ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

ECOCRITICISM AND
ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION

Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many years co-existed as
parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in separate academic
spheres. These fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to reinforce the
common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication charts the history of
the relationship between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also
highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applica-
tions of environmental communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of
environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors to this book include
literary, film and religious studies scholars, communication studies specialists, environmental
historians, practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers, sociologists, literary
theorists, and others, but all focus their discussions on key issues in textual representations of
human–nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities of environmental commu-
nication. The handbook is designed to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and
environmental communication and to predict future directions.
This handbook will be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners of
environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and rhetoric, as well as the
broader meta-discipline of environmental humanities.

Scott Slovic is Professor of Literature and Environment, Professor of Natural Resources and
Society, and Faculty Fellow in the Office of Research and Economic Development at the
University of Idaho, USA.

Swarnalatha Rangarajan is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and

Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Vidya Sarveswaran is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and

Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.
“The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication is a surprising,
insightful, and gratifying collection of essays stemming from multiple disciplines and
cultures, yet all converging on the rhetoric used in conveying environmental issues through
a diverse array of communication strategies and media. The editors’ conscious effort to
decentralize European and Anglophone perspectives to include other voices is both
refreshing and necessary.”
— Carmen Flys Junquera, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, editor of Ecozon@: European
Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

“This collection of essays gathers from the fields of ecocriticism and environmental
communication to promote paths of understanding that help us mend the broken ways of
our interconnectedness. A hearty salute to the editors for bringing together these critiques
and hopes for a renewed life on our Earth.”
— Juan Carlos Galeano, Florida State University, USA, poet,
environmentalist, and author of Folktales of the Amazon

“This wonderful collection testifies to the ever-expanding transnational reach of environ-

mental literature and other arts. The editors have compiled a vital volume of ecocritical
thought, as their book brings into conversation an exciting array of new texts and new
conceptual approaches.”
— Rob Nixon, Princeton University, USA, author of Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor

“This new anthology offers a brilliantly varied and international spectrum of perspectives
on the overlapping concerns of ecocriticism and environmental communication, two areas
of study that should have long been connected, but have rarely been considered together.
A must-read for anyone interested in environmental storytelling and image-making, from
news coverage to nonfiction, fiction, and film, and a gateway to exciting new paths of
research in environmental expression and communication.”
— Ursula K. Heise, UCLA, USA, author of Imagining Extinction:
The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF ECOCRITICISM AND
ENVIRONMENTAL
COMMUNICATION

Edited by Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan

and Vidya Sarveswaran
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
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publishers.
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only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Slovic, Scott, 1960- editor. | Rangarajan, Swarnalatha, 1969- editor. | Sarveswaran, Vidya, editor.
Title: Routledge handbook of ecocriticism and environmental communication / edited by Scott Slovic,
Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran.
Other titles: Handbook of ecocriticism and environmental communication
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044752 (print) | LCCN 2018057189 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315167343 (eBook) |
ISBN 9781138053137 (hardback) |
Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Communication in the environmental sciences.
Classification: LCC PN98.E36 (ebook) | LCC PN98.E36 R68 2019 (print) | DDC 809/.933553–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044752

ISBN: 978-1-138-05313-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-16734-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd
 CONTENTS

List of figures ix
List of contributors x
Foreword – M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer xviii

Introduction 1
Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran

PART I
New frameworks 13

1 Ecocriticism and discourse 15

Andrew McMurry

2 The climate of change: graphic adaptation, The Rime of the Modern Mariner,
and the ecological uncanny 26
Pramod K. Nayar

3 Eco churches, eco synagogues, eco Hollywood: 21st-century practical

responses to Lynn White, Jr.’s and Andrew Furman’s 20th-century readings
of environments in crisis 36
CA Cranston

4 Communicating resistance in/through an aquatic ecology: a study of K.R.

Meera’s The Gospel of Yudas 54
Gayathri Prabhu

5 Transformative entanglements: birds and humans in three non-fictional texts 63

Wendy Woodward

v
 Contents

6 Discovering the Weatherworld: combining ecolinguistics, ecocriticism,

and lived experience 71
Arran Stibbe

7 Narrative communication in environmental fiction: cognitive and

rhetorical approaches 84
Markku Lehtimäki

8 Postcolonial development, socio-ecological degradation, and slow

violence in Pakistani fiction 98
Saba Pirzadeh

9 How the material world communicates: insights from material

ecocriticism 108
Serpil Oppermann

10 Scale in ecological science writing 118

Derek Woods

11 The literal and literary conflicts of climate change: the climate migrant
and the unending war against emergence 129
Shane Hall

12 Reconceptualizing the individual as a social actor in environmental

communication 143
Julia B. Corbett

PART II
Pragmatic communication 153

13 Directionality in Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow: ecocritical art history

and visual communication 155
Alan C. Braddock

14 Challenges to developing a long-term environmental perspective:

PAN and DIM 167
Patrick D. Murphy

15 The “Chernobyl Syndrome” in U.S. nuclear fiction: toward risk

communication parameters of “nuclear phobia” 175
Inna Sukhenko

16 Art as eco-protest and communication in Tanure Ojaide’s selected poetry 187

Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure

vi
 Contents

17 Nature writing in the Anthropocene 199

Christian Hummelsund Voie

18 Experimental ecocriticism, or how to know if literature really works 211

Wojciech Małecki

19 Grey literature, green governance 224

James R. Goebel

20 When thirst had undone so many: a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of

water crisis in Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Girish Malik’s Jal 242
T. Ravichandran and Nibedita Bandyopadhyay

21 Cows, corn, and communication: how the discourse around GMOs

impacted legislation in the EU and the USA 255
Annka Liepold

22 Science, wonder, and new nature writing: rachel Carson 265

Saskia Beudel

PART III
Non-Western environmental communication 277

23 Designing the communication of traditional ecological knowledge:

a Noto case study 279
Yuki Masami

24 Cosmopolitan communication and ecological consciousness in Latin

America: miguel Gutiérrez’s Babel, el paraíso 291
Roberto Forns-Broggi

25 Communicating with the Cosmos: contemporary Brazilian women

poets and the embodiment of spiritual values 301
Izabel F.O. Brandão and Edilane Ferreira da Silva

26 Women’s street artivism in India and Brazil: Shilo Shiv Suleman’s

pan-indigenous environmental movement 314
Aarti Smith Madan

27 Novelist as eco-shaman: Buket Uzuner’s Water [Su] as requesting spirits

to help the earth in crisis 326
Pınar Batur and Ufuk Özdağ

vii
 Contents

28 Environmentalism in the realm of Malaysian novels in English 339

Zainor Izat Zainal

29 Ecomedia nurture Japanese ecological identity 351

Keitaro Morita

30 Indigenous interiority as nature–culture–sacred continuum: an ecological

analysis of Have You Seen the Arana? 363
Rayson K. Alex

31 Risk, resistance, and memory in two narratives by Asian women 373

Chitra Sankaran

32 Environmental NGOs and environmental communication in China 384

Chen Hong

Afterword – Homero Aridjis and Betty Ferber 391

Index 402

viii
 FIGURES

13.1 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts,

after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836, oil on canvas 51 ½ x 76 in.,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 157
13.2 George A. Crofutt after John Gast, American Progress, 1873,
chromolithograph, 37.6 x 49 cm., Library of Congress, Washington, DC 161
13.3 Thomas Cole’s fossil and rock collection, ca. 1830–40, Thomas Cole
National Historic Site, Catskill, New York 164
23.1 Maruyama, rice paddies, and mountains in Ichinosaka. The white roof
at the lower left is the Haginos’ house 282
23.2 Monitoring and observation of plants around Maruyama 284
23.3 Locavore lunch in the living room 285
23.4 Soybean plants in the berm after the weed-cutting 286
26.1 First instance of revisionist feminist history in Fearless Futures: A Feminist
Cartographer’s Toolkit 318
26.2 Second instance of revisionist feminist history in Fearless Futures:
A Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit 319
26.3 “I miss the village I never had: it takes a village” 321
29.1 The seven factors that have contributed to the development of
the research participants’ ecological identities 353

ix
 CONTRIBUTORS

Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of English and

Literary Studies, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, where she teaches African and
non-African literature at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She was a 2016–17 Fulbright
Foreign Student Researcher and a 2018 American Council of Learned Society of the African
Humanities Program Postdoctoral fellow (ACLS/AHP). Her research interests include envir-
onmental literary studies, gender studies, and postcolonial literatures. She has written a
number of journal articles and book chapters on environmental and gender justice.
Rayson K. Alex is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences at Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus, Goa,
West India. He has coedited Essays in Ecocriticism (2007), Culture and Media: Ecocritical
Explorations (2014), Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays (2016) and Ecocultural Ethics: Critical
Essays (2017). His academic interests are in the areas of ecoindigeneity and ecomedia studies.
Homero Aridjis, one of Latin America’s greatest living writers, is also extraordinary for his
pioneering work as an environmental activist and his two-term stint as president of PEN
International. Aridjis has served as Mexico’s Ambassador to Switzerland, The Netherlands and
UNESCO. Many of his 49 books of poetry and prose have been translated into 15 languages
and he has received important literary and environmental prizes in Mexico, France, Italy, the
United States and Serbia. Most recently out in English are The Child Poet, Maria the Monarch
and News of the Earth, a biography of his relationship with the natural world and a wide-
ranging selection of his work and writings in defense of the environment. He lives in Mexico
City, Mexico.
Nibedita Bandyopadhyay recently completed her PhD program in English from the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
(IIT) Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. For her doctoral thesis, she worked on postcolonial
ecocriticism and narratives of the Global South. She is a recipient of a Junior Research
Fellowship. She participated in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.
She has presented her research in international and national conferences and journals.

