"Intrinsic Value: Will the defenders of nature please rise?"
So, I’ve finally read my first Arne Naess. Having been previously exposed both to some dubious claims that grow out of Deep Ecology (ie: Oates in Myth and Reality in the Rainforest: ‘the great thing about dictators is that they can really get conservation done.’) and some of the important challenges to it (Nations: “Deep Ecology Meets the Developing World.” ‘try to tell someone whose kids are starving not to shoot that wildlife because it has intrinsic value’)… I suppose I was expecting something more out there. Granted, there are some problematic ideas here. Like positing identification with all life forms (and concomitant desire to protect them) with “full human maturity.” (He does admit that social realities sometimes make the protective step impossible.) BUT. There is something terribly wrong with creating a spectrum from ‘not fully mature’ human beings and societies to ‘mature human beings and societies,’ and placing yourself smack on the mature end.
Otherwise (and that’s a big otherwise), Naess is rather more measured and more deeply interesting than I was expecting. His concern that scientists answer the questions at hand (compare Evil Dam Project A to Evil Dam Project B) and do not publicly advocate their personal convictions… this slips interestingly into the discussion which is very much ongoing (See Lackey’s 2007 “Science, Scientists, and Policy Advocacy,” who suggests that scientists must never advocate, or the public will lose respect for the impartiality of science. An unsurprising position for a scientist in the Bush EPA, in fact.) (And I would tend to agree with Naess.) I was also intrigued by his depiction of the microscope as an instument of pleasure – a motif, if you will, that’s intrigued me in both Dillard and D.H. Lawrence.
Legacy of Conquest
Patty Limerick, 1987
There’s obviously a good deal of information and conceptual work in this book – it’s after all, a whole history of the whole West, and Limerick positions herself as trying to move the entire field beyond 1890 and the Frontier Thesis. Of the many points of interest in the book… Limerick finds pioneers of the religous-missionary type to be fairly logical and explicable individuals: extraordinary faith inspires extraordinary action. It’s the gold-rushers, land-claimers, uranium-hunters (like the pair Abbey describes having a shootout in Desert Solitaire, btw) who should strike us as downright odd. She uses a variety of extraordinary examples to make them strange, and concludes:
“Neither the Western past nor the Westen present will make sense until attachment to property and attraction to profit find their proper category as a variety of strong emotion” (76)
… I’ve been mulling this over, trying to decide what we get by reclassifying this commercial activity, placing it within the scope of natural human emotion. Compare to other ways of shelving it – as the bedrock of a socio-capitalist-Darwinism; in a moral plane as greed or lust for profit; in a pathological framework as a madness for money. So. Emotion instead.
Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is running through my head, too, in relationship to this idea, as I think about the treatment of Jimmy Blevins’ need to get his horse – and then his saddle and gun – back from the town, followed by the more admirable/reasonable John Grady’s need to do the same.
Zeitoun
Dave Eggers (2009)
I read Zeitoun cover-to-cover last night.
It was obviously enjoyable, particularly strong and suspenseful leading up to Katrina. I think it would be interesting to teach next semester. If I think about the theme that’s emerged from what I’d taught so far, it’s that texts that look like they’re about “nature” are often about other things - race, religion, politics… (Think of Thoreau’s “Wild Apples”) Well, this looks like a book about a natural disaster (especially if you don’t read the reviews before reading it)… and turns out to be also very much about who gets to be American. The early parts of the book are what I might most enjoy teaching, where Eggers makes a number of fairly obvious moves to connect the Zeitoun family to ‘traditional American values.’ The combination of salience and skill strikes me as a nice one for a freshman comp class, where students are sometimes still half-skeptical that subtexts and connotative meaning exist in literary texts.
I’m also aware (and would bring to the classroom) the issue of such a text about personal and national tragedy being ‘pleasurable.’ I’d probably spend a day with images of Detroit and the issue of ‘ruin porn’ before teaching Zeitoun, just to help make the reading experience that much more self-conscious.
I’m a little fretful of course book costs, but I have a few more days to mull it over before I have to tell the bookstores in town what I’m using. $17 for Zeitoun, $10 for Ceremony, $15 for They Say/I Say (our writing text)… plus a huge markup if bought on campus, plus I’m contemplating a coursepak, which involves purchasing readings upfront instead of hiding the costs at the end of the semester when students often run out of their printing alotment and wind up paying painfully for every page. (I really wish that the students were charged per page instead of per side. They could all use the duplex printers and be okay!)
All the Pretty Horses
1992, Cormac McCarthy
What a gorgeous, dark, violent, beautiful book. My favorite thing I’ve read in a while. I described his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965) as the way Faulkner would have written if Faulkner was a disciple of Hemingway. Well, Hemingway is very much in ascendence here, which isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know about McCarthy. It’s not even the writing style, specifically, that has me thinking Hemingway. Rather it’s the eating and drinking in little cafes and stores and around campfires and in hotels, the occasional peaceful natural interlude, the gratitude for the goodness of strangers and proprietors, that takes me to Burguete and Pamplona - to The Sun Also Rises. Except, here in All the Pretty Horses, there’s a bloody possibility lurking behind any doorway, over any horizon. Instead of in Hemingway, matters of life and death seem to intrude upon the fiesta, whereas, on McCarthy’s Mexican holiday, they seem to have been there all along.
Every once in a while, I make a new one of these to terrify myself with.
“ Alexander Wilson was even capable of activism on behalf of birds. When in 1807 good sense would not prevail with merchants who were killing thousands of robins to satisfy the genteel palates of Philadelphia, he wrote an anonymous article to city newspapers explaining that robin flesh was unhealthy because of the birds’ heavy diet of pokeberries; though Wilson knew the claim to be entirely false, it effectively curtailed the slaughter of robins for the Philadelphia market. ”
Robins: almost another passenger pigeon? This is Michael Branch in the article, “Indexing American Possibilities”
“ Nature is the only gardener able to do work so fine ”
John Muir (with his humanism showing?) in My First Summer in the Sierra
More on seeing nature as a man-like actor...
Alison Byerly’s 1996 article, “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and The National Park System,” describes the human-centric tendency to describe natural wonders as art, (perhaps God’s art, though I don’t think she says this.). We therefore expect that we can stretch a velvet rope and that the natural forms will remain unchanging as a painting on a museum wall. (It’s very much a response to the Yellowstone fires of 1988)
She concludes with a call to appreciate parks and wilderness as something other than art - something that remakes itself. Then, I think, she goes off the rails a bit, in calling parks “nature’s laboratory.” Why is it better to say “nature is a scientist like us” than to say “nature is an artist like us”? Both are human-centric, and both are elite - she frets that “aestheticization of landscape” is a luxury for leisure classes; nature-as-scientist seems to me a luxury for educated ones.
My First Summer in the Sierra
John Muir, covering the summer of 1869, published in 1911
(How close to the original diary was it?)
I’ve had these notes sitting on my desk on a scrap of peper for several weeks.
Muir calls the real shepherd, a naysayer to the beauty of the land, “poor in spirit.” Here, then, is the opposition of the worker and the tourists down below who come to see the valley. But where does Muir, the budding environmentalist? He’s not quite a shepherd and not quite a tourist.
The sheep as commodity interested me. (I must read the Quest of the Silver Fleece - the DuBois book, which, I am told, is all about cotton as commodity.) Muir often, wryly it seems, or as part of a slang I do not understand, refers to the sheep as “the wool,” as in, “The wool is dry and calm.”
Muir’s description of how the landscape comes to be (he was actually ahead of his time at understanding the action of glaciers, for instance) uses phrases like “meadows planted with _____” or says that bears “turn and till the soil.” Here, I think, he bounces interestingly off of William Howarth’s “Some principles of ecocriticism.” He points out that the very language for geography and geology often comes from human bodies, buildings, tools, etc. Is it really a humanistic tendency, though? To me, it seems that Muir’s insistence upon a land planted by birds or tilled by bears is one that insists on an animal-centrism, on animals as actors. The question, I suppose, is, Can such content and intent allow you escape from etymology?
I have not been so bad...
I read Huck Finn. I have been plugging through the Ecocriticism Reader. I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer - another first encounter with a writer who has me really impressed. I’d like to get to her nonfiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle soon.
Oh, yes, and I’ve been obsessing over teaching. That’s where the rest of the time goes.
