Dubkin worked for several papers penning nature columns over the course of his life, including that youthful gig the Chicago Daily News and a brief stint at the Chicago Tribune that ended abruptly when he offended the Tribune’s publisher, Robert R. McCormick, by impugning the character and motives of life-list-constructing “bird lovers” — one of whom was McCormick’s wife. Later on, from the late 1950s until his death in 1972, he maintained a long-standing position at Lerner Newspapers in Chicago as a news reporter and nature writer; his popular “Birds and Bees” column containing his folksy yet scientifically informed observations on urban nature ran for nearly 30 years, and enjoyed a wide and dedicated readership throughout the city.
Carbon copy of the dust-jacket blurb by Loren Eiseley, c. 1972 (source: P. Dubkin Yearwood)
Once established as an accomplished naturalist-writer, Dubkin was in demand to pen reviews of books by his contemporary nature writers for such venues as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. He also maintained friendships and regular correspondence with important writers, naturalists, and scientists of his day, from legendary Chicago writer Nelson Algren to biologist and environmental writer Rachel Carson to anthropologist and essayist Loren Eiseley. In fact, it is Eiseley who penned what might be the most eloquent tribute to Dubkin’s skill and craftsmanship as a naturalist-writer. In a 1972 letter to Dubkin he included a carbon copy of a dust jacket blurb for Dubkin’s final book, My Secret Places:
Mr. Dubkin has no parallel as the naturalist of the city and its environs. An able and expert journalist, he has the heart and eye of a child. It is this which convinces those of us lost in adult affairs that there is still truly a hidden place between the last billboard and the viaduct, a place as worthy of preservation as a forest. In such spots a rare human gentleness can sometimes be nurtured. Leonard Dubkin is a graduate of that kind of innocent back lot school which Americans are close to losing forever. His work is not only readable, it is utterly sincere.[ii]
Eiseley concisely and poetically captures here several salient qualities of Dubkin’s perspective on nature and his literary voice. An esteemed member of the scientific establishment (an establishment that both inspired and intimidated Dubkin) and a writer who produced hard-to-categorize yet utterly compelling works that blended natural history, evolutionary theory, philosophy of science, and autobiography, Eiseley recognized not just the singularity of Dubkin’s unique perspective and literary ability but also the value of Dubkin’s lifelong efforts to bring the neglected yet fascinating manifestations of urban nature to light.
Notes
[i] The biographical information in this essay on Dubkin is culled from the author’s interviews with Dubkin’s daughter, Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, as well as from Yearwood’s short essay “Family Memoir: The Urban Nature Lover.”
[ii] This letter is part of the extensive manuscript collection of Dubkin’s writings and correspondence — including letters, journals, newspaper columns, book reviews, book manuscripts, fiction, poetry, and unpublished manuscripts — maintained by Pauline Dubkin Yearwood.
Works Cited
Dubkin, Leonard. Enchanted Streets: The Unlikely Adventures of an Urban Nature Lover. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1947.
—. The Murmur of Wings. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944.
—. My Secret Places: One Man’s Love Affair with Nature in the City. New York: David McKay, Inc., 1972.
—. The Natural History of a Yard. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1955.
—. Personal papers. Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, Chicago, IL.
—. The White Lady. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952.
—. Wolf Point: An Adventure in History. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953.
Eiseley, Loren. Letter to Leonard Dubkin. 12 February 1972.
Yearwood, Pauline Dubkin. “Family Memoir: The Urban Nature Lover.” Chicago Jewish History (Fall 2005): 4-5.
—. Personal interview. 15 March and 18 April 2007.
A somewhat interesting article from yesterday’s NY Times about literature-and-environment courses that are beginning to address issues of climate change. Unfortunately, the author didn’t know about Prof. Gary Wolfe’s groundbreaking seminar here at Roosevelt this spring, “Sustainability in Film and Fiction,” as that would’ve been a great example to profile here. Here’s the full text of the article:
EUGENE, Ore. — University courses on global warming have become common, and Prof. Stephanie LeMenager’s new class here at the University of Oregon has all the expected, alarming elements: rising oceans, displaced populations, political conflict, endangered animals.
The goal of this class, however, is not to marshal evidence for climate change as a human-caused crisis, or to measure its effects — the reality and severity of it are taken as given — but how to think about it, prepare for it and respond to it. Instead of scientific texts, the class, “The Cultures of Climate Change,” focuses on films, poetry, photography, essays and a heavy dose of the mushrooming subgenre of speculative fiction known as climate fiction, or cli-fi, novels like “Odds Against Tomorrow,” by Nathaniel Rich, and “Solar,” by Ian McEwan.