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 Contributors

Pınar Batur is Professor and the Chair of Sociology at Vassar College. Her works include
Handbook of Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations (2018), White Racism (2001) and The Global
Color Line: Racial and Ethnic Inequality and Struggle from a Global Perspective (1990), with Joe
Feagin. Her recent research is on racism and global climate change, as well as on Turkish
environmental thought. She received grants from the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow
Wilson Center, USA, the Hoover Institution, USA, HR Guggenheim Foundation, SSRC,
USA, AAC&U, USA, SENCER, USA, and the Dreyfus Foundation, USA.
Saskia Beudel, Ph.D., is author of Borrowed Eyes (2002), A Country in Mind: Memoir with
Landscape (2013) and Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future (with Jill Bennett, 2014).
Her research interests encompass history of science, environmental writing, life writing,
narrative nonfiction, environmental humanities and contemporary art. She is currently
Adjunct Associate Professor at the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the
University of Canberra, Australia, where she lectures in the writing program.
Alan C. Braddock is the Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American
Studies at William & Mary, USA. He is the author of Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of
Modernity (2009), co-editor with Christoph Irmscher of A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies
in American Art History (2009), co-editor with Laura Turner Igoe of A Greene Country Towne:
Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination (2016), and co-author and co-curator with
Karl Kusserow of Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (2018). He is currently
working on a new book titled Ecocritical Art History: Theory and Practice.
Izabel F.O. Brandão is Professor of Literatures in English, and contemporary Brazilian
women writers, at Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, and is a CNPq grant holder for
literature research. She has edited/co-edited several books about women writers and feminist
criticism and has published extensively both in Brazil and elsewhere (France, England, Italy,
Spain, and the USA). She co-edited (with Ildney Cavalcanti and two other scholars) a
feminist anthology in translation (Traduções da cultura: perspectivas críticas feministas – 1970–
2010 [“Translations of Culture: Feminist Perspectives 1970–2010”]), in 2017. She is also a
poet and has published Espiral de fogo (“Fire Spiral”, 1998), Ilha de olhos e espelhos (“Island of
eyes and mirrors”, 2003), and As horas da minha alegria (“The hours of my joy”, 2013).
Roberto Forns-Broggi has been a writer and Professor of Spanish at Metropolitan State
University of Denver, USA, since 1998. He teaches diverse Spanish advanced courses,
including Latin American Cinema, and Latin American Essay on nature. His essays on
ecological perspectives applied to literature, art, film and new media aim to investigate
alternative epistemologies and its influence in reading and writing practices. He published in
Spanish Knots like Stars: The ABC of Ecological Imagination in our Americas (2012). An updated
version of that book in English was published in 2016. His work is fed by curiosity, crossing
disciplines, weaving knots from ancient and contemporary cultures. He is currently preparing
a bilingual workbook on environmental writing and film in Latin America.
Chen Hong is a professor of English in the Research Center for Comparative Literature and
World Literatures at Shanghai Normal University, China, where she specializes in English
poetry since the Romantic period. She has published a number of papers on contemporary
Chinese environmental literature in both Chinese and English languages, including two in
ISLE and one in Concentric, and a chapter in East Asian Ecocriticism: A Critical Reader (2013).
Chen hosted two international ecocriticism conferences in China in 2008 and 2015.

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 Contributors

Julia B. Corbett is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Environmental

Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah, USA. Her scholarship investigates
human relationships with the natural world. Books include Communicating Earth: Engaging with
Climate Change (under review), Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday (2018), Seven
Summers: A Naturalist Homesteads in the Modern West (2013), and Communicating Nature: How
We Create and Understand Environmental Messages (2008). Before receiving her M.A. and Ph.D.
at the University of Minnesota in 1994, she was a reporter, a park naturalist, and a natural
resources information officer.
CA Cranston is a University of Tasmania Associate, Australia. Her latest publication appears in
Studies in Australasian Cinema (May 2018). In 2017, she published the “Australia” section of
“Climate and Culture in Australia and New Zealand” in A Cambridge Global History of Literature
and the Environment, editors Louise Westling and John Parham. Her essay “Reconstructing
Representations: ‘Australia’ as Ecocritical Andragogy” is to be published in Ecocritical Concerns
and the Australian Continent (2018) edited by Helen Tiffin and Beate Neumeier. When president
of ASLEC-ANZ she initiated and edited their flagship journal Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism
(AJE) for six years. In 2007 she contributed to and co-edited the first Australian collection of
ecocritical essays The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers (2007).
Betty Ferber, of Mexico City, Mexico, is the translator of three novels by Homero Aridjis:
1492 The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile, The Lord of the Last Days: Visions of the Year
1000 and Persephone. With Canadian/Irish poet George McWhirter she co-edited Eyes to See
Otherwise, Selected Poetry of Homero Aridjis. She and Aridjis co-authored News of the Earth. As
International Coordinator of the Group of 100 since its founding in 1985, she shared the
Mikhail Gorbachev/Green Cross Millennium Award for International Environmental Leader-
ship with Homero Aridjis, the Group’s founder and president. Ferber and Aridjis held three
international symposia of writers and scientists in Mexico as well as three acclaimed interna-
tional poetry festivals.
Edilane Ferreira da Silva is a Ph.D. student at the Federal University of Alagoas (Ufal),
Brazil, whose feminist ecocritical research is on contemporary Brazilian women writers,
specifically Marina Colasanti. She received her M.A. in Ecologia Humana e Gestão Socio-
ambiental (“Human Ecology and Social and Environmental Management”) from Bahia State
University (Uneb), Brazil. Her research interest is on women writers, gender, and ecology via
feminist ecocriticism, and she is a member of Mare&sal, an interdisciplinary research group at
Ufal.
James R. Goebel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Irvine, USA, where he is currently completing his dissertation,
“Sustainable Subjects: Literature, Science, and Environmental Governance in the American
West.” His research explores the relation between postwar political and scientific practices of
resource management and 19th- and 20th-century western American literature. James has
published essays on literature, film, and art in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Caliban:
French Journal of English Studies, and the edited volume Exploring Animal Encounters.
Shane Hall is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Salisbury University, USA.
He studies the intersections of climate change, militarization, and environmental justice in US
literature and popular culture. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon’s Environ-
mental Sciences, Studies, and Policy Program. He is the co-editor of an anthology: Teaching
Climate Change in the Humanities (2017) with Stephen Siperstein and Stephanie LeMenager, and

xii
 Contributors

his work on teaching climate change through creative writing has been published in Resilience:
A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Shane teaches a variety of courses at Salisbury,
including “Introduction to environmental humanities,” “War and environmental conflict,”
and “Environmental justice.”
M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Professor Emeritus of English from Texas A&M University,
USA, has published on American literature, rhetoric, technical communication, and environ-
mental studies. His books include the award-winning Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental
Politics in America (1992, co-authored with Jacqueline Palmer) and Walt Whitman and the
Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (2004). His latest books are Facing It: Epiphany and Apocalypse in the
New Nature (2014) and (with Jacqueline Palmer and James Frost) Nuclear New Mexico: A
Historical, Natural, and Virtual Tour (2018). He edits the series Seventh Generation: Survival,
Sustainability, and Sustenance in a New Nature.
Markku Lehtimäki, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Eastern
Finland and Acting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland.
His research focuses on narrative theory, visual culture, and environmental literary studies. He
is co-editor of several books, including Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing, and
the Trivial in Literature (2012) and Veteen kirjoitettu: Veden merkityksiä kirjallisuudessa (2018;
“Written on Water: Meanings of Water in Literature”). His current research project, “The
Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (2017–
2021),” is funded by the Academy of Finland.
Annka Liepold earned a doctoral degree in Environmental Humanities from the Ludwig-
Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, in 2017. Her thesis was titled “Corn Capital:
How Corn Changed the Landscape, Industry, and Culture of Olivia, MN.” In 2015, she was
a Visiting Scholar at the Environmental History Department of the University of Kansas,
USA. She currently works at the Deutsches Museum Munich as a curatorial staff member.
Andrew McMurry (Ph.D., Indiana) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English
Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He has published widely on
ecocriticism, systems theory, and environmental discourse. His books are Environmental
Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau and the System of Nature and Entertaining Futility: Despair and
Hope in the Time of Climate Change.
Aarti Smith Madan (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, USA) is an Associate Professor of
Spanish and International Studies in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, USA, where she serves as Director of the Buenos Aires Project
Center. Her research centers on the ways spatial practices inform the production and
consumption of literature, film, and art in Latin America. In her first book, Lines of
Geography in Latin American Narrative: National Territory, National Literature (2017), Aarti
unearths the literary roots of the discipline of geography in 19th-century Latin America.
Her second book-length project explores literary and cultural encounters between India
and Latin America, with a special focus on Brazil.
Wojciech Małecki is Assistant Professor of Literary Theory at the Institute of Polish
Philology, University of Wrocław, Poland. His research interests include American pragma-
tism, animal studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, popular culture, and the empirical study of
literature. He is the author of Embodying Pragmatism (2010), the editor or co-editor of five
collections of essays, and sits on the editorial boards of the journal Pragmatism Today and the
Eger Journal of English Studies. He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles,

xiii
 Contributors

including in such journals as The Oxford Literary Review, Foucault Studies, Poetics, Angelaki,
Journal of Ecocriticism, and PLOS One.
Keitaro Morita, D.B.A., is an independent scholar currently living in Tokyo and a
professional Japanese-English simultaneous/consecutive interpreter and translator, as well as
an active member of ASLE-Japan. His published articles include “A Queer Ecofeminist
Reading of ‘Matsuri [Festival]’ by Hiromi Ito” (East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader,
2013), “Ecocriticism and Gender/Sexuality Studies: A Book Review Article on New Work
by Azzarello and Gaard, Estok, and Oppermann” (CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and
Culture, vol. 16, no. 4, 2014), and he co-edited and contributed to Kankyô-jinbun-gaku I & II
[The Environmental Humanities, volumes I & II] (2017).
Patrick D. Murphy is Professor Emeritus, University of Central Florida, USA, where he
served as professor and chair of the English Department, and before that taught at Indiana
University of Pennsylvania, USA. Founding editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature
and Environment, he is author of several ecocritical and ecofeminist books, including most
recently Transversal Ecocritical Praxis and Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis, both published by
Lexington.
Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad, India, and is the author, most
recently of Human Rights and Literature (2016), The Indian Graphic Novel (2018), The Extreme
in Contemporary Culture (2017) and Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (2017). Forthcoming works
include Ecoprecarity and Brand Postcolonial.
Serpil Oppermann is Professor of Environmental Humanities at Cappadocia University,
Turkey, and the Immediate Past President of EASLCE. Her recent publications include
International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (co-edited with Greta Gaard and Simon C.
Estok, 2013), Material Ecocriticism (2014), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene
(2017, both co-edited with Serenella Iovino), and New International Voices in Ecocriticism
(2015).
Ufuk Özdağ is Professor of American Culture and Literature, and Founder-Director of the
Land Ethic Research and Application Center at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.
Özdağ is the author of Literature and the Land Ethic: Leopoldian Thought in American Nature
Writing (2005) and Introduction to Environmental Criticism: Nature Culture Literature (2014), both
in Turkish. She is the co-editor of The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (2011) and
Environmental Crisis and Human Costs (2015). Özdağ is the translator of Leopold’s A Sand
County Almanac into Turkish (2013).
Jacqueline S. Palmer co-authored, with Jimmie Killingsworth, Information in Action (1999),
the award-winning Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (1992), and Nuclear
New Mexico: A Historical, Natural, and Virtual Tour (2018, photography by James Frost). Her
published articles and book chapters have focused on environmental rhetoric, environmental
education, and assessment (the latter with the Laboratory Network Program). Before retiring,
she taught technical writing, editing, and web writing at Texas A&M University, USA,
where she also served as Associate Director of both the Writing Programs Office and
the English Department’s Institutional Assessment Program. She now lives in El Prado,
New Mexico.

xiv
 Contributors

Saba Pirzadeh is Assistant Professor of English and Environmental Literature at Lahore

