Category: Humanities

Teaching Climate Change through Literature

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.”

Reviewing “The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment,” by Timothy Clark

Cambridge Intro to Lit and EnvPart 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.

Sand County AlmanacIn 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.”

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.

Timothy Clark. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+254.

Note: This is a modified version of a review that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Modern Philology.

Pete Seeger, Legendary Musician and Activist, Dies at Age 94

Last night I had trouble sleeping, and found myself tossing and turning in the wee hours. When I got up to get a drink of water hoping to settle myself down, my night owl spouse solemnly greeted me with sad and wistful news. One of our musical heroes, Mr. Pete Seeger, had just passed away at the ripe old age of 94.

Pete Seeger atop the sloop Clearwater, which he used to promote the environmental cleanup of the Hudson River, along which he lived for many years in Beacon, NY (photo: AP)
Pete Seeger atop the sloop Clearwater, which he used to promote the environmental cleanup of the Hudson River,
along which he lived for many years in Beacon, NY (photo: AP)

It’s almost impossible for me to imagine a person who lived life as joyously, as productively, as meaningfully as Mr. Seeger. Chronicler and performer of folk music, advocate for social and environmental justice, celebrant of ordinary life’s victories and sorrows, political activist who stood up to the nasty oppression of McCarthyism — Pete Seeger was these things and many more during his lifetime, during which he never wavered from his ethical convictions and love of music.

For me, he’s best known in our household as “Pete” — as when I say to my two girls, “Hey, let’s listen to some Pete.” We put on a record or CD of his recordings for children, for which he is justly famous; and we sing, dance, and let the song stories he so effortlessly and skillfully wove fill the room. It’s as if he’s sitting there, on one of our old chairs, playing his banjo and singing to us. We love to imagine Pete dropping in at one of our schools here in Joliet and playing some songs for the kids and teachers — something he did hundreds of times at schools all across America during the course of his long and colorful life.

Pete, I never had the great fortune of meeting you; but I’m so glad you gave your music to the world. Thank you! You will be missed but never forgotten.

Jon Pareles, “Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94” (NY Times 28 Jan 2014)

Environmental Studies at Roanoke College

Roanoke College campusThis week I had the opportunity to visit the Environmental Studies Program at Roanoke College in Salem, VA, and give two guest lectures.

Tuesday, Jan. 14th:
“Writing the Urban Landscape: Literature, Environmental Studies, and the Sustainable Future of Cities” (ppt and pdf of slideshow)

Wednesday, Jan. 15th:
“Exploring the Chicago River: Science, Policy, Ethics, and Sustainability” (ppt and pdf of slideshow)

New Book on Rachel Carson by Robert Musil

Rachel Carson and her Sisters coverThis looks to be an excellent new book on Rachel Carson and many other women scientist/writers/activists who have profoundly shaped environmental discourse and policy in the US. Notably included here is Sandra Steingraber, who recently spoke at Roosevelt University during the Great Lakes Bioneers conference on Nov. 1st. As the book’s website from Rutgers University Press notes:

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

Epilogue

Verlyn Klinkenborg Publishes Final Column for “The Rural Life” in the NY Times

klinkenborgOne of my favorite journalists, commentator and essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg, published the final piece for his long-running column, “The Rural Life,” in today’s New York Times. His wise and observant prose-poems about his small farm and the nature that inhabits it were among the pieces of writing I most relished amid the dreck and disruption contained within the daily news.

Klinkenborg’s artful and well-wrought column will be greatly missed by many, I’m sure. I’m reprinting today’s essay in full here.

Farewell

By

The first Rural Life appeared on the editorial page nearly 16 years ago. This is the last. This seems a good season to leave, with a long winter ahead, the wood stove burning, and plenty of hopes and plans for the coming year. When The Rural Life began, I didn’t imagine that it would last so long or chart so many changes in my life. Nor did I imagine that it would find so many good readers. But it has, and I’m grateful for that.

As for the farm, it will go on much as it has. The horses will stand broadside in the sun or paw the snow looking for last year’s grass. The roosters — two of them now — will breast the bright morning air as always while the hens go about their business. The dogs — two of them now, again — will chase each other through the snow. I’ll be fixing fence and hauling wood and feeding out hay and chopping ice in the horse tank when the power goes out. And I’ll be doing what I’ve always done: watching the way one thought becomes another as I go about the chores.

But what about your farm, the one you’ve pictured while reading The Rural Life all these years? I know, from talking to readers, that it’s far bigger and more orderly than mine. It has fewer rocks and richer soil and fences that somehow magically stay taut. It reflects who you are as surely as my place reflects who I am. And it seems to be just about anywhere, wherever there’s open land and some woods and enough time to walk the fence line. I’ve always wished that I could visit the farm that readers imagine I live on. It sounds like a very nice place.

I am more human for all the animals I’ve lived with since I moved to this farm. Here, I’ve learned almost everything I know about the kinship of all life. The only crops on this farm have been thoughts and feelings and perceptions, which I know you’re raising on your farm, too. Some are annual, some perennial and some are invasive — no question about it.