“Speculative fiction allows a kind of scenario-imagining, not only about the unfolding crisis but also about adaptations and survival strategies,” Professor LeMenager said. “The time isn’t to reflect on the end of the world, but on how to meet it. We want to apply our humanities skills pragmatically to this problem.”
The class reflects a push by universities to meld traditionally separate disciplines; Professor LeMenager joined the university last year to teach both literature and environmental studies.
Her course also shows how broadly most of academia and a younger generation have moved beyond debating global warming to accepting it as one of society’s central challenges. That is especially true in places like Eugene, a verdant and damp city, friendly to the cyclist and inconvenient to the motorist, where ordering coffee in a disposable cup can elicit disapproving looks. Oregon was a pioneer of environmental studies, and Professor LeMenager’s students tend to share her activist bent, eagerly discussing in a recent session the role that the arts and education can play in galvanizing people around an issue.
To some extent, the course is feeding off a larger literary trend. Novels set against a backdrop of ruinous climate change have rapidly gained in number, popularity and critical acclaim over the last few years, works like “The Windup Girl,” by Paolo Bacigalupi; “Finitude,” by Hamish MacDonald; “From Here,” by Daniel Kramb; and “The Carbon Diaries 2015,” by Saci Lloyd. Well-known writers have joined the trend, including Barbara Kingsolver, with “Flight Behavior,” and Mr. McEwan.
And with remarkable speed — Ms. Kingsolver’s and Mr. Rich’s books were published less than a year ago — those works have landed on syllabuses at colleges. They have turned up in courses on literature and on environmental issues, like the one here, or in a similar but broader class, “The Political Ecology of Imagination,” part of a master’s degree program in liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
For now, Professor LeMenager’s class is open only to graduate students, with some working on degrees in environmental studies, others in English and one in geography, and it can have the rarefied feel of a literature seminar. Fueled by readings from Susan Sontag and Jacques Derrida, the students discuss the meaning of terms like “spectacle” and “witness,” and debate the drawbacks of cultural media that approach climate change from the developed world’s perspective.
Climate novels fit into a long tradition of speculative fiction that pictures the future after assorted catastrophes. First came external forces like aliens or geological upheaval, and then, in the postwar period, came disasters of our own making.
Novels like “On the Beach,” by Nevil Shute, and “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” by Walter M. Miller Jr., and films like “The Book of Eli,” offered a world after nuclear war. Stephen King’s “The Stand,” Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood,” and films like “12 Monkeys” and “I Am Legend” imagined the aftermath of biological tampering gone horribly wrong.
“You can argue that that is a dominant theme of postwar fiction, trying to grapple with the fragility of our existence, where the world can end at any time,” Mr. Rich said. Before long, most colleges will “have a course on the contemporary novel and the environment,” he said. “It surprises me that even more writers aren’t engaging with it.”
The climate-change canon dates back at least as far as “The Drowned World,” a 1962 novel by J. G. Ballard with a small but ardent following. “The Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 nonfiction best seller, mentions the potential dangers of the greenhouse effect, and the 1973 film “Soylent Green,” best remembered for its grisly vision of a world with too many people and too little food, is set in a hotter future.
The recent climate fiction has characters whose concerns extend well beyond the climate, some of it is set in a present or near future when disaster still seems remote, and it can be deeply satirical in tone. In other words, if the authors are aiming for political consciousness-raising, the effort is more veiled than in novels of earlier times like “The Jungle” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Professor LeMenager’s syllabus includes extensive nonfiction writing and film, alongside the fiction, and she said she had little interest in truly apocalyptic scenarios or those that are scientifically dubious. She does not, for example, show her students “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2004 film about an ice age caused by global warming that was a huge hit despite being panned by critics and scientists alike, though she says everyone asks her about it.
Stephen Siperstein, one of her students, recalled showing the documentary “Chasing Ice,” about disappearing glaciers, to a class of undergraduates, leaving several of them in tears. Em Jackson talked of leading groups on glacier tours, and the profound effect they had on people. Another student, Shane Hall, noted that people experience the weather, while the notion of climate is a more abstract concept that can often be communicated only through media — from photography to sober scientific articles to futuristic fiction.
“In this sense,” he said, “climate change itself is a form of story we have to tell.”