University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. She obtained her Ph.D. in English
from Purdue University on a Fulbright fellowship in 2016. Her research interests include
ecocriticism, militarism, socio-environmental justice, postcolonial literature, popular culture
and gender studies. Her work has been published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature
and Environment, South Asian Review, Parergon and is forthcoming in South Asian Popular
Culture.
Gayathri Prabhu is Associate Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal
Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), India. She holds a doctoral degree in English from
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. She is the author of the novels Maya (2003),
Birdswim Fishfly (2006), The Untitled (2016), and the memoir If I Had To Tell It Again (2017).
Her research interests include global modernism, medical humanities, environmental literature,
and women writers of 20th-century India.
Swarnalatha Rangarajan is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. She served as the founding
editor of the Indian Journal of Ecocriticism (IJE), has been guest editor for two special issues on
Indian ecosophy for The Trumpeter, and is on the editorial board of ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment. She has edited two books, Ecoambiguity, Community, and
Development (2014) and Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015) with Scott Slovic and Vidya
Sarveswaran. Her book Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies was published in 2018. She
and Scott Slovic are the series editors for Routledge Studies in World Literatures and Environment.
She is currently working on a book of interviews with contemporary women writers from
Tamil Nadu titled Mapping the Ahampuram, with K. Srilata, which is forthcoming from
Women Unlimited. Rangarajan also dabbles in creative writing and her short fiction and
poetry has appeared in various anthologies. Her first novel, Final Instructions (2015), has a
prominent ecosophical theme.
T. Ravichandran is presently a Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. He
is a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship
(2014–15) for his research and teaching at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. Recently,
he was honored with the Champa Devi Gangwal Chair Professorship at IIT Kanpur. His new
courses on “Climate Fiction and Films” and “Perspectives of the Posthuman and/in the
Anthropocene” have been introduced for the first time in India. He has written numerous
journal articles and book chapters and edited a special issue on “cyberpunk literature” for the
Creative Forum Journal, and published a book on postmodern identity. He has presented a
number of papers in national seminars and international conferences.
Chitra Sankaran is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, National University
of Singapore. Her research interests include Ecocriticism, South and Southeast Asian fiction
and feminist theory. She recently edited a Special Issue of The Journal of Ecocriticism on
“Ecocriticism in ASEAN”. Her other publications include monographs, edited volumes,
book chapters, and research articles in International Research Journals including Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, Theatre Research International, Australian Feminist Studies and Critical
Asian Studies. She is currently working on ecofeminism in South and Southeast Asian
Women’s fiction. She is the founding-president of ASLE-ASEAN: The Association for the
Study of Literature and Environment in ASEAN.

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 Contributors

Vidya Sarveswaran is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities

and Social Sciences at IIT Jodhpur, India. She is a Fulbright Fellow (2008–09) and a
Rachel Carson Fellow (2016) from LMU Munich. Vidya also heads the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research and teaching focus on environmental
humanities, environment and culture, ecocriticism and literary studies. Vidya has co-
edited two books: Ecoambiguity, Community and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriti-
cism (2014) and Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015). She is currently working on a script
and a film that seeks to document ecological narratives around Rajasthan.
Scott Slovic is Professor of Literature and Environment, Professor of Natural Resources and
Society, and Faculty Fellow in the Office of Research and Economic Development at the
University of Idaho, USA. He served as founding president of the Association for the Study
of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from 1992 to 1995, and since 1995 he has edited the
journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. The author and editor of
more than 25 books, his recent co-edited volumes include Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language,
Beauty, and the Environment (2018), Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts
(2016), Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (2015), and
Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015).
Arran Stibbe is Professor of Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire, UK.
He is the Convener of the International Ecolinguistics Association, author of Animals Erased
and Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, and producer of the free online
course The Stories We Live By.
Inna Sukhenko is a postdoctoral researcher of the Helsinki University Humanities Program,
the University of Helsinki, Finland. She graduated from Dnipo National University, Ukraine,
where she defended her doctoral dissertation. Her current research interests deal with
environmental humanities, ecocriticism, literary energy narratives, and nuclear narrative
studies. Her special interest lies with the “Chernobyl narrative” within ecocritical studies as
well as energy humanities. She is a member of the Association for Literary Urban Studies,
Finland, HELSUS (Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Sciences, Finland), the Finnish Society
for Development Research, Finland, and the Ecological Information Center, Ukraine. She
was a member of research teams within international mobility programs (Cambridge Colleges
Hospitality Scheme, Erasmus Mundus, Open Society Foundations).
Christian Hummelsund Voie is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Southeast Norway. His teaching subjects include written and oral communication, American
literature, and literature and the environment in America. He has published various articles on
literature and the environment, and the title of his recent dissertation, Nature Writing of the
Anthropocene (Mid Sweden University, 2017), reflects many of his current research interests. They
include nature writing, the Anthropocene, ecocriticism, material ecocriticism, ecofeminism,
environmental justice, the environmental humanities, environmental literature, environmental
memory, environmental generational amnesia, science fiction and the environment, Norwegian
black metal and the environment, and Louisiana and the environment.
Derek Woods is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College,
USA. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Rice University, where he was a Fellow in the
Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. His essays appear in
publications like the journal American Literary History and the collection Anthropocene Reading:
Literary History in Geologic Times. Currently, his work in progress is a monograph about the

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 Contributors

cultural and philosophical dimensions of green technology, entitled What Is Ecotechnology?

Literature, Biopolitics, and the Artificial Ecosystem.
Wendy Woodward is Professor Emerita in English Literature at the University of the
Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in
Southern African Narratives (2008) and the co-editor, with Erika Lemmer, of a special issue of
the Journal of Literary Studies on “Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa” (2014).
She is co-editor, with Susan McHugh, of Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges and the Arts:
Animal Studies in Modern Worlds (2017). She has also published three volumes of poetry.
Yuki Masami is Professor of Human and Socio-environmental Studies at Kanazawa
University, Japan. She has been publishing books and articles on environmental literature
with special focus on topics such as discourses on food and toxicity, biocultural diversity,
and cultural-natural environments called “satoyama.” Her books include Foodscapes of
Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (2015; Japanese original in 2012), Ecocriticism in Japan
(co-edited with Hisaaki Wake and Keijiro Suga, 2017) and Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in
Ecocritical Perspective (co-edited with Bruce Allen, 2016). She is currently President of the
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Japan.
Zainor Izat Zainal, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia, where she
teaches Malaysian literature in English and miscellaneous other subjects related to world
literature. Currently, she is vice president of the Association for the Study of Literature and
Environment ASEAN (ASLE-ASEAN). Her primary research interest is postcolonial ecocriti-
cism, with particular emphasis on Malaysia.

xvii
 FOREWORD
M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer

The tour of Nuclear New Mexico, the topic of our latest book, has led us beyond state
boundaries into the sheer beauty of the red rock formations in the Four Corners region
(where the edges of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado come together). It feels as if
we’ve been chasing a metaphor of boundaries forming and reforming, emerging and
disappearing. State lines, Indian reservation boundaries, national frontiers, the fences of federal
installations and military bases, the grids of power systems, the shifts into new eco-zones,
rivers and watersheds, wildlife ranges, lines of influence, vectors of appeal, disciplinary
borders.
We’ve been chasing metaphors of division and definition, boundaries and circulation,
since we met in Socorro, New Mexico, in the mid-1980s—Jimmie, a literary scholar on the
tenure track in Humanities at New Mexico Tech, trying to figure out the relationship of
literary training to his main work in teaching English comp and tech writing; Jackie pursuing
graduate work in science education—both of us gradually coming to the realization that
ecology was calling, that the environmental movement would need an academic wing in
education and literary/rhetorical studies, both of us collecting relevant articles and sample
texts and tossing them into a box (not a file, for we lived mainly out of boxes in those years).
We fell in love and merged boxes. Within a few years we published Ecospeak: Rhetoric and
Environmental Politics in America and, with scholars like Scott Slovic, began to define the fields
that came to be known as environmental communication and ecocriticism. A thin boundary
separating them mirrored the division between literary studies and rhetoric/composition, with
fields like speech and journalism also claiming space within communication. Then came
media studies, cultural studies, race studies, women’s studies, period studies, and topical
specializations like eco-feminism, environmental justice, place theory, tourism, and nuclear
studies, not to mention the inevitable overlaps and territorial disputes with burgeoning
scholarship in environmental history, human ecology, eco-philosophy, and eco-theology.
On this latest research tour, we were tracking the spaces devoted to Nuclear New Mexico
and Natural New Mexico and the relationship between nuclear tourism and eco-tourism. The
tour became the metaphor for encountering and sometimes transgressing the boundaries, and
eventually it also became the guiding metaphor for the book we were writing (walking or
driving transfigured as reading, the virtual tour on which we invite our readers). In our
earliest publications, we subscribed to an idea that was in the air in the 1980s and early 1990s,
that environmentalism (at that time fabulously on the rise) got its first boost from the
discovery and detonation of the atomic bomb in World War II, followed in the 1950s and
1960s by the arming of the superpowers with thermonuclear weapons and the arms race. For

xviii
 Foreword

the first time in history, human beings had the power to destroy the world with a single
decision. Environmental activism, in this view, appeared as a by-product (some would say
side effect) of the Cold War. In the 1960s, Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich had used the
atomic bomb as a metaphor for the destruction wrought by chemical pesticides (Carson) and
overpopulation (Ehrlich). They were feeling the newfound power and apocalyptic potential
of humankind. The image of “destroyer of worlds,” which Robert Oppenheimer invoked
with his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after the first atomic test at Trinity Site in 1945, found
its counterpart in the environmentalist dream of “saving the world”—a much more far-
reaching and globalist position than the old conservationism with its focus on resource
management and the preservation of specific locations and land features. And now while
exploring our re-adopted home, both of us having retired and returned to New Mexico after
a decades-long grand tour of Southern academia (anchoring finally at Texas A&M), we kept
coming upon the intersections of Natural and Nuclear New Mexico. Trinity Site, where the
bomb was first tested (now enclosed in the expansive White Sands Missile Range, open twice
a year to nuclear tourists and pilgrims of various stripes), borders the White Sands National
Monument to the south and the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Preserve to the east.
Los Alamos (the secret headquarters of the Manhattan Project during World War II and now
the seat of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the work continues) is sandwiched
between the Bandelier National Monument (which shares space with Los Alamos on the
Parajito Plateau and contains some of the finest examples of ancient Puebloan cliff dwellings)
and the Valles Caldera National Monument (with its great meadows formed by ancient
volcanos and now populated with herds of elk and deer). The town of Carlsbad hosts both
the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. When we began to
get the idea for writing a book on the metaphor of the tour (or pilgrimage), this pairing of
war and nature on public land—including the big stories of official history, of Oppenheimer
and Groves, Fat Man and Little Boy, of the A and the H Bombs, of winning the war and
becoming a world superpower, the stories told and retold in Pulitzer-Prize-winning histories,
mainstream novels, television series, federally funded museums, and roadside markers—
became the stories and stops on what we began to call the Tour of Enlightenment. There
we found nature, archaeology, spectacular mountains and canyon lands with guidance from
on-site signage, trail maintenance, rangers, museum staff, and visitor centers; there we found
lessons in the official history and the heroic adventures of scientists and soldiers (their words
and deeds recounted in shiny federal museums and dusty local displays).
But also vying for our attention was a different tour that followed a different history. It
emerged only when we took our guidance from indigenous literature (like the prose/poetry
of Simon Ortiz and the fiction and poems of Leslie Marmon Silko, perhaps the foremost
world novelist of the Nuclear Age), and from activists and advocates of environmental justice
and related causes. We came to realize that the Tour of Enlightenment leaves many other
stories in the dark. What remains is the Shadow Tour. It leads to the places where uranium
was mined in unregulated and unhealthy conditions, where waste piled up, where the largely
indigenous workforce took jobs in the mines and mills and suffered health effects that went
unmonitored and uncompensated for decades, where (at Church Rock) a uranium spill
poisoned the land and water of rural, mainly indigenous people, a leak (more of a torrent)
that happened in the same year as the Three Mile Island accident (1979) and yet went all but
unreported in the national press, while the smaller leak in Pennsylvania dominated the
headlines. The Shadow Tour encompasses the northwest quadrant of New Mexico and
leads to the country where boundaries grow fuzzy.

