This post was originally written as a discussion post in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a graduate environmental literature course. 

Glen Love, “Revaluing Nature.” Western Literature, 1990. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/104/article/532067/pdf

Reading Love’s article made me a little sad because here we are, 32 years later, and we still seem to have a dearth of ecological literary criticism, at least from my perspective. To be fair, I haven’t been in the English grad school world for a long time. However, I have been teaching literature and literary criticism to my students for 20+ years. And, in all that time, when I have searched for new materials for my literary criticism unit in ENG 102, I have not run across anything on eco-criticism. Aside from my time teaching ENG 105, back when Desert Solitaire was required reading and every student had to write an essay on a sense of place were the focus (are they still?), I haven’t run across a universal concern for environmental issues within the English department at any of the institutions I have taught for. As Love points out, it’s not that English folks aren’t concerned about the environment; it’s just not a topic I see very often. Even in my own classes, while I do love to use my examples of community gardens and sustainable fish farming, the environment is not a primary theme. So Love’s assertion at the end of this piece that “The time cannot be far off when an ecological perspective will swim into our ken” makes me sad.

It’s interesting that Love pairs the environment with issues like race and gender. Even though all three are important topics, Love frames the conversation about the environment in terms of survival: “Whether we can accept it or not will say much about our chances for survival.” He quotes Krutch, who says, “ ‘We have engineered ourselves into a position where, for the first time in history, it has become possible for man to destroy his whole species.’” When put in those terms, it seems that the survival of the species should have precedence over all other issues, and I can see why Love would be baffled about why that wasn’t the case!

Based on the readings for this week, it seems clear that the reason that these issues aren’t being brought to the forefront has to do with anthropocentrism. Love says that “One explanation might be that we care about these issues, but we don’t care enough.” Despite the efforts of politicians and even Hollywood, it seems that the environment is a “postponable worry.” Despite all the evidence of the destruction of the environment, if we don’t see it, we don’t have to face it. Our trash is hauled away to a dump and buried under dirt and our recyclables are shipped overseas. We get to live our comfortable lives without facing the consequences of our actions. Nature isn’t posting videos on YouTube. Love’s observation that “In our thinking, the challenge that faces us in these terms is to outgrow our notion that human beings are so special that the earth exists for our comfort and disposal alone” is very apt. This idea is reflected in some really great kids’ films (Wall-E, The Lorax). Just like the characters in those films, most folks are so focused on what we want that we don’t notice what’s happening to the world around us…and I think the question that folks like Love are asking is are we going to notice before it’s too late? Like the recent (but not stellar) film Just Look Up, the environment is like the asteroid that is going to hit earth, but everyone ignores. He likens our lack of concern to the Titanic with our “failure to consider the iceberg, our discipline’s limited humanistic vision, our narrowly anthropocentric view of what is consequential in life.” Most people, I think, would agree that it’s important to take care of the earth, but, at the same time, most folks aren’t willing to be inconvenienced for that cause. (Ben—I’m thinking about your comment about straws! So many simple things we could do but we don’t!)

I found Love’s discussion of  “…the mindless diversion reflected in mass culture…” really apropos. My son read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 last year in his English class, and both novels reflect the consequences of a society consumed by technology and personal comfort. Though not framed in terms of the environment, both authors expose the dangers of living lives disconnected from the world. Boyd’s work on art connects to this idea, as well. He talks about how human beings have an inexplicable tendency to prefer fiction over reality: “In explaining art in general, and our intense pleasure in engaging with art, we need to explain why an ‘appetite for the useful’ fails to predict so much of human activity…” Technology, it seems, has amplified this appetite. And maybe the focus on human activity via social media has further distracted us from the more important issues—the ones that we aren’t facing every day.

At the same time, Boyd offers a sliver of hope in that art can unite us in a common cause. “Art…can readily be commandeered both to engage the attention of putative spiritual beings and to ensure social cooperation at the human level…” As Love points out, Western literature has a focus on replacing “ego-consciousness” with “eco-consciousness.” Shifting the traditional pastoral view of literature, where nature is a place that we return to only temporarily before going back to the ‘real, significant’ world, to a more western view of nature could have an impact. “A pastoral for the present and the future calls for a better science of nature, a greater understanding of its complexity, a more radical awareness of its primal energy and stability, and a more acute questioning of the values of the supposedly sophisticated society to which we are bound. These are the qualities which distinguish much of our best western American literature, where writers characteristically push beyond the pastoral conventions to confront the power of a nature which rebuffs society’s assumptions of control.” I love the quote about nature from Willa Cather: “ ‘I am here still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, I am its destiny.’” Literature has the power to highlight issues and move folks to action.

However, while writers are creating work that highlights the importance of nature and our relationship with it, I think that, as Love says, leaving the work to art alone isn’t enough. Though stories like “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” brought attention to women’s issues, it was the voices of scholars who continued to highlight their significance over and over again that finally brought these issues into the mainstream. It seems that the same needs to happen with environmental concerns. Allowing scientists to share statistics isn’t enough. Like Aristotle explains, even if folks are convinced that something is true, they won’t often take action if their emotions are not also moved. Academic fields outside of science could help to draw more attention to the issues by calling attention to the work being done by story tellers and poets and artists, hopefully moving those emotions and getting folks to take action. And those of us teaching literature can help by shifting the focus in our classrooms, as well. Like the straws, every little bit counts. I know that the one course I took on nature writing 20+ years ago has influenced me in ways that I didn’t even realize. And this one is already asking me to be more intentional about what I teach and do.