Part of an extensive series by this venerable university press, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment is a detailed and comprehensive overview of the many relations among literature, criticism, and the natural environment. Author Timothy Clark of Durham University has produced an ambitious, nuanced, and critically adept introduction to the heterogeneous field of ecocriticism that has emerged as an important current of cultural studies over the past two decades. Explicitly pitched to professors as a pedagogical resource but also valuable as a survey of a rapidly maturing academic field, this slim but substantive book is immensely useful for students and professional scholars alike. Clark effectively models the praxis of textual interpretation and intellectual engagement in his writing, which is unfailingly smart and stylistically lucid.
While several good overviews of ecocriticism have been published previously, some are more than 15 years old while others are edited volumes containing a diverse array of essays written by different scholars. Clark’s book is therefore both a much-needed update on as well as coherent assessment of the present state of ecocriticism, which he defines as the “study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, usually considered from out of the current global environmental crisis and its revisionist challenge to given modes of thought and practice” (xiii). While Clark sees ecocriticism as “a provocative misfit in literary and cultural debate” (3) since it is a relatively young and unapologetically interdisciplinary field of inquiry, he convincingly documents its contemporary relevance as a means of bringing the humanities to bear on matters of ecological and political import.
Clark provides a 30,000-foot-high perspective on a sprawling and still-evolving critical movement that includes not just the study of Anglo-American nature writing (its historic core concern), but also embraces ecofeminism, critical theory, postcolonial studies, evolutionary biology, environmental justice, animal studies, and other interdisciplinary modes of humanistic inquiry. At the same time, Clark frequently descends from this high-altitude viewpoint to systematically inspect the surface, by which I refer to his frequent close readings of particular texts, authors, genres, or philosophical issues. In doing so, he models for students how ecocritics do their work of interrogating texts, unpacking words and concepts, making connections among disparate themes or ideas, etc. This effortless interplay between comprehensive critical overview and concrete interpretative engagement makes the text useful both for classroom use with advanced undergraduate or graduate students as well as the seasoned scholar seeking insights into ecocritical topics and methods.
The book includes an introduction and 20 chapters, which in turn are grouped into four main sections, the titles of which are more poetically suggestive than transparently informative: “Romantic and Anti-Romantic,” “The Boundaries of the Political,” “Science and the Struggle for Intellectual Authority,” and “The Animal Mirror.” Interspersed throughout are 13 concise “quandaries,” passages in which Clark poses “open invitations to further thought” (xiii). These are enclosed within grey boxes on the page, which along with numerous illustrations provide an arresting visual aesthetic as well as opportunities for stimulating dialogue within the college classroom.
In terms of scope, Clark covers tremendous ground in his elucidation of the connections among literature, criticism, and the natural environment — from Romanticism to questions of genre to current debates about posthumanism; from ecofeminism to science studies to nature writing to environmental justice; from ethics to animal studies to climate change. Two particular chapters highlight Clark’s success in weaving together and making sense of this wide array of subjects as well as his skills in parsing the meaning and relevance of particular texts.
In Chapter 7, “Thinking like a Mountain” (also the famous title of an oft-cited essay by the American conservationist, ecologist, and writer, Aldo Leopold), Clark identifies an important tension within environmentalism between radical theory and reformist practice. In his words, environmental advocates “must speak in terms accepted within existing structures of governance and economics, the very things they may consider ultimately responsible for environmental degradation in the first place” (77). Next follows a detailed reading of two foundational texts of 20th century American environmental writing — Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac; and, Sketches Here and There (1949) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) — in which Clark traces the aforementioned quandary between radicalism and pragmatism in the rhetoric of Leopold and Carson. While I feel his interpretation downplays the paradigm-challenging environmental ethic espoused by Leopold as well as the explicit critique of the industrial-chemical-military-agricultural complex that is at the heart of Carson’s Silent Spring, I nonetheless greatly admire Clark’s astute and eloquent explication of the form and rhetoric of Sand County Almanac (78-9) that seems tailor-made for introducing students to the deceptively simple yet well-wrought structure of this landmark work.
Similarly engaging is Chapter 13, “Questions of Scale,” in which Clark addresses the interlinked topics of bioregionalism, climate change, global versus local environmental activism, environmental sloganeering, and (lest you think he’s forgotten about literature) ecopoetry. One excellent feature of this chapter is Clark’s penchant for moving beyond Anglo-American literary borders, as he does in his commentary here on Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant (132-135). Then there’s his especially insightful riff on climate change and the now-clichéd dictum of the Sierra Club, “Think globally, act locally.”