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 Foreword

It is a bright spring day on the Shadow Tour when we land in Halchita, Utah. There we
catch sight of wild burros. That’s why we stop the car, to see the burros. They are munching
dry grass not far from a big lake. A lake in this desert? We’re close to the San Juan River, so
perhaps there’s a dam. But no, it’s not a lake. It’s a large pit of what looks like gravel. There’s
no signage at all (it’s the Shadow Tour). The burros look up from their grazing occasionally
to assess the threat we might present. We stand and wonder, the scene framed by red-rock
mesas, woven stone (to use an image from Simon Ortiz), and wild wind-sculpted formations
like the nearby rock known as Mexican Hat. The burros wander off. We note the name of
the place and move on.
Later, we would discover on the internet that we had stumbled upon the Mexican Hat
UMTRA site. UMTRA stands for Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action, a nationwide
cleanup project involving several Four Corners sites, operated by the US Department of
Energy (DOE) and funded by an act of Congress in 1978. The hallucinatory lake near
Halchita is an attempt to stabilize the tailings pile from the Mexican Hat uranium mill, which
operated from 1956 through 1963, grinding ore and refining uranium to fuel Cold War
initiatives. The 2.2 million tons of waste was not stabilized when the mill shut down and the
sponsoring company pulled out, the land reverting to the Navajo Nation. With groundwater
and the nearby river threatened, the DOE intervened. A huge concrete cell was constructed
with layers of insulation around the waste—not only Mexican Hat waste, but also additional
tonnage brought over from sites even closer to Monument Valley. The cell, with its two-
foot-thick radon-infiltration barrier, is capped by multiple layers of protective material and
finished with a sand-and-gravel cover to permit “safe” drainage. Although it covers 72 acres
and still radiates weakly, no further remedial action is planned (Rekow, 2013).
As we were reading the internet site, all those hours in the tech comm classroom came
rushing back—the acronyms, the passive voice, the strategic vagueness—all the stylistic habits
we combatted now mocking us in this return of the repressed. But that wasn’t all. Circulating
through our experience were the activist narratives of the Southwest Information and
Research Center and of journalists and scholars like Judy Pasternak and Valerie Kuletz.
These narratives tell of the Navajo (Diné) people whose families worked the mines and,
oblivious of the potential danger, used the contaminated sands near tailings piles to build
adobe dwellings. A people once thought to be immune to cancer soon became a population
whose cancer rates are far higher than comparable populations worldwide, whose waters have
been regularly rendered unfit for use, and whose lands have sometimes been closed to farming
and human habitation more or less forever—a people recruited to support the work of
uranium production in the world war and the arms race by appeals to their patriotism and
warrior traditions, the same people whose kinsmen became the famous Code-talkers who
used their native language to baffle the Japanese in the Pacific war. With the memory of that
place warm in our minds—the burros munching possibly irradiated grass, the San Juan River
flowing and cutting the canyons, the perpetual wind whirling through the big rocks folded
and broken and layered by the long processes of geology, where four state lines come
together and public land alternates with private land and reservation allotments—we aban-
doned the idea of boundaries as the metaphor we sought. Where boundaries are imposed and
who imposes them makes little difference in the world defined either by ecology or nuclear
power, by natural or human history. Water, wind, animals, and electrons are no respecters of
human-imposed borders, though the effort to control their circulation may become life-
denying. For them, life means circulation. Blood and breath circulate. News circulates, or it
doesn’t (like the failed reporting on the Church Rock uranium spill). Infection circulates,
too. At the Mexican Hat UMTRA site, the lake of gravel attempts to prevent circulation of

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 Foreword

radioactivity. Likewise with government/corporate/military secrecy and information manage-

ment. What circulates? Who controls it? The questions work as well for language and
literature (and all kinds of signs in the semiotic sense) as for ecology.
Books like the one you are about to read promote the circulation of stories left untold, of
boundaries established or transgressed by disciplinary tags like environmental communication
and ecocriticism. The research confronts official history, authority, and received wisdom. It
energetically seeks alternative narratives, new explanations, images and tropes that shift
attention and change minds. With our modest contribution of the questions arising from the
tour of Nuclear and Natural New Mexico—like what circulates, and who controls the
circulation?—we gratefully join the authors in the search for answers and insight.

Works cited
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Fawcett Crest, 1962.
Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. Original work published 1968. Sierra Club, 1969.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Facing It: Epiphany and Apocalypse in the New Nature. Texas A&M University
Press, 2014.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America.
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Photography by James E. Frost. Nuclear New Mexico:
A Historical, Natural, and Virtual Tour. Texas A&M University Press, 2018.
Kuletz, Valerie L. The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West. Routledge, 1998.
Ortiz, Simon J. Woven Stone. University of Arizona Press, 1992.
Pasternak, Judy. Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed. Free Press, 2010.
Rekow, Lea. “Monument Valley, AZ. Mexican Hat UMTRA Site.” Ex-Tract: Mineral Extraction and
Cultural Ecology on the Colorado Plateau www.learekow.com/extract/content/mexicanhat.php. 2013.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Intro. Larry McMurtry. New Preface by L.M. Silko. 1977. Penguin,
1977.

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 INTRODUCTION
Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran

What is ecocriticism and how has the field developed?

Although named in 1978 and officially recognized as a burgeoning discipline (or academic
movement) in the mid-1990s, the field of ecocriticism (environmental approaches to textual
analysis and cultural studies) has actually existed for a very long time, perhaps dating back to
the earliest commentaries on natural themes in ancient sacred texts. David Mazel summarizes
this development in the introduction to his 2001 collection, A Century of Early Ecocriticism,
referring to the field as “the study of literature as if the environment mattered” (1). Mazel
marks the onset of contemporary ecocritical studies of environmental texts and the cultural
contexts of environmental communication as the publication of Leo Marx’s The Machine in
the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), tracing “early ecocriticism” back
100 years to Henry Tuckerman’s America and Her Commentators: With a Critical Sketch of Travel
in the United States (1864) and including Tuckerman’s essay on naturalists John and William
Bartram as the earliest sample of proto-ecocriticism in his anthology. The field of ecocriticism
has evolved and expanded tremendously since early studies of “nature-writing” (such as Dallas
Lore Sharp’s work in the 1911 book The Face of the Fields) and the focus on natural themes in
literature (such as Norman Foerster’s 1923 monograph Nature in American Literature: Studies in
the Modern View of Nature).
Those who adhere to the “wave theory” of ecocriticism have typically begun their
historiography with William Rueckert’s “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in
Ecocriticism,” published in the Iowa Review in 1978, a work in which Rueckert argues
that ecological concepts are embedded in the literary expression, especially in poetry,
which he refers to as “the verbal equivalent of fossil fuel (stored energy)” (108). The
initial wave of ecocriticism—the so-called “first wave”—appeared in the 1980s following
Rueckert’s use of the term, although most of these scholars did not actually use the term
“ecocriticism” to describe their work until Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm pub-
lished The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology in 1996, helping to launch
“ecocriticism” as a formally recognized branch of literary and cultural studies, although it
took a number of years before the field gathered momentum and became the ubiquitous
area of teaching, research, and even activism that it is today. In his 2005 volume The
Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Lawrence

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 Scott Slovic et al.

Buell (2005) initiated the use of wave terminology in discussions about the historical
development of ecocriticism. He wrote:
No definitive map of environmental criticism in literary studies can . . . be drawn.
Still, one can identify several trend-lines marking an evolution from a “first wave”
of ecocriticism to a “second” or newer revisionist wave or waves increasingly
evident today. This first-second distinction should not, however, be taken as
implying a tidy, distinct succession. Most currents set in motion by early ecocriti-
cism continue to run strong, and most forms of second-wave revisionism involve
building on as well as quarreling with precursors. In this sense, “palimpsest” would
be a better metaphor than “wave.”
(17)
Despite Buell’s cautionary words about the difficulty of mapping the historical development
of ecocriticism, subsequent scholars have sought to do so. Ken Hiltner uses Buell’s first- and
second-wave distinction as the basic structure of his 2015 anthology, Ecocriticism: The Essential
Reader, which highlights the particular efforts of ecocritics since 2000 to avoid romanticizing
nature and to take up such issues as social justice, the impacts of colonial development (and
the slow violence of neoliberal postcolonialism), the global expansiveness of ecological issues,
and the ontological question of “nature” (132). Other scholars, though, have noted more
precise phases within the development of ecocriticism since 1980. Scott Slovic’s “The Third
Wave of Ecocriticism: North American Reflections on the Current Phase of the Discipline”
(2010) noted, for instance, the move away from a North American-centered approach to the
field in the mid-1990s as well as a new focus on multiple genres of environmental expression,
on environmental justice issues, and on urban and suburban contexts of environmental
experience in second-wave ecocriticism, followed by a dawning emphasis on global concepts
of place, an interest in various gendered approaches to ecocriticism (from ecomasculinity to
queer ecocriticism), and an emergence of postcolonial ecocriticism and animality-based
ecocriticism around the year 2000. Slovic summarizes the first three waves of ecocriticism
and a fourth wave highlighting material ecocriticism and “applied ecocriticism” in his 2016
article “Seasick among the Waves of Ecocriticism: An Inquiry into Alternative Historio-
graphic Metaphors” (104–06) and highlights some of the major features of fourth-wave
ecocriticism—such as material ecocriticism, transnational ecocriticism, econarratology, eco-
critical animal studies, and ecocriticism and information processing—in the article “Litera-
ture” from the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2016). In her comprehensive
overview of the discipline, Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies (2018), Swarnalatha
Rangarajan argues that responding to the “planetary tragedy” posed by the Anthropocene “is
the central goal of ecocriticism, one of the youngest, cutting-edge, revisionist literary move-
ments with a profound advocacy function that has influenced teaching and scholarship in the
humanities since the late twentieth century” (1). In highlighting “new trajectories” in the
field at the end of her book, Rangarajan points specifically to material ecocriticism, queer
ecocriticism, posthuman ecocriticism, and ecocriticism and film studies.
In truth, though, many of these approaches are extremely important, but perhaps not
precisely “new.” Material ecocriticism has now been around for more than a decade, since
the publication of Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s Material Feminisms in 2008. Queer
ecocriticism was institutionalized with the appearance of Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and
Bruce Erickson’s collection Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire in 2010. Posthuman
approaches to the field that blur the distinction between human and non-human nature date
at least back to Timothy Morton’s 2007 book Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking

2
 Introduction

Environmental Aesthetics. And ecocritics began exploding the literature-centered approach to

environmental expression as early as the 1990s and have since that time produced a cottage
industry of research focusing on film, media, and popular culture.