But perhaps the most important thing I learned here, on these rocky, tree-bound acres, was to look up from my work in the sure knowledge that there was always something worth noticing and that there were nearly always words to suit it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/opinion/farewell.html

Film Noir Star and Joliet Native Audrey Totter Dies at Age 95

I’m a big fan of obituaries, and always read them with great fascination. This week there was a dandy story of an elegant lady from my hometown of Joliet who passed away at the ripe old age of 95. Despite being fan of film noir, I had not known that noted femme fatale Audrey Totter was a Joliet native.

Totter was born 3 years after my paternal grandmother, Millie Bryson; they very well may have seen each other as students at Joliet Township High School. (I’ll have to check Gram’s senior yearbook for clues.)

Here’s the obituary published by Tina Akouris in Tuesday’s Joliet Herald-News. Also see this excellent write-up in the New York Times.

Audrey Totter
Audrey Totter, 1917-2013

Joliet native Audrey Totter, a radio actress who became a movie star by playing femme fatales in 1940s film noir, including “Lady in the Lake,” has died. She was 95.

Totter’s daughter, Mea Lane, reported that her mother died Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital after recently having suffered a stroke.

Totter was born Dec. 20, 1917 and began her acting career in radio in the later 1930s. She was signed to a movie contract with MGM starting in 1944.

She had her debut in “Main Street After Dark” in 1945. After landing a small part in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Totter went on to a series of roles as a tough-talking, scheming blonde.

With Ray Milland in "Alias Nick Bea" (1949)
With Ray Milland in “Alias Nick Bea” (1949)

Her breakthrough came with “Lady in the Lake,” the 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective story. She also appeared in the thriller “The Unsuspected” and the boxing drama “The Set-Up.”

After retiring to raise a family, Totter resurfaced on television in 1954 and appeared in several television series, including the role of Nurse Wilcox on “Medical Center” from 1972-76.

Her brother, Joliet resident George Totter, 90, has a favorite story to tell about his older sister. He said she tried out for the senior play at at Joliet [Township] High School (now Central), but the teacher in charge of the play didn’t think she could pull it off.

“He had a favorite student whom he wanted to get that role,” George Totter said in a telephone interview. “When Audrey came back for a visit years later, she went back to the school and that same teacher saw her.”

Totter said the teacher took Audrey into his classroom and introduced her, saying, “I always knew she’d be a star.”

“She told me when she heard that she almost vomited in the classroom,” George Totter said.

He said his sister met a doctor in Korea, Leo Fred, “while she was performing for the troops (with the USO), and they met again when they were in Los Angeles and got married.”

The couple were married for 42 years until Fred’s death in 1995.

 

Introducing Sandra Steingraber at the Great Lakes Bioneers Conference

Back on November 1st, the opening day of the Great Lakes Bioneers environmental sustainability conference on “Community Resilience” hosted by Roosevelt, I had the honor of introducing Dr. Sandra Steingraber, that evening’s keynote speaker. Here’s the text of my introductory comments.

Connection. It’s a basic tenet of ecology as well of human relations. Nothing and no-one are truly disconnected. The water cycle flows through the ground, the ocean, the air . . . and each of us. We throw away our trash and flush our bodily wastes; but ecology teaches us there is no “away.” That is a falsely comforting myth of our disposable and fossil-fueled society, in which pollution and toxicity — in our lakes and streams, in our food, even in human breast milk — are accepted as normal.

Normal? That is where I first met our distinguished keynote speaker this evening, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, back in the late 1980s. More precisely, I mean the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where I had gone for a poetry reading upon the recommendation of my creative writing professor at nearby Illinois Wesleyan, Jim McGowan. He had rightly admonished me for being a lazy writer, too content with a quick semi-catchy draft of a poem. “Go hear my former student, Sandy Steingraber,” he said. “Then you’ll understand the difference between just dashing something off and really working at your craft.” Boy, he was right.

Science. At the time of being blown away by Steingraber’s poetry in Normal, I didn’t know she was a scientist, too. Like me, only a few years earlier, she had studied biology and English at Illinois Wesleyan; then she had gone on to get a masters in creative writing and a PhD in ecology. I remember my brother David attending Columbia College here in Chicago as a theater major and telling me, “I’m taking this amazing class on evolution. It’s taught by a really cool professor, Sandra Steingraber. Do you know her?” I thought, wow — anyone who can get young hipster actors to dig Charles Darwin has to be really good.

That far from eloquent assessment turns out to be uncannily accurate and widely shared. Since the original publication of her acclaimed book, Living Downstream, in 1997, Dr. Steingraber has become an award-winning author of several subsequent books; an influential environmental journalist for Orion, the Huffington Post, and other publications; a sought-after speaker and scientific consultant; an internationally recognized authority on the links between cancer and the chemical pollution of our environment; and a passionate yet scientifically rigorous critic of the environmentally devastating gas and oil extraction process called fracking.

