April 26, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Contemporary Works

[The 49^th annual Earth Day is April 22^nd, 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 21^st 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?

April 25, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Edward Abbey

[The 49^th annual Earth Day is April 22^nd, 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 distinct and even contrasting ways to contribute to environmental activism.

Edward Abbey is perhaps best known for his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which depicts a group of heroic anarchists and environmental terrorists using every means at their disposal (including, if not especially, criminal ones) to fight for the environment against corporate and governmental forces. Abbey’s book directly inspired the eco-terrorist (or eco-revolutionary, depending on who you ask) organization Earth First!, which was founded in 1980 and the members of which frequently referred to (and still to this day call) their acts of eco-sabotage as “monkeywrenching.” While Abbey did not become an official member of Earth First!, he did both write for them and take direct action with them on occasion, and thus seems to have been more than fine with his fictional ideas being turned into radical activism in this way. As with other radical leftist groups such as the Weathermen, it’s important to try to maintain a sense of the line between inspiring activism and destructive terrorism; but it’s also important not to let any one perspective, and certainly not a corporate or authoritative one, be the sole arbiter of that spectrum. And to read Abbey’s book is to recognize the complexity of such issues when it comes to environmental extremism.

Abbey published more than twenty books in his three-plus decade long writing career, however, and thus engaged with environmental issues in far more varied ways than that one most famous novel would indicate. For example, his first non-fiction book, 1968’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, presents a far more individual and reflective form of environmental advocacy and activism. An autobiographical account of Abbey’s time spent living alone in Southeastern Utah’s spectacular Arches National Park (he lived there from 1956-1957 as a backcountry park ranger), Desert Solitaire is in many ways a 20^th century Walden, equal parts memoir and personal reflection, environmental and scientific journal, and social and philosophical commentary. As did Thoreau, Abbey offers his personal experiences and perspective as a model for his readers and all of us, suggesting the intense and important value of this kind of isolated immersion in the natural world. At the height of 1960s social and political debates, such a book and project might seem like a retreat or at least a separation from those shared concerns, but I believe Desert Solitaire is better seen as a complement to them, an argument for how and why environmental activism should be part of that broader spectrum of social change (if a form that perhaps does at times require more individual and, yes, solitary pursuits).

As that year in Arches National Park reflects, Abbey also worked for a number of years, particularly in the early part of his writing career, as a park ranger. He did so not only there but at many other parks and sites in the late 1950s and 1960s: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (in Arizona near the Mexican border); the Everglades in Florida; and Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California among others. These efforts partly embodied Desert Solitaire’s ethos of individuals immersing themselves in natural worlds, of the advice Abbey gave in a September 1976 speech to environmental activists: “It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here.” But I would argue that working as a park ranger also represents a contribution to communal experiences of nature and the environment as well as a form of fighting for the land that differs from eco-terrorism. That is, I think Abbey’s service as a ranger represents a third form of environmental activism, one that recognizes that we’re all in it together and seeks to defend the environment in more positive ways. There’s a place for all these forms in our conversations and efforts, but as a devotee of our National Park system, I’m especially inspired by this third form.

Last Earth Day post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?

April 24, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Henry David Thoreau

[The 49^th annual Earth Day is April 22^nd, 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 distinct but interconnected ways to commemorate one of our most foundational and enduring environmental voices.

1)      Read Faith in a Seed: I’ve made the case many times in this space for broadening our Thoreau canon beyond the most established texts, and one of the most important ways to do so would entail reading Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings. Collected by the wonderful Thoreau scholar Bradley Dean from various works left unfinished at Thoreau’s death (including The Dispersion of Seeds), Faith in a Seed offers a vision of Thoreau the naturalist and scientist that goes well beyond any of the other works I’ve previously highlighted in this space (or, indeed, any of the works published in his lifetime). Yet Faith also reflects how much Thoreau’s perspective, ideas, and writing had evolved in the course of his two decades as a published writer—an evolution that highlights the tragedy of his far too youthful passing but also offers a vital challenge to any attempt to define Thoreau only through Walden or any one text or project. For all those reasons, I can’t imagine a more apt Earth Day week read than Faith in a Seed.

2)      Visit Walden Pond: Thanks to the efforts of Don Henley (yes, that Don Henley) and many others in the Walden Woods Project, the woods and pond have been largely preserved as they were in Thoreau’s era. As I wrote in this post about six years ago, however, even the changes, which have made the pond more accessible to modern visitors, seem to me to be in the spirit of Thoreau’s project and book. The site now features a newly renovated and still evolving Visitor Center, one which in its numerous green elements and initiatives as well as in its exhibits both presents and honors Thoreau’s legacy and vision. Moreover, I can testify from personal experience that simply sitting on the beach at Walden—or, as highlighted in this blog post by a favorite nature writer of mine, walking through the woods as a train passes by—allows you to feel a genuine and moving kinship with both Thoreau and the many millions of others who have spent meaningful time in these spaces. You won’t spend a summer or fall or winter day more happily, and certainly won’t better commemorate Earth Day, than by visiting Walden Pond.

3)      Walk with Others: Maybe you lived thousands of miles away from Walden, though. And maybe you’re not able to get your hands on a copy of Faith in a Seed. Well, I’m here to tell you that you can commemorate Earth Day in a deeply appropriate Thoreau-inspired way wherever you are, and with nothing other than your own two feet and (ideally) a companion or two. I don’t know of any American author or figure who more consistently or convincingly made the case for walking than Thoreau, a fact illustrated by the wonderful children’s book character who bears his name. It might seem that solitude was an important part of those walks, and certainly Thoreau wasn’t averse to such solo treks. But as “A Walk to Wachusett” reflects, Thoreau was always more than happy to share his walks, and indeed wrote about such companionship as a vital part of the experience. Having walked around Walden Pond (and many many other places, some familiar to one or all of us, some new to all) with my parents, with my sons, and with other good friends, I can say that here I entirely agree with the sometimes iconoclastic but always interesting and important environmental writer.

Next Earth Day post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?