Ecocriticism and environmental communication

The environmental approach to literature—and soon thereafter to other artistic media and
popular culture—began to receive widespread public attention in North America, Western
Europe, and East Asia in the mid-1990s, coinciding with the publication of The Ecocriticism
Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, in 1996. That same year, environ-
mental communication specialists James Cantrill and Christine Oravec (1996) wrote that the
“environment we experience and affect is largely a product of how we come to talk about
the world” (2). For many years, ecocriticism and environmental communication studies
have co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in
separate academic spheres. Ecocriticism has traditionally been primarily attached to high art
and popular culture, often emphasizing aesthetic, ethical, and activist traditions in various
societies around the world. Environmental communication studies has tended to lean
toward practical issues in environmental journalism and the sociology of environmental
movements.
Perhaps the earliest major publication in environmental communication studies was
M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer’s Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental
Politics in America, which appeared in 1992. As they define their purposes in this project,
Killingsworth and Palmer write:
Classically defined as the production and interpretation of signs and the use of
logical, ethical, and emotional appeals in deliberations about public action, rhetoric
is both a theory and a practical art. On the one hand, it analyzes and models
discourse practices; on the other hand, it seeks to improve these practices. Our
purpose in this book is primarily analytical. We want to delineate the patterns of
rhetoric typically used in written discourse on environmental politics.
(1)
They identify two somewhat distinct audiences for Ecospeak, the first of which consists of
“students of public rhetoric” (1). This is primarily a scholarly project, a legitimate and
intriguing branch of academic inquiry. However, it is significant to note as well their
second intended audience:
people engaged in the effort to adjust thought and action to the changing conditions
of human life—scientists, government officials, investors, managers, workers, farm-
ers, environmental activists, nature mystics, and anyone else who puts thoughts on
paper with the intention of changing the way others think and act in the world.
(2)
Scholars familiar with ecocriticism—and more broadly interested in the environmental
humanities—will immediately recognize in Killingsworth and Palmer rhetorically astute
researchers whose goals map precisely onto the objectives of ecocriticism, dating back to the
emergence of first-wave ecocriticism in the late 1970s (and even earlier if one points to the
publication of such books as Glen and Rhoda Love’s 1970 textbook Ecological Crisis: Readings
for Survival, another of the discipline’s urtexts that tends to be overlooked). A fascination with
the intricacies of human discourse and an intrinsic belief that improving communication

3
 Scott Slovic et al.

practices might help to sway society toward more positive humanitarian and ecological
practices are at the heart of both environmental communication studies and ecocriticism.
Killingsworth’s own career straddles the disciplines of environmental communication
studies and ecocriticism. In addition to co-authoring Ecospeak and several major articles on
the rhetorical aspects of environmental discourse, he has also published implicitly and
explicitly ecocritical studies of the American poet Walt Whitman, dating back to Whitman’s
Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politic, and the Text (1989) and including Walt Whitman and the
Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (2004). Others also recognized early on in the development of
environmental communication studies and ecocriticism the profound confluence between
these disciplines. In their early collection Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary
America (1996), published in the same year as Glotfelty and Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader,
Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown write:
Rhetoricians study the ways people use language to construct knowledge and to do
things in the world. The chapters gathered here provide rhetorical analyses of the
environmental debates that occur in a wide variety of institutional and cultural
locations, from public hearings on nuclear waste sites to nineteenth-century land-
scape painting.
(vii)
Indeed, contributors to Green Culture include rhetoricians such as Craig Waddell and James
Cantrill as well as such ecocritics as Scott Slovic and Charles Bergman. Other contributors,
including M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer and Lewis Ulman, clearly straddle
the disciplines. Despite the early gesture of consilience and kindred-spiritedness between the
fields, environmental communication studies and ecocriticism have tended to drift apart
during the past 20 years, perhaps owing to the growing professionalism and precision of
focus within each.
James Cantrill and Christine Oravec published The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our
Creation of the Environment in 1996 (reinforcing what a momentous year 1996 was for both
environmental communication and ecocriticism), but this book focused more exclusively on
public and political discourse than was the case with Green Culture. Studies in The Symbolic
Earth trace such topics as the discourse of environmental advocacy as used with government
officials, the discourse of green consumerism, and environmental reporting in the mass media.
As environmental communication studies continued to develop, such field-defining works as
Julia B. Corbett’s Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages
(2006) and Robert Cox’s Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (third edition,
2013) appeared, building up to the publication of The Routledge Handbook of Environment and
Communication, edited by Anders Hansen and Robert Cox, in 2015. In their introductory
discussion of the history and growth of the field of environmental communication, Hansen
and Cox highlight seven major research questions that guide the work of scholars exploring
“the nexus between communication and environment”:

1. How do human agents represent nature/environment? That is, how are specific environmental
phenomena, conditions, or processes discursively or symbolically constituted as subjects for
human understanding and/or action?
2. What accounts for the development and reproduction of dominant systems of representa-
tion or discourses of “environment,” and what communication practices contribute to the
interruption, dilution, or transformation of such discourses?

4
 Introduction

3. What effects do different environmental sources (e.g., media) as well as specific commu-
nication practices have on audiences?
4. What are the relationships between or among communication, individuals’ values and
beliefs, and their environmental behaviors?
5. In what ways do different modes of production, dissemination, and reception of scientific
or technical information contribute to the understanding of, or constitute “knowledge” of
nature or environmental phenomena?
6. How do humans discursively or symbolically constitute “space” or places, and how does a
sense of one’s “self-in-place” influence one’s understanding and/or behaviors in relations
to such environments?
7. How do local or indigenous cultures understand “nature” or “environment,” and how do
such cultures form or convey these understandings in everyday life? (Hansen and Cox,
2015)

The 33 chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication explore various
aspects of these very same questions, but only one of the contributors to the earlier handbook,
Pat Brereton, who contributed a chapter on eco-cinema to the collection, is a scholar who also
publishes in ecocritical journals and engages with the ecocritical community. One finds a
similar exclusivity in important recent volumes of ecocritical research, such as Greg Garrard’s
2014 collection The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, which includes such articles as Cheryl
Lousley’s “Ecocriticism and the Politics of Representations” and Joni Adamson’s “Cosmovi-
sions: Environmental Justice, Transnational American Studies, and Indigenous Literature,” but
makes few explicit gestures toward environmental communication research, despite efforts to
explore questions that are deeply in sync with the questions quoted above.
However, in the past decade, even as the field of ecocriticism has subdivided into
increasingly nuanced sub-disciplines, such as Asian eco-cinema and cognitive econarratology,
there has also been a strong push toward knitting together previously divergent fields into the
meta-discipline called the “Environmental Humanities.” The 2016 publication of The
Routledge Handbook of Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen,
and Michelle Niemann (2017), reinforces many of the disciplinary syntheses of this emerging
meta-discipline, but the volume downplays potential overtures between ecocriticism and
environmental communication.
A number of recent ecocritical publications have indicated a new tilt toward information
management and communication studies in the context of environmental textuality. This
work ranges from attention to the theoretical challenges of apprehending and articulating
invisible societal and planetary processes (such as global industrial capitalism and climate
change) to analysis of practical communication strategies in literary and visual media. These
publications range from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
and Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016) to
Heather Houser’s ongoing series of articles on information management and environmental
discourse and Alexa Weik von Mossner’s work on audience’s emotional responses to literary
and cinematic texts in Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (2017).
Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic’s Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a
World of Data (2015) is an explicit effort to merge the disciplines of cognitive psychology
(especially risk perception), ecocriticism, and environmental communication in the contexts
of humanitarian and environmental crisis. The fields of ecocriticism and environmental
communication studies are now rapidly converging, and the hope of this handbook is to
reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines.

5
 Scott Slovic et al.

How this book is structured and why

The handbook is structured in a way that charts the history of the relationship between
ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also highlighting key new
paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applications of environmental
communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of environmental
communication in non-Western societies. When ecocritic and rhetorician M. Jimmie Kill-
ingsworth and communication scholar Jacqueline S. Palmer, a husband-wife team, published
Ecospeak in 1992, they scrutinized the fundamental intersection between the textual-studies
orientation of ecocriticism and the application of discourse analysis to practical contexts of
environmental thought that has now become visible throughout the two fields and in other
branches of the environmental humanities. Their foreword to this handbook highlights the
themes of “division and definition, boundaries and circulation,” which are at the core of the
current volume, a book raising questions about the boundaries and definitions of ecocriticism
and environmental communication, while also testing the boundaries and permeable borders
between various cultural and methodological approaches to environmental discourse. Kill-
ingsworth and Palmer, who after long careers at Texas A&M University now live in New
Mexico, tour the state of New Mexico, in their foreword (and their book Nuclear New
Mexico), exploring the relationship between nuclear and natural features of the state,
demonstrating how the interpretive imagination of the textual scholar also applies to the
examination of place and society. This collection is book-ended by an afterword provided by
another husband-wife team, the prominent Mexican environmental authors and activists
Homero Aridjis and Betty Ferber, co-founders of El Grupo de los Cien (The Group of
100), an organization of artists and scientists that began in Mexico City in the 1970s with the
goal of motivating public and government responses to devastating air pollution in Mexico’s
capital city. If Killingsworth and Palmer have led the way during their careers as scholars of
environmental discourse in political and artistic spheres, Aridjis and Ferber have modeled the
use of literary expression and social activism as means of communicating environmental
concerns to the broader public, both in Mexico and throughout the world.
Part I of the handbook identifies and traces avant-garde communication frameworks
within broad genres such as climate discourse, science writing, animal narratives, and
narratives of slow violence. Andrew McMurry begins this section by introducing critical
discourse analysis (CDA) as a tool from linguistics and communication studies that has the
potential to help ecocritics understand the “social entanglements of literary texts” by grouping
texts into what he calls “the ecophobic,” “the ecophatic,” “the ecoliterate,” and “the
ecophilic.” At the heart of the ecocritical enterprise, some would argue, is the effort to
understand the place of human beings and human society in relation to the more-than-human
world—many will recall Cheryll Glotfelty’s foundational definition of ecocriticism as “the
study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (1996: xviii). In
her analysis of two foundational eco-religious texts from the mid-twentieth century and the
turn of the twenty-first century, CA Cranston explores the essential function of religious
thought and discourse in clarifying our species’ relationship with the planet. Given the
current state of the planet, it is no wonder that several contributors have emphasized climate
change in one way or another. Pramod K. Nayar uses the rubric of the “ecological uncanny”
as a lens through which to examine Coleridge’s classic Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
contemporary graphic narratives. Employing an ecolinguistic focus on specific types and
tones of speech, Arran Stibbe seeks to bridge the realms of linguistics, ecocriticism, and life-
in-the-world in his experimental essay, which emphasizes “weatherworld”. Shane Hall also