It’s a distinct honor and privilege to have Sandra Steingraber speak at this year’s Great Lakes Bioneers conference at my longtime academic home, Roosevelt University. Her writing and life’s work — as an environmental activist, an artist, and a parent — truly embodies the spirit of this gathering and the ethos of sustainability. As Steingraber argues in Living Downstream and elsewhere, as Rachel Carson knew more than fifty years ago as she wrote the complacency-shattering book Silent Spring, it is not enough to know something scientifically, or to express that knowledge poetically. We must also act — to change policy for the better, to fight for environmental justice in all communities, and to become true stewards rather than reckless exploiters of nature.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Sandra Steingraber.

Presenting at SLSA 2013: Water & the Postnatural City

UND in fallYesterday I arrived at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana — my first visit to this storied campus — to participate in the annual meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. This year the conference theme is “Postnatural.”

My talk yesterday afternoon was part of a panel entitled “Water and the City,” and included stimulating presentations by Christine Skolnik of DePaul University (“Imagined Eco-Futures” Restoring the Current” [of the LA River]) and Peter Hobbs of York University in Toronto (“What Does Lead Do? Toxic Entanglements, Exposures, and Cosmo-Chemo-Politics”).

Below is the introduction to my talk, which was an extemporaneous exposition of this slideshow (pdf, 10MB file).

Water and the Postnatural City: Reversals, Invasions, and Prospects for Sustainability

It is hard to think of a natural substance more vital to life than water. Yet, “the natural” is difficult to locate amidst the bewildering complex of intakes, filters, screens, pumps, chemical treatment chambers, distribution mains, pipes of all sizes, gutters, storm drains, sinks, sewers, settling tanks, combined sewage overflows, canals, locks, oxygenating waterfalls, electric fish barriers, and myriad other technological accouterments that allow us to convey, control, imbibe, and dispense with freshwater/wastewater in our cities and suburbs.

One of the tunnels within the Deep Tunnel / TARP system (photo: Chicago Tribune)
One of the tunnels within the Deep Tunnel / TARP system (photo: Chicago Tribune)

Despite the utter domination of water’s movement by what environmental engineers call the “hard path” of water resource management, however, the capacity of even highly degraded urban river corridors to support surprising levels of biodiversity — not to mention the tendency of urbanized landscapes to flood — demonstrates that Nature in the form of wild (read: violent) water frequently reasserts its power over us.

This presentation takes a deep dive into the water resources and management systems of the Chicago Region to ask:

  • What does it mean for the aptly named Chicago Area Waterway System to be “postnatural,” and why has it been such for so many decades?
  • How does a dredged, straightened, polluted, reversed, flushed, rerouted, industrialized, and biologically invaded since the mid-19th century urban river become a locus of urban sustainability and ecological restoration in the 21st century?
  • In what ways are Chicago’s rivers and canals connected to its other vital water resources and systems: fresh water supply (intake) and wastewater (outflow)?
  • Finally, what might the salient tropes of various Water and the City narratives teach us about our capacity to explore and apprehend an urbanized but still wild (read: unpredictable) nature in a postnatural age?

“Artifacts & Illuminations” Wins 2012 Nebraska Book Award

In the spring of 2012, my essay “Unearthing Urban Nature,” an analysis of scientist-writer Loren Eiseley’s investigations and representations of urban and suburban landscapes, was published in the critical anthology Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley, edited by Tom Lynch and Susan Maher (University of Nebraska Press).

Artifacts and Illuminations coverI just received word that the collection has won the Nebraska Book Award for best anthology in 2012, which is a testament to the hard work of the book’s editors as well as the high production quality by UNP. You can read the book’s Table of Contents and Editors’ Introduction (pdf), a pre-publication pdf of my chapter, as well as reviews in Western American Literature (Andrew Angyal, 2013) and Prairie Fire (Christine Pappas, 2013).

About Artifacts & Illuminations

Loren Eiseley (1907–77) is one of the most important American nature writers of the twentieth century and an admired practitioner of creative nonfiction. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Eiseley was a professor of anthropology and a prolific writer and poet who worked to bring an understanding of science to the general public, incorporating religion, philosophy, and science into his explorations of the human mind and the passage of time.

As a writer who bridged the sciences and the humanities, Eiseley is a challenge for scholars locked into rigid disciplinary boundaries. Artifacts and Illuminations, the first full-length collection of critical essays on the writing of Eiseley, situates his work in the genres of creative nonfiction and nature writing. The contributing scholars apply a variety of critical approaches, including ecocriticism and place-oriented studies ranging across prairie, urban, and international contexts. Contributors explore such diverse topics as Eiseley’s use of anthropomorphism and Jungian concepts and examine how his work was informed by synecdoche. Long overdue, this collection demonstrates Eiseley’s continuing relevance as both a skilled literary craftsman and a profound thinker about the human place in the natural world. (from the book’s website)