Category: Humanities

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)

Toward a Sustainable Future: Why Science and Policy Need the Environmental Arts and Humanities

Recent reports in the popular media would have it that the humanities are embattled: waning in popularity among students, deemed irrelevant by the general public, and viewed by legislators as expendable luxuries in today’s rapidly changing higher education environment. In truth, though, the humanities in general — and the environmental arts and humanities in particular — have never been more important and necessary, both to the academy and within the culture at large.

First, a bold claim: the arts and humanities, broadly conceived, are the most exciting and diverse sources of creativity, intellectual speculation, and cultural critique we have. Together with the empirical methods of the physical and biological sciences, as well as the critical tools of the social and behavioral sciences, the arts and humanities do a great deal more than provide us with amusing diversions or a well-rounded college education. They literally define us as a species. They embody the best of our capacities as human beings.

Just as importantly, the three Es of sustainability — Ecology, Economy, and Equity — dictate a vital role for the environmental arts and humanities in envisioning and working toward a more sustainable future for humanity as well as for the millions of fellow species on our beautiful yet vulnerable planet. Thought-provoking ideas, artwork, architecture, poetry, stories, historical accounts, ethical frameworks, theater, music, theology, and films are necessary complements to the production of ecological data and development of progressive environmental policy.

Why? Because ideas and vision matter. Compelling narratives, whether literary or visual, can bring scientific facts to life and change hearts and minds. Ethics must guide our thinking to ensure that social equity and environmental justice are not marginalized or ignored in the pursuit of the next great clean energy source or wastewater treatment process or organic food production system. Environmental and economic sustainability thus cannot be achieved without the full participation and engagement of the arts and humanities.

Consider just one issue: climate change, arguably our most pressing and seemingly intractable global problem. Decades of compelling scientific evidence on global warming, glacial retreat, increasing severe storm frequency, rising ocean levels, and more have not yet produced the sea change in values and priorities needed to create effective national climate change mitigation laws. Neither have the voluminous policy analysis, political lobbying, and other efforts by social scientists and activists.

Science and policy do matter, of course. But they are not enough. This is where the environmental arts and humanities — those areas of inquiry and creative expression concerned with the natural environment and our place in it — come into play, not in opposition to the empirical findings and systematic methodologies of the natural and social sciences, but in concert with them.

In a truly sustainable society, an ethic of stewardship would reside in each individual as well as be a pervasive value within the community. Such an ethos, though, is seldom adopted in a fully rational way based upon mere apprehension of scientific data. It must be embodied and inspired by stories, arresting images, powerful metaphors, enduring questions; it should be felt as well as comprehended. It is not surprising, then, that the scientist-writers I have researched and greatly admire — Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley; and in the present day, E. O. Wilson, Sandra Steingraber, and others — articulate this synthesis in their work.

Influenced by these and other artists, writers, and scientists, my own journey as a scholar and teacher have affirmed for me the capacity for art, storytelling, history, music, and poetry to enrich and energize the conversations we must have about environmental science and policy. All of these endeavors, properly integrated, can help us work toward the long-term sustainability of our planet.