6
 Introduction

tests the convergence of the literal and the literary in his treatment of climate by way of the
crisis of climate migration, a humanitarian angle on the broader ecological issue. Julia B.
Corbett challenges traditional concepts of the individual social actor in light of the idea that
facts accrue meaning “communally”—if environmental communication speaks to us on an
individual level, telling readers and listeners how to live more carefully during a time of great
ecological upheaval, how does such communication inspire and empower us to act in socially
meaningful ways? Derek Woods, too, is interested in questions of scale, specifically in the
context of science writing, which faces a tremendous challenge in guiding readers to think on
a macroscopic level. He focuses, in particular, on the controversial role of figurative language
—metaphor—in communicating ecosystemic complexity.
Major recent trends in ecocriticism include the emergence of material ecocriticism
approximately a decade ago, the application of new theories of narrative (including cognitive
narratology, which explores how the human mind creates and receives stories) to environ-
mental texts and topics in the form of econarratology, studies of cultural texts that explicitly
acknowledge and explore the communication of non-human subjectivities, the study of
practical issues (such as the availability of clean water and air) through what might be called
applied ecocriticism, and the consideration of slow ecological violence in the developing
world (a convergence of information studies and postcolonial concerns through the medium
of ecocritical analysis). Part I also includes important overviews and examples of these modes
of ecocritical research. Gayathri Prabhu uses a Malayalam novel (from southern India) as a
lens through which to understand and communicate the implications of state-sponsored
violence toward aquatic ecosystems and human communities—in its emphasis on the idea of
social resistance through literary expression, this chapter exemplifies the applied, practical
tendency in current ecocriticism. Using the rubric of “entanglements” and “anthropo-zoo-
genesis,” Wendy Woodward demonstrates how ecocritical reading of texts that reveal varying
degrees of human attunement to other species—particularly birds in the examples she offers
here—alters our sense of vulnerability to extinction, to loss. This study exemplifies the
communication of human attentiveness to other species, which is such a vital form of
environmental communication. Markku Lehtimäki shows how narrative theory (“narratol-
ogy”) and ecocriticism have traditionally emphasized fundamentally different conceptual
frameworks, but argues that the rhetorical theory of narrative offers an effective approach
to weaving together narratology and environmental literary theory—he highlights the
emphasis on mimetic action and didactic teaching in the communication of environmental
values and risks in recent narrative fiction. Narrative fiction is also the focus of Saba
Pirzadeh’s study of “socio-ecological degradation” in recent Pakistani literature, with a
particular interest in air pollution as an example of slow violence that requires deft narrative
strategies in order to be communicated meaningfully to readers. Most of the emphasis in
both ecocriticism and environmental communication is on how humans communicate
environmental information and their own ideas about the environment, not on how the
world itself—the physical, non-human world—communicates its own reality. In her over-
view of material ecocriticism, Serpil Oppermann shows how this view of communicative
agency explodes traditional thinking, explaining how this approach “takes into account how
all material agencies possess narrative potentialities and emerge as narrative agencies
combining matter and meaning to reveal astonishing storied articulations of the physical
environment.”
Part II shifts the focus slightly toward a set of chapters that offer explicitly pragmatic focuses
within the intertwined fields of ecocriticism and environmental communication. Alan C.
Braddock begins the part with his demonstration of how environmental communication

7
 Scott Slovic et al.

concerns apply to visual texts, taking as his primary subject Thomas Cole’s famous painting The
Oxbow and proposing that “directionality” might serve as a helpful term for ecocritical analysis.
The study of visual culture and visual communication is a branch of ecocriticism that has
primarily focused on film and television studies to date, with notable exceptions such as
Braddock and Christoph Irmscher’s 2009 collection A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in
American Art History. Amplifying ideas from his 2013 monograph Transversal Ecocritical Praxis:
Theoretical Arguments, Literary Analysis, and Cultural Critique, Patrick D. Murphy illuminates his
concepts of PAN (Present as Always Normal) and DIM (Discrete Incident Mentality) as
cognitive tendencies that inhibit our ability to develop “long-term environmental perspective,”
limitations that make us especially susceptible to the slow violence of environmental and social
catastrophe. Key examples of such slow violence are the ecological and public health ramifica-
tions of military and industrial nuclear technology, which Inna Sukhenko discusses in her
chapter on risk communication and emotion in post-Chernobyl nuclear fiction in the United
States. Oil is more visible than nuclear radiation, more tangible perhaps than radiation, but
communicating the ecological and social meanings of petroleum also requires careful imagina-
tive strategies—these are the subject of Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure’s chapter.
The field of ecocriticism began its rise toward mainstream academic recognition in the
1980s as a field focusing on nonfiction “nature writing,” but by the mid-1980s there was a
strong backlash against the perceived quaintness and cultural exclusivity of such writing.
Christian Hummelsund Voie, however, argues that nature writing is a vital and vibrant genre
in the twenty-first century, especially necessary as a medium for communicating environ-
mental science and a sense of activist urgency to the public. But does literature—do words—
really have any impact upon audiences? In a sense this is the ultimate question of pragmatic
ecocriticism/environmental communication studies. Wojciech Małecki, a pioneer in devel-
oping new empirical methodologies in ecocriticism, explains how such work tests the efficacy
of various narrative strategies in influencing readers’ attitudes toward animals. Lest it seem that
ecocritical techniques for close reading can be fruitfully applied only to artistic texts, verbal
and otherwise, James R. Goebel demonstrates the use of ecocriticism as a means of critically
analyzing “grey literature” (i.e., government documents) in order to reveal “hegemonic
cultural values” and “epistemological habits” that we have come to take for granted. Picking
up on Gayathri Prabhu’s treatment of aquatic ecology in Part I, T. Ravichandran and
Nibedita Bandyopadhyay also use postcolonial ecocritical reading as a means to confront the
water crisis in India. Like climate change (a phenomenon closely linked to water issues),
water itself—too much water, too little, the contamination of water, and the inaccessibility of
water for those who need it—is a topic that cannot be overemphasized. One might say the
same thing regarding food safety and security, which is the topic of Annka Liepold’s chapter
on debates in North America and Europe regarding the use of genetically modified organisms
(GMOs) as a food-production technology. Her study reveals the power of communication in
shaping government and consumer actions, sometimes unrelated to the actual scientific facts
of GMO technologies. Most of the chapters in this part specifically ask questions of efficacy—
how might particular communication strategies or media “mobilize” public awareness or
concern regarding the environment in general or regarding specific issues or problems that we
face in the world today? Saskia Beudel turns her attention to the words of Rachel Carson,
one of the icons of twentieth-century environmental communication, to ask how Carson’s
writing managed to stoke a sense of wonder among general readers and, moreover, to
provoke in such readers an impulse toward “pre-emptive activism.”
We have called Part III “Non-Western Environmental Communication,” hoping to
recognize and provide insights into diverse communication strategies, especially approaches

8
 Introduction

to environmental communication that are significant in non-European and North American

cultures. There is obviously a strong Anglophone bias in the opening parts of the volume,
despite contributions by scholars from countries as wide-ranging as India, Finland, and
Nigeria. In this third and final part, there is perhaps more explicit focus on ecocritical reading
of culturally distinctive approaches to environmental communication in literature and other
media of environmental expression. As if to underscore the idea that such communication is
not restricted to literary communication, Yuki Masami offers the opening chapter on the
traditional Japanese ecological knowledge, much of it closely related to the philosophy of
satoyama (a concept literally meaning “homeplace”/“mountain”), as it is employed by a
community on the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture. She argues that the essential design
of the community—location of houses, configuration of rice paddies and vegetable gardens,
calendar of events and activities, etc.—is a multi-layered system of communication within the
Maruyama community, between the people and their surrounding environment, and between
the residents of Maruyama and non-residents. Roberto Forns-Broggi’s chapter focuses on a
more traditional literary text, Peruvian novelist Miguel Gutiérrez’s Babel, el paraíso, but this
experimental novel is itself a meta-narrative contemplation of the author’s vision of a “utopia
of cosmopolitan communication,” in which social justice and environmental protection are
interwoven through varied examples of indigenous and intercultural communication
throughout the novel. The spiritual values emphasized in Izabel F.O. Brandão and Edilane
Ferreira da Silva’s study of Brazilian poetry are Western/Christian values, but one could say
they reveal the use of religious poetry to express an ethos of attachment to the more-than-
human cosmos—in this way, such poetry serves as a form of environmental communication
in the developing world. Aarti Smith Madan addresses the role of street art (“eco-graffiti”) as
a vital communication strategy to reinforce a “pan-indigenous feminist environmental move-
ment” that spans nations and continents, focusing in her chapter on the work of Bangalore-
based artist and activist Shilo Shiv Suleman in India and Brazil. In Turkey, one of the most
ancient threads of environmental thought and communication is the shamanic tradition—
Pinar Batur and Ufuk Özdağ show how contemporary Turkish fiction, in particular Buket
Uzuner’s novel Water [Su], reinterprets Turkish mythology as a means of engaging with a
current environmental crisis, the author herself “striv[ing] to be an eco-shaman” who guides
readers toward “a new way of envisioning an alternative future, to save the Earth.” The
contemporary nation-state is a political mechanism that often represses and silences indigen-
ous and other non-mainstream voices. This is a predicament that Zainor Izat Zainal explores
in her ecocritical reading of four contemporary Anglophone Malaysian novels, which address
the development of the Malaysian environmental movement as a response to colonial and
postcolonial forms of cultural repression.
While Yuki Masami’s Japan-focused chapter emphasizes various strategies for conveying
TEK (traditional ecological knowledge), Keitaro Morita looks at a rather different dimension
of Japanese culture—that is society’s attentiveness to ecomedia, including film. His chapter
uses an empirical approach (somewhat related to the empirical methodology Malecki discusses
in his contribution to this book) to gauge the role of ecomedia, as a form of environmental
communication, in influencing the “ecological identity” of contemporary Japanese people.
But contemporary media and indigenous (or traditional) cultures need not be placed in
opposition to each other. Rayson K. Alex’s ecocritical approach to the documentary film
Have You Seen the Arana? explicitly studies the challenges and the value of using film as a
means of communicating tribal societies’ ideas about the natural and spiritual worlds. Earlier
in this book, Woods addressed, from a North American perspective, the issue of scale in the
context of science communication—Chitra Sankaran also considers such issues as “scale

9
 Scott Slovic et al.

effects” and “scale framing,” but through the work of south and southeast Asian women
writers, Sonali Deraniyagala (Sri Lanka) and Lily Yulianti Farid (Indonesia), and it is striking
to compare the ideas related to scale, vulnerability, and risk when viewed from these different
cultural angles. Finally, Chen Hong, a noted scholar of English animal poetry and the work of
British poet Ted Hughes, offers unique insight into the role of environmental non-govern-
mental organizations in contemporary China, with a specific focus on communication
strategies employed by these NGOs in bringing environmental concerns to the attention of
government officials and the general public.
This handbook seeks to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental
communication and to predict future directions (or, rather, an increasingly unified direction
as the fields increasingly overlap). We hope this work will not only be useful to scholars
interested in the specific insights of the many chapters presented here, but will inspire future
cross-over between colleagues who have been artificially constrained—even quarantined?—in
the parallel disciplines of ecocritical textual studies and environmental communication studies.
These fields have so much to offer each other and need to be in more frequent and energetic
conversation.

