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| Spaceship Earth |
Environmental tropes' imbrication with regimes of social control, such as Nazism and neocolonialism?
The value of literary critical skills to analyze and affect notions of the environment in the public sphere?
The importance of environmental literary studies especially in the face of postmodernism and late capitalism?
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| Garrard |
These are just a few ideas, but what struck YOU as the most compelling reason to be trained in ecocritical skills today? And, while you're at it, what are those skills again?
If you're interested in the full-length of that environmental humanities video featuring Garrard and others, of which we saw 10 minutes in class last week, here's the link: Environmental Humanities video featuring Garrard and others
In the final paragraph of Ecocriticism, Garrard articulates what he sees the project and promise of ecocriticism: “In addition to the clever technologies, wily policies and ethical revaluations that we shall need to respond to environmental crisis, we shall need better, less anthropocentric metaphors” (205). If this is the project of ecocriticism, it seems that it is basically critical theory deployed upon the technological, political, ethical, and literary planes of a context where humanity is involved, but removed from the center of focus.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading Garrard’s book, I believe I have a better sense of what ecocriticism is. My main opposition and complaint with this field has been the hope for the existence of a static, essential Nature. It seems that Garrard is not leaning in this direction. His view of ecocriticism is much like philosophy or any other critical perspective. It will never “solve the problems” that it seeks to analyze or critique. It is sustained by the degradation that it addresses and it may help move towards different forms of redemption, but can never truly reconcile these issues – just as “there is no such thing as ‘saving the planet’” (205).
Sammy
ReplyDeleteIn the final chapter titled, “Futures: The Earth” Garrard states, “Ecocriticism demands attention to literal and irreducibly material problems such as ozone depletion, but it also depends upon the insight that scientific problems are never fully separable from cultural and political ones” (189). This quote was really powerful in convincing me of the importance of ecocriticism in thinking critically about the environmental situation on Earth. Ecocriticism shows a way in which interdisciplinary studies are effective because they choose to embrace the fact that culture impacts all of the different approaches to looking at the environment. Science, theories, nature writing, and media are all whether it be science, theories such as post colonialism, or nature writing. The ability for ecocriticism to have a critical lens while exposing the unavoidable connection to culture that all disciplines have creates a sense of responsibility that humans are not exempt from what is happening on Earth. If culture is impacting science, and science is telling us objective truths than perhaps cultural studies can offer solutions. The skills of ecocriticism, the ability to have a critical lens against dualisms, concrete definitions, objective truths etc., are crucial for the ability for humans to sustain a dynamic perception of themselves and the environment. It seems as though Garrard is arguing that through ecocriticism we are able to deny the wisdom of nature, deny predetermined harmony, and rely on ourselves to become responsible, to become educated and critical.
There were three keys spots in Garrard's last chapters that validated my thoughts about the value of ecocriticism to the environmental movement. One occurred on page 188, when Garrard remarks about Kate Soper's quote about language not being the one with the hole in its ozone layer, "Her neat, memorable phrase has been cited by a number of critics to exemplify the emphasis on literal truth, rather than social construction, that marks ecocriticism out from other literary critical schools." This comment disperses the idea that often follows literary theory that it has nothing to offer the real world and is only applicable to itself. Ecocriticism, unlike other literary critiques, is grounded in the real world and considers literary theory as a set of tools to understand the world.
ReplyDeleteAnother section that stood out to me was on page 169, when Garrard is speaking of Kate Rigby's negative ecopoetics: "...rather than imagining some ultimate form of ecopoetry that would comprehend or adequately represent the 'more-than-human world,' she considers that 'the literary text saves the earth by disclosing the nonequation of word and thing, poem and place.'" By its inability to reduce the world into a set of words as other disciplines attempt to reduce the world into a set of equations or natural laws, ecopoetry and ecocriticism work with environmental organizations as "cultural mediators allowing us to grasp the planet as a biosphere, as distinct from the primarily political and economic globe of 'globalisation'" (pg 193).
The last and most validating passage, which struck me as so important that I underlined it and gave it three stars in the margins, occurs on page 198 when Garrard quote Mike Hulme as saying, "'The idea of climate exists as much in the human mind and in the matrices of cultural practices as it exists as an independent and objective physical category,' necessitating the intervention of cultural criticism and pedagogy as well as voluminous, authoritative scientific reporting." If climate is as much a part of culture as of nature then, in order to effect real change in our environmental problems, we must address both sides of the issue. By deconstructing common nature tropes and analyzing the effects they have on our society, ecocriticism can be science's other half in the attempt to function more knowledgeably and more sensitively withing this world.
As our esteemed associate Herr Geiger is apt to point out; ecology, as it is popularly understood, has the potential to become a sort of opiate of the masses. In this potential we see the growing need for the ecocritic to respond to extravagant or overly simplistic constructions of the world we find ourselves in the midst of. In the discussion of dwelling we can realize the extent of environmental theory is both micro and macro in relation to the individual and the societal unit. Dwelling in the immediate includes reflection on one’s own home and the conditions surrounding it, but can be expanded far beyond this. The immediacy of dwelling places us within a natural setting that conditions and colors our subsequent experiences, especially in regard to landscape, place, comfort and setting.
ReplyDeleteIn a cultural sense we can recognize that a sense of dwelling can retain common characteristics within similar social units, populations or peoples. In the postcolonial context, dwelling stands as a disruption to dominant motifs, to oppression and to seemingly ecocidal allocation of land by western proponents of Bestand. Whether as a mode of resistance or a landscape-encultured history, land and dwelling have regarded as keystone to many indigenous rights movements. To put it bluntly there is a measure of freedom in self-determination, for these rights movements, self-determination can only occur alongside and within a cultured landscape, their landscape. Thus land is necessary for self-determination.
Dwelling is intrinsic to land in these rights movements as a place we inhabit. In this circumstance dwelling is a realization of both our being-thrown-into-the-world and as already being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. Here we find our commiseration in our common arrival into world already vastly varied and diverse.
In the beginning of this book, he quotes Ecocriticism as "Ecocriticism cannot contribute much to debates about problems in ecology, but it can help to define, explore and even resolve ecological problems in this wider sense."
ReplyDeleteThrough this book, he explains and shows us that there is no problems in ecology or natural world, the problem is always coming from our side. In many fields, people say there are many issues in ecology, but we are the one who make these problems, and nature have nothing to do with it.
"There is no such thing as 'bad weather', only inappropriate clothing, and likewise there is no such thing as 'saving the planet'(205) He put this in the last paragraph of this book and I think this is the what he wants to tell people through this book. Nature and wild animals have done nothing wrong, only problem is our human being and through our histories and still today we caused many problems in ecosystem. What we should focus on in the future is not "saving the planet", because it sounds like nature itself has some problems that we have to fix. What we should focus in the future is changing our behaviors in this anthropocentric world which caused many damages in natural world, and ecocriticism is one of the keys to change people's mind and behaviors, and again it is not for finding problems in ecosystem.
I wanted to look at ‘Dwelling’ but, more specifically the part about the ‘Ecological Indian’. The face that the Indians of the land are subsequently the ultimate ‘Dwellers’, is it really acceptable, whatsoever to go this route of turning to the Indian for wisdom regarding nature and the ways in which we should not only approach it but conserve it? What I want to know is what would the Ecological Indian say to us? How would he not fear or Georgian tactics of relation to the earth but, actively practicing in agricultural productivity? And I also wonder if our attempt to reach out to the Ecological Indian and his methods, would look like an act of industrialized assimilation – how do we gain back their trust in this type of way and which Indian is genuinely the Ecological Indian? Overall, I like how this chapter exploits the fact that we will never be able to use the sense of ‘working the land’ and that harmony must not push away agriculture but work to infiltrate it in a way that is beneficial to the human but also gives nature its ancestry, ritual, and life. Pairing Georgics and Bioregionalism is an essentially safe way to analyze the situation of nature and I feel that they draw attention to the fact that not only does nature have labels of gender identity and political conflict but, that it also has a racial quality about when we come to consider culture, and what culture really mean – what culture is more specific to nature than the other.
ReplyDeletePg 129 says “ ‘We’ cannot dwell in working harmony with nature, but perhaps other cultures are able to do so.”…….and with that said, what would allow us that granted access of ‘dwelling’ like the ecological Indian? Does it start with equality of race between the white man and the Indian? Pg 130 says “White people, not Indians, make pollution, and that Indians ethics to respect were needed to counteract white greed and destructiveness.” Are we ready to take the back-seat and let the Chief lead us into the land?