[The 49th
annual Earth Day is April 22nd, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy
a handful of environmental stories and histories. Share yours in comments to
help us celebrate this wonderful and all too often underappreciated home of
ours!]
On three recent
books that carry the legacy of environmental writing into the 21st
century.
1)
Coming of Age at
the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet (2016):
Edited by Julie
Dunlap and Susan A. Cohen, this wonderful
collection gathers together a wide variety of writers (twenty-two in total,
as well as an introduction by the great Bill
McKibben) and genres to consider what environmental writing and activism
are and can be in this bleak historical moment. I excerpted a few pieces from
it for my
Spring 2017 adult learning class on contemporary issues and they were very
well-received, but I would really argue that the book works best when read as a
whole, putting these individual voices in conversation and community to
exemplify the subtitle’s generational cohort as fully as possible.
2)
Breaking
into the Backcountry (2010): I’ve highlighted my FSU
colleague Steve Edwards in a number of posts over the years, and in terms
of his evolving writing career have been particularly inspired by his recent pieces
on both parenting
and reading.
But Steve’s first book, the magisterial Breaking
into the Backcountry, is likewise great and indeed represents a worthy heir
to works like Desert Solitaire by
yesterday’s subject Edward Abbey. As I said about Abbey’s 1968 book, a 2010
project on the importance and inspiration of spending nearly a year in solitude
in nature might seem a bit too divorced from the social and communal issues
facing us collectively these days. But like Desert
Solitaire and Walden and so many
other great works, Steve’s thoughtful and moving book proves that the opposite
is true: that we need such books and writing now more than ever.
3)
Trace: Memory,
History, Race, and the American Landscape (2016): We also need books
that can bridge those only superficial gaps between (for example) nature and
society, individual experience and collective history, and I know of few works
(recent or otherwise) that do so more potently than Lauret Savoy’s Trace. Savoy, a geologist and Professor
of Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College, links those scientific and
scholarly pursuits to both her own and America’s multi-racial heritage and
identity, and the result is a book that truly exemplifies interdisciplinary
engagements with some of our most complex and shared collective spaces and
themes. Trace seems to me to be a key
reflection of the future of environmental writing (and a key part of the future
of American Studies to boot), and an illustration, like all three of these
books, that that future is in very good hands.
April 2019 Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?
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