Works cited
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Indiana University Press, 2008.
Braddock, Alan C., and Christoph Irmscher, eds. A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art
History. University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Blackwell, 2005.
Cantrill, James G., and Christine L. Oravec. The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the
Environment. University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
Corbett, Julia B. Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages. Island Press,
2006.
Cox, Robert. Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Third edition. Sage, 2013.
Foerster, Norman. Nature in American Literature: Studies in the Modern View of Nature. Macmillan, 1923.
Garrard, Greg, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Introduction.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll
Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. xv–xxxvii.
Hansen, Anders, and Robert Cox, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication.
Routledge, 2015.
Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. University of Chicago
Press, 2016.
Heise, Ursula K., Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Environmental
Humanities. Routledge, 2017.
Herndl, Carl G., and Stuart C. Brown, eds. Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America.
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Hiltner, Ken. “Second-Wave Ecocriticism.” Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, edited by Ken Hiltner.
Routledge, 2015, pp. 131–133.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. University of North
Carolina Press, 1989.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. University of Iowa Press,
2004.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America.
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Love, Glen A., and Rhoda M. Love, eds. Ecological Crisis: Readings for Survival. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1970.
Mazel, David, ed. A Century of Early Ecocriticism. University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire.
Indiana University Press, 2010.

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Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University Press,
2007.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Rangarajan, Swarnalatha. Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Strategies. Orient BlackSwan, 2018.
Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978) The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. University of
Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 105–123.
Sharp, Dallas Lore. The Face of the Fields. 1911. Books for Libraries, 1967.
Slovic, Scott. “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism: North American Reflections on the Current Phase of the
Discipline.” Ecozon@. 1.1 (April 2010).
Slovic, Scott. “Literature.” The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, edited by Willis Jenkins, Mary
Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim. Routledge, 2016, pp. 355–363.
Slovic, Scott. “Seasick among the Waves of Ecocriticism: An Inquiry into Alternative Historiographic
Metaphors.” Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, edited by Serpil Oppermann and
Serenella Iovino. Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016, pp. 99–111.
Slovic, Scott, and Paul Slovic, eds. Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data.
Oregon State University Press, 2015.
Tuckerman, William. America and Her Commentators: With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States.
Scribner, 1864.
Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Ohio State
University Press, 2017.

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 PART I

New frameworks
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 1
ECOCRITICISM AND
DISCOURSE
Andrew McMurry

The human discourse show

Not long ago I attended a mock teaching lecture by a job applicant for a position that had opened
up in our department. The interviewee passed out a text we were to analyze in our roles as first-
year students: a poem by the black Scottish poet Jackie Kay called “In My Country.” This short
poem describes a walk by (we surmise) the poet herself, along what we imagine is a Scottish
shoreline where an “honest” river “shakes hands with the sea” (24). She encounters another
woman who challenges her right to be there—to be anywhere, really, in this historically white
nation—with the provocative question, “Where do you come from?” The poet replies without
hesitation, without apology, and without qualification: “Here. These parts.”
We broke into small groups to brainstorm the poem’s images, tropes, and characters.
When we reconvened as a class, the interviewee did a brilliant job of bringing to bear our
work and the work of the poem on larger questions of identity, belonging, nationhood, and
so forth. The discussion really took off.
For some reason during the course of this job season I had emerged as the committee’s designated
bad cop. So I dutifully donned the hat of a mutinous freshman, and I asserted the poem was mostly
about elemental things: air, land, water, and, particularly, rivers and oceans. Only incidentally were
the movements and doings of people of any significance. What appeared to be the focal human
interaction of the poem, I argued, was just some minor business carried out in the interstices of an
estuarine landscape; any other sort of back and forth between random people would have equally
served to highlight their irrelevance in the context of the grand, timeless flow of the river in its
meeting with the sea. Long after these temporally-limited, self-important individuals moved off, I
claimed, that honest river would roll on—no matter what any of us in this room thought, because
we, too, were mostly beside the point.
Well, everyone laughed, and nobody was buying it. Neither was I. Reading literature
requires the exercise of prudence and good faith: the rejection of wrong-track interpretation
and the affirmation of right-track interpretation. You have to play the game of explication
and meaning-making; you have to stay within the well-marked guardrails of acceptable
thought. Metaphors fly to their targets; narratives stay on their paths; themes trumpet their
arrival. There’s a compact between the reader and the author—the latter a complex intentional
function we like to imagine stands behind the text—that consists of something like, “You

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 Andrew McMurry

pretend to be speaking to me and I’ll pretend to be understanding you. We’ll meet in a place
where we can both be comfortable.” Sure, there are lots of ways to skin a cat, and lots of
ways to dissect a poem, but some techniques produce a truer, or maybe stronger (as Harold
Bloom would say), reading than others, one that jibes with what we take to be a fitting
convergence of word, world, and audience. Mine was weak, notional, unsupportable. It was
misanthropic. If I ignored the represented humans, ditched the human interest angle, and,
maybe worst of all, made light of my own authority as the human reader of this human
artifact, well, I was not just not playing the hermeneutical game, I was flipping over the table.
My infelicitous reading does bring me, however, to the point I want to make in
introducing this chapter on ecocriticism and discourse: humans are the A-listers in the
human discourse show, and ecocritics have to work like hell to bring the bit players—i.e.,
the non-human world—downstage. Thoreau wrote, “I wish to speak a word for Nature,” in
part because no matter what the poet says nature can never speak for itself (243).

Discourses: big and small

In literary studies we often use the word “Discourse” to signal big, amorphous thought-move-
ments and period-tied grand narratives like “The Discourse of Madness” or the “Discourse of
Modernity.” I’ll stipulate to the fact that what I’m going to discuss here operates in the margins of,
let’s call it, the “Discourse of Anthropocentrism.” But in this chapter I want to move away from a
detailed analysis of that metanarrative (stipulating to its existence as a kind of massively powerful
conditioning force in minds, matter, and ecosocial life) and to less ambitiously consider micro-
level “discourses” (note the small “d”) that are more akin to “parole” than to “langue,” to borrow
Saussure’s terminology. A micro-level discourse could be, for example, any sort of everyday text,
its linguistic apparatus, and its contexts of production and reception. (Because every text that you
can think of is always already part of a collection of similar texts, unintelligible in isolation but
rarely if ever isolable, I take no risk in making this fairly reductive definition.) Humbly, I want to
offer a few concepts that help us understand how the micro and the macro levels are bridged
through lexicogrammar, that is, word choices and their sequencing.
In doing so, I’m informed by Halliday’s systemic functional theory and social semiotics; the
venerable rhetorical canon of elecutio and its contemporary cousin, stylistics; twentieth-century
language disciplines like sociolinguistics and pragmatics; environmental communication and
ecolinguistics; and conversation analysis and speech act theory. Most especially, I’m guided by
critical discourse analysis (CDA), an approach that brings together much of what is tactically
useful from all the foregoing and to which is added a dash of left political theory and critique.
Along these lines, then, “discourse studies” of the flavor I want to present has been developed
to give us insights into how ideology is inscribed in the linguistic nuts and bolts of texts.
More precisely, for analysis of texts that operate within the Discourse of Anthropocentrism
(which includes, arguably, all texts!), I will assume the following:

• that discourses are representations of and interventions in ecosocial reality produced and
reproduced in texts and by participants (both text creators and text consumers);
• that although texts appear to be the products of individual participants, they are overdeter-
mined by existent, persistent, insistent ideological dispositions embedded in the ecosocial order;
• that linguistic choices in texts and ideological dispositions are mutually constitutive and
reinforcing;
• that sentence-level grammatical and lexical choices are not ideologically neutral;
• that such choices can express ecosocial exigencies and purposes.

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 Ecocriticism and discourse

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and literature

For ecocritics, predominantly but not exclusively concerned with ecocentric literary texts and
other creative cultural productions with eco/enviro inflections, the value of CDA will not be
immediately apparent. Poems, stories, essays, and films present special challenges for CDA;
such artifacts interrupt the predictable patterns of quotidian speech and writing where linkages
between overt themes and supporting linguistic structures are relatively straightforward (e.g.,
When President Trump says “There was no collusion,” the denial of his agency with respect
to the actual matter is buttressed by his choice of the passive voice at the sentence level).
Aristotle made a distinction 2500 years ago between rhetoric and poetics, and the distinction
remains non-trivial. Rhetoric (and by extension CDA) prioritizes suasive language: the words
and texts of rhetors as they represent reality with a view to changing beliefs, attitudes, and
actions in audiences. Poetics looks at language one step further removed, in the sense that
suasory motives and elements are trickier to pin down. Unlike “working” genres of
communication, genres like poetry, drama, belles lettres, fiction—what we lump together
under the moniker “literature”—are artfully designed to veer away from (or defamiliarize as
Bakhtin put it) everyday speech and writing. Literary criticism thus gravitates toward
considerations of play, openness, expressiveness, ambiguity, etc., considerations often absent
from critical discourse analysis, which seeks to tackle matters of pragmatics, persuasion, and
politics. In discourse analysis, sometimes the most mundane pieces of language prove the most
interesting; in literary criticism that is rarely true.
Harry Widdowson says:
what is distinctive about a poem, for example, is the language is organized into a
pattern of recurring sounds, structures and meanings which are not determined by
the phonology, syntax or semantics of the language code which provides it with its
basic resources.
(39)
In other words, while literary language must draw on the same set of resources as everyday
speech and writing, it extends those resources. Yet for this very reason—that literary texts are
at bottom forged from the same lexicogrammatical possibilities accessible to all texts—
discourse analytical tools can be applied to them fruitfully.
One quantifiable measure of the crucial difference between the literary and non-literary is
to observe that the literary text generally possesses a lexical diversity (number of different
words in a text) and a lexical density (the ratio of content words to connecting words) very
much higher than, say, a conversation, a technical report, or a news article. Decoding a
lexically dense and diverse literary text is a specialized activity that assumes the semantic
freight of the literary text is weightier than what the words themselves technically bear. A
poem just doesn’t want to map onto the world as straightforwardly as, say, a press release from
the EPA, and we don’t go into the exercise of interpreting the poem by assuming otherwise.
Its lexical and grammatical divagations put it at great remove from the normal language–
thought matrix that contributes to genres produced in politics, business, education, advertis-
ing, and so on—the sorts of genres where CDA is typically applied.
The enforcement of a separation between literary theory (and literary criticism) and
discourse theory is thus conceptually, perhaps aesthetically, justifiable. We shouldn’t forget,
however, that policing always occurs for historical, cultural, and political reasons. True, the
generic borders between poems and political speeches are robust. But they are not inviolable.
Borders exist not simply to foster inclusion but to exclude the other. Just as a chimp shares 99

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percent of its DNA with Homo sapiens, there’s actually a lot of linguistic overlap between
novels and news reports. Yes, the differences that make a difference, well, you could say they
make all the difference. Yet the common grammars and lexicons—the linguistic affordances
and constraints; the provenance of signs, symbols, and metaphors; the cultural touchstones
and commonplaces; the interdiscursive baggage—all of these are hugely significant. And the
undergirding rhetorical purposes of literary texts, while often vague or hidden, are not absent.
In fact, they are often very clear. Roger Fowler, thinking of Orwell’s seminal critique of
hegemonic discourse in “Politics and the English Language,” writes, “all language, not just
political uses, constantly drifts towards the affirmation of fixed, and usually prejudicial,
categories. Criticism, and literature itself, have roles in combating this tendency” (48). Thus,
many of the same tools derived from analysis of everyday discourse can, with some tinkering,
enhance our insights into the texts ecocritics tend to study—texts that we believe may lend
their voices to the resistance against anthropocentrism and to the preservation of nature (or,
for that matter, to nature’s degradation or its destruction).
To sum up: the claim I’m making here is apposite to the one that Greg Garrard identified
in his landmark text, Ecocriticism: “the study of rhetoric supplies us with a model of a cultural
reading practice tied to moral and political concerns, and one which is alert to both the real
or literal and figural or constructed interpretations of ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’” (16).
The same is true, I argue, for critical discourse analysis, which I like to think of as a souped-
up, linguistically attuned version of rhetorical analysis. In other words, though literary texts
tend to be more complex and ambiguous than political speeches or advertisements, we can
(and often do) read them as if they are making claims on our hearts and minds. Literary texts
are symbolic interventions into our beliefs, actions, and attitudes by authors (or author
functions, if you prefer) who exist in networks of affiliation with other people, places, events,
and discourses. In their own way, literary and other creative texts do the same things that all
communications do: insert themselves into the world in an effort to change it.