While this phrase “says, in effect: try to understand ecological systems on the largest possible scale and then take action locally in accordance with that understanding,” Clark reveals how the urgent ecological crisis of climate change demonstrates an essential paradox — “one cannot only act locally, [because] . . . any action affects the whole world, however, minutely” (136, emphasis added). Clark correctly notes that the global/local tension as well as climate change are examples of critically important environmental issues that up to now have received scant attention from most ecocritics. What such engagement might entail is illustrated by a reading of Gary Snyder’s bioregional ecopoetry in the final pages of the chapter, work which “use[s] multiple scales of space and time to form a critique of the destructive, one-dimensional and ultimately fragile sphere of the modern neoliberal state” (138).
Two last points about the book, which is beautifully produced by Cambridge University Press (and thus inspired me to newly peruse the titles of this expansive series of “Introduction to” volumes). First, I greatly appreciate the “Further Reading” bibliography at the end, which lists well-chosen sources according to the text’s table of contents, rather than merely (and far less usefully) alphabetically. For those planning an advanced undergraduate course or graduate seminar on, say, “Environmental Literature” or “Ecocriticism or Nature in Literature” or “Art, Humanities, and the Environment,” etc., this bibliography is a must-read, as it provides both seminal background references as well as a cornucopia of potential syllabus readings.
On a less enthusiastic note, the conspicuous omission (for me, at least) of cities, sustainability, and urbanization from the book’s index reveal one lacuna in Clark’s otherwise catholic coverage of contemporary environmental concerns. In a world of accelerating climate change, ongoing pollution, feeble environmental regulation, habitat loss, poverty, and persistent socioeconomic inequity, the global movement toward urbanization that has paralleled the human population explosion (as of 2008, over half the world’s population now resides in urban areas) is something that ecocriticism has finally begun to acknowledge in productive ways, as urban-focused studies published in the field’s foremost scholarly journal, ISLE, testify. Clark’s otherwise valuable and instructive chapter on environmental justice (87-95), for example, misses an opportunity to connect this political movement to its urban origins and, somewhat curiously, features an extended reading of a prototypically male wilderness narrative set in the American West (Norman Maclean’s 1976 novella, A River Runs Through It).
That is, however, a decidedly minor quibble about a skillfully written, eminently readable, and immensely useful book. Far from a pedestrian college textbook, Clark’s Introduction to Literature and the Environment is an erudite survey of ecocriticsm accessible to both scholar and student, as well as a practical tool for demonstrating literature’s representation of and engagement with environmental issues of all kinds. As Clark writes in his concise and hard-hitting final chapter, “The limitations as well as the excitement of ecocritical work to date may reflect the fact that environmental questions are not just a matter of aesthetics, politics, poetics or ethics, but can affect certain ground rules as to what these things mean” (202). In other words, ecocriticism — and by extension, literature and the humanities — matters greatly, for it must join (and provide constructive critiques of) science and policy in engaging the pressing environmental issues of our time. With that bold claim in mind, I can think of no better intellectual map of ecocriticism’s present state or future prospects than this book.
In Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Robert K. Musil redefines the achievements and legacy of environmental pioneer and scientist Rachel Carson, linking her work to a wide network of American women activists and writers and introducing her to a new, contemporary audience.Rachel Carson was the first American to combine two longstanding, but separate strands of American environmentalism—the love of nature and a concern for human health. Widely known for her 1962 best-seller, Silent Spring, Carson is today often perceived as a solitary “great woman,” whose work single-handedly launched a modern environmental movement. But as Musil demonstrates, Carson’s life’s work drew upon and was supported by already existing movements, many led by women, in conservation and public health.
On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this book helps underscore Carson’s enduring environmental legacy and brings to life the achievements of women writers and advocates, such as Ellen Swallow Richards, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Terry Tempest Williams, Sandra Steingraber, Devra Davis, and Theo Colborn, all of whom overcame obstacles to build and lead the modern American environmental movement.
Contents:
1 Have You Seen the Robins? Rachel Carson’s Mother and the Tradition of Women Naturalists
2 Don’t Harm the People: Ellen Swallow Richards, Dr. Alice Hamilton, and Their Heirs Take On Polluting Industries
3 Rachel and Her Sisters: Rachel Carson Did Not Act Alone
4 Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Ecological Empathy
5 The Environment Around Us and Inside Us: Ellen Swallow Richards, Silent Spring, and Sandra Steingraber
6 Rachel Carson, Devra Davis, Pollution, and Public Policy
7 Rachel Carson and Theo Colborn: Endocrine Disruption and Public Policy
Hey, RU students! Want to improve your research skills in order to find great sources for your academic work, whether in print or online? If so, your timing’s perfect, since my colleague Katy Hite, instructional librarian at RU, is running some great student workshops next week. Here’s the skinny: