So, who do you think got it right?

Is our conception of nature — as a special, redemptive place apart from human civilization, a space endowed with “spiritual” qualities that restores the individual — now dead? Because man has so fundamentally altered weather patterns even for the most distant mountain peak, has global warming killed the Romantic love affair with this idea of wilderness? (McKibben)

Or, is this kind of plangent lament *exactly* the problem — that our concept of the wild was seriously flawed, even dangerously unenvironmental, to begin with? (Cronon) Do we need to discard the wild, or celebrate its demise, and even move to a different configuration of human-nature relationships?

If you discuss, please ground your discussion in the two essays by the authors, quoting and referring to them as necessary.

There’s an informative discussion of McKibben’s book by an environmental philosopher in Canada here — it features some choice quotes from McKibben where he tries to respond to the Cronon critique.

Last October, as our semester was just getting started, Matthiessen’s iconic Snow Leopard celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. It has remained a popular book, often in reprint, and the particular version that appears in the Reader is taken from a new Penguin edition that was made in honor of this 30th anniversary.

Anyway, to give notice: there’s a great radio interview with Matthiessen here from several months ago that talks about the Snow Leopard, 21st century environmental politics, and much else. I’ve also posted this audio link on the blog roll resources on the righthand side. Listen, if you can.

Well, if you were like me, despite rushing out of the seminar early to get to a television that would be broadcasting Obama’s inauguration, I nonetheless missed a large chunk of the speech. Although there is no way to connect to the elecricity of that particular historical moment again, we can easily and readily watch the speech again below (so thank goodness for such “gadgets” like youtube, to think back on what we said about technology in Aldo Leopold’s essay). It’s a rather short speech, and I found it’s emphases surprising and a bit different than I was expecting. Instead of a feel-good, kind of self-acknowledgement about the historicity of a black American becoming president and this bearing out the pragmatic idealism of the American multicultural dream–proving it in essence works–the speech had darker, even plangent tones here and there. The New York Times writes how:

what Mr. Obama did say in his speech must have come as a bit of a shock to Mr. Bush. No stranger to criticism, over the past eight years he had rarely been forced to sit in silence listening to a speech about how America had gone off the rails on his watch.

Mr. Obama’s recitation of how much had gone wrong was particularly striking to anyone who had followed Mr. Bush around the country, especially during the re-election campaign of 2004, when he said it was his job “to confront problems, not to pass them on to future presidents and future generations.”

Yet Mr. Obama blamed America’s economic peril on an era “of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some,” and talked of how “the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.” It was an explicit critique of an administration that went to war in the Middle East but rejected the shared sacrifice of conservation, and reluctantly embraced the scientific evidence around global warming.

So, in fact, there was a slight nod towards the environment in Obama’s speech, perhaps a first in the history of inaugural addresses. It is interesting to note that if Obama had said “globe” instead of “planet,” this sentence would lose its environmental edge: for whatever reason, in English, “planet” has acquired a certain environmental valence in a way that globe has not (except, of course, when you specifically say “global warming”). It remains to be seen if this lofty and often vague rhetoric is met by practical policy changes in the new administration. But, to have these words present at the start is very promising.

Bryce National Park in Utah. (Photo: Ron Niebrugge)

Check out Michael Winships acerbic expose on what the Bush administration is doing to American national wilderness areas in the last days before Obama takes office. Sadly, this kind of deregulation of public space, and opening wilderness areas like the one pictured above to oil and natural gas drilling (under so-called “leasing” of the land), will be very hard decisions for an Obama administration to change or reverse.

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular…but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive.” from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Open space for comments / reflections / observations on Jewett and Austin. There’s been substantial posts on the blog already as to do the gendering of American landscape, a space that was virgin, pliant, female, etc.–we have finally come to two women writers who–especially in the case of Jewett–deliberately raise questions about the relationship between nature and (cultural) constructions of femininity. In fact, we owe the rescucitation and revival of Jewett and Austin as significant authors primarily due to the work of feminist literary historians; it is only more recently that both have begun to be (re)appraised as nature writers.

Still, we shouldn’t limit either author to a ghetto of consideration that is based solely on gender concerns, or their ability to fit certain protofeminist proscriptions. The Land of Little Rain and A White Heron are rich and complex texts in their own right… what, do you think, do they add to our conversations on wilderness and the wild?

P.S. — we are being read and watched, not by Big Brother, VirtUOS, or even my mother, but by several colleagues I know in the United Kingdom and the U.S. who do respective work in the fields of ecocriticism and American Transcendentalism. They’ve been very impressed at the quality of the writing on this blog, so kudos and good job, bloggers. Keep it up…

This deliberation is, in my opinion, very similar to his defiance of the railroad. He avoids the ‘new’ teaching methods of theory before practise and the gathering of institutionalized knowledge in favour of ‘the old ways’. Just throw the child into the water and it will learn to swim. In this arguement I find an essential question that is still strongly debated between anthropologists, humanists, psychologists, pedagogues and everyone with a slight interest in human development: the question of nature vs. nurture. Thoreau is definitely a supporter of the nature theory, alleging that man is born with innate features to deal with and overcome almost any given problem. He only touches the subject in Walden (although I cannot say that for sure, for I have yet to read the rest of it), but I think it is worth discussing.

I agree with Thoreau to a certain degree, for most of the information exchanged on a daily basis is pointless in deeper meaning, yet necessary for social interaction. But that is not limited to conversations over distance. And Thoreau misses the usefulness of the increase in information technology and speed, whether it enables people to react faster to or be informed about important events. The problem about the technological improvements and the communications revolution is that it makes the world smaller, less mystic. I think that is Thoreau’s main concern, for the greatness and the distance of the American landscape are something that heavily influenced him in his perception of the world and life itself: more than one can grasp or control, yet very intense to experience. It bothers him that such a great area can be “conquered” by some meaningless words, passing through in seconds, without even taking a look at its majesty and accepting it greatness. To me the writing in “Economy” seems to be full of defiance for all that mankind prides itself in, especially technological progress, civilization and a general feeling of superiority towards fauna and flora.

We’ve mentioned more than once in our conversations how the development of an American sense of wilderness and the wild in various literary and artistic forms, from poetry to paintings, was greatly affected by the western tradition of the pastoral.

The contemporary writer Toni Morrison’s most recent novel also dialogues with the pastoral tradition in interesting ways, and from this interactive book review from the New York Times (with video interviews and chapter downloads), it sounds like A Mercy would have been a wonderful addition to our seminar, especially for considering the development of a colonial and Puritan aesthetic that was shaped by the perceived “howling wilderness” of north America. Not that you didn’t already have enough to read, as it is… : ). What makes Morrison’s fiction so interesting–given its historiographic dimensions, of re-writing a particular historical period and playing with the story that is embedded in history–is the frought ways that it brings to light the dark histories of slavery and imperialism through postmodern narrative strategies.

Whether you read the novel (or any of Morrison’s other work, for that matter) or not, the interview has lots of relevant reflections on the pastoral and a space of the “wild,” the attempts to build a new civilization in native north America.