Textual modes of ecological engagement

The meaning potential of any given swath of discourse will be impoverished if its audience
lacks sufficient contextual knowledge. Sometimes the lack is a result not of ignorance but of
trained incapacity. While mainstream literary critics tend to pass over without comment the
ecological/environmental contexts of texts, ecocritics have become pretty good at articulating
them. At the risk of framing the problematic too simply, we can divide the ecosocial
entanglements of literary texts into four broad modes:

• the ecophobic—texts that are uninterested in the non-human world, feature it as

incidental, or reject it altogether (e.g., The Portrait of a Lady);
• the ecophatic—texts that draw on the non-human to affirm, model, and metaphorize
human social experience and self-understanding (e.g., Emerson’s Nature);
• the ecoliterate—texts that comprehensively register and reflect upon the interplay of the
human and non-human (e.g., The Overstory);
• the ecophilic—texts that passionately speak about/for/with the non-human (e.g.,
“Walking”).

I want to be clear that I don’t intend these modes as decisive: any author—any person—
can range throughout these modes in the course of a text or in the course of a day. They have
only heuristical value (and I hesitate to even include the ecophilic, which is probably just a

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hypertrophied instance of the ecoliterate—or, sometimes, the ecophatic, e.g., The Call of the
Wild). But they may be useful for laying out tendencies, penchants, leanings, allegiances;
perhaps most importantly, in the porous boundary between the ecophatic and the ecoliterate,
we locate the issue that so many authors (and ecocritics) are trying to sort out: the
consequential difference between viewing the world as for us and not for us. Alice Walker
powerfully framed the matter (in an eponymous essay) as follows: “everything is a human
being.” Everything is a human being if we measure it all through our own eyes (and
language) and come to the conclusion the universe exists to realize us; yet at the same time,
everything is a human being if we yearn to inscribe in the world the same agency/subjectivity
that we’ve come to grant ourselves. And if we are able to do that, however precariously and
provisionally, we may also find that neither the universe nor we ourselves are human beings
at all—if by human we mean an entity meant to be lord of everything.
Now, I could argue, as I did with the Kay poem, that there will always be some measure of
environmental (un)consciousness in any ecophatic text that manages to cough up an occasional
reference to a bird or a tree. I could even argue that ecophobic texts that don’t mention nature
at all, that take place entirely in apartments, that consist of dialogues between cynical office
workers, or that describe the wacky hijinks of two precocious middle-schoolers named Milt and
Ditzy, are still, through strategies of ignorance, absence, and suppression, evincing ecological/
environmental relations. But there is only so much time one should devote to exploring the
counterfactual. It is more salutary to deal with manifestly ecoliterate and ecophilic texts (and
those ecophatic texts like Emerson’s that are struggling to use “nature” words and concepts as
more than simply markers in the humanist conversational echo chamber). That is so because the
discursive investments such texts make in foregrounding the non-human world we fear—we
know!—is in jeopardy are more helpful in advancing the implicit goal of all ecocriticism:
shifting our decidedly anthropocentric world-system toward a more ecocentric one.
So the heart of the ecoliterate text—if you had to describe the one thing that ecocritics
look for in texts they admire—is some move toward decentering the human. It’s safe to say
there will never be much shifting in the actual relationship of “man [sic] and nature” if there
isn’t some readjustment, however minimal, in the linguistic formulation of that relationship.
The non-human has to be expressed in such a way that, to use another tired metaphor, the
Great Chain of Being (that puts gods, angels, and humans at the top and women, beasts, and
things at the bottom) is sundered, its components concatenated non-hierarchically. But the
non-ecoliterate text doesn’t test that chain. It abides with the way of the world as it has been
understood for time out of mind: human up here, the rest of creation down there. The
ecoliterate text tries something else. It tries to describe—to inscribe—new grooves for
thinking and being. Critical discourse analysis helps us address these matters by asking a
crucial question: How precisely does a text speak for/against anthropocentrism through its
core linguistic features?
It’s time to look at a few of the tools CDA provides. I’m able to discuss and exemplify
only a handful of key concepts, in the hope that they will provide ecocritics with an entrée to
the field.

Transitivity in the ecotext

When I tell my students to “give me some examples of weasel nouns used to soften
environmental impact,” and they supply “landfill” (instead of “dump”) and “even-aged
forest management” (instead of “clear-cut”), they’re right, and they’re thinking quite usefully
about connotations in micro-level discourse, and about the routine euphemizing and utility-

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naming that our everyday language supports. Then they might notice that these sorts of
naming practices are directly tied to the higher-level beliefs and aspirations mainstream society
has about resource extraction, wastage, and so on. They might consider synonymic drift, in
which the gradual accretion of alternative terms soon floods the field with more palatable
ways of meaning. They might see how we are slowly conditioned to erase from language and
memory the earthier, cruder signifiers that we began with. They might find themselves, too,
consciously struggling to reconstitute the absent referent of “Chicken McNugget,” i.e., the
coagulated ball of pink flesh slurry that was once a living creature.
But maybe, if they were willing to press me, what could prove even more interesting is
my question’s implicit construction of their own agency via the imperative mood, a grammatical
feature of language a little slipperier than connotation but no less significant for ecocritical
understanding. By this I mean my imperative takes advantage of our language’s transitive
function to put students in a discourse structure where they can more readily think of
themselves as subjects to my authority, subjects who have been named—without even
naming them, mind you!—via the in-built authority of grammar itself, to act upon objects
(in this case, to mentally retrieve “weasel nouns used to soften environmental impacts.”).
It is this same transitive function that is routinely massaged by mainstream political and
corporate voices to seal the rest of us in eco-neutral bubbles (e.g., “We’re all environmen-
talists now” or “ADM feeds your food business”). You see, language doesn’t just point to
things, and it doesn’t just connect us one to another. It also sets up roles for us—both to
allow us to decomplexify the burbling, bleating world and, maybe more important, to
channel power to and fro among language users who inhabit it. It does the thing you yourself
do when you take your small child to Denny’s. You don’t hand her the menu—usually about
ten densely illustrated pages—and say “what do you want?” If you did that you’d be there all
day. Freedom of choice is your enemy in this situation. No, you say, “You may have the
grilled cheese or the chicken fingers. Which would you like?” So you both simplify and
administer her encounter with that menu, and by extension, the food itself.
So what exactly is transitivity? All natural languages possess the two crucial grammatical
classes, nouns and verbs. A language user is hard-pressed to utter a phrase that does not
involve some entity (noun) engaged in an action (verb) involving another noun (object). We
call these relations between nouns and verbs transitivity processes. Basically, language is
structured so that you can easily represent people and things acting on other people,
themselves, their own thoughts, and things. (This is why, for example, in English you get
the typical sentence structure of subject-verb-object.)
As you might expect, there are several kinds of transitivity processes: those that represent
material or mental processes (they ran away, they worried about running away); those that
represent states of being or relationships of being between nouns (he was crying, he was a
crier); those that represent behavioral processes (she grimaced, she fumed); those that represent
existential processes (there was war, there is no collusion); those that represent verbal processes
(the teacher explained the lesson, George said he was unhappy). Some linguists cut this cake in other
ways, but such details aren’t important here.
Of course, a typical language user produces utterances in the course of the day that deploy
any and all of these processes. So, on the face of it, these categories may seem mostly
descriptive with minimal analytical value. But the field of noun/verb interplay in discourse
can prove interesting; sorting out which types of transitivity predominate in a given text may
tell you something about the genre’s requirements as well as, more intriguingly, the author’s
favored ways of representing participants and their activities. You might expect, for example,
to see many more material and verbal processes (doing or saying-type processes) in straight

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news reporting than in, say, lyric poetry, where you might find more mental or behavioral
processes.
It is not immediately clear that the ecoliterate or ecophilic text uses a different assortment
of processes than the ecophobic or ecophatic text. But I think we can surmise that if the focal
human language user is deprivileged, we might expect to see more material and relational
transitivity processes at work. To help exemplify this idea, let’s consider two famous passages
from American literature:
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find
the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the
bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the
bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly
bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with
wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick
angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
(Hemingway, 133)
Pap he hadn’t been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me; I
didn’t want to see him no more. He used to always whale me when he was sober
and could get his hands on me; though I used to take to the woods most of the time
when he was around. Well, about this time he was found in the river drownded,
about twelve mile above town, so people said. They judged it was him, anyway;
said this drownded man was just his size, and was ragged, and had uncommon long
hair, which was all like pap; but they couldn’t make nothing out of the face, because
it had been in the water so long it warn’t much like a face at all.
(Twain, 14)
Twain’s novel, written in the first person, is almost entirely framed by Huck’s mental and
verbal processes. There’s little room for independent material or existential verb processes.
The novel represents an almost exclusively humanized understanding of the world, despite
the omnipresence of the Mississippi and Huck’s flight into the relatively untrammeled riverine
wilderness. On the other hand, Hemingway, developing his distinctive style out of his days as
a straight news reporter, typically draws on material verb processes to give thick descriptions
of Nick’s environment in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the Two-Hearted River. Now,
it’s an open debate whether or not Hemingway is writing an ecoliterate text here—but it’s a
good debate, and one which is enlivened by a consideration of his preference for certain
transitivity options. We’ll come back to a related issue of verb processes shortly.

Truth in discourse
Modality is the CDA term that orients us toward the concept of truth. Truth in discourse
analysis is understood as a measure of social agreement about the nature of the referential
dimension. In other words, truth is not an absolute value but a kind of communal
endorsement of a particular version of reality. The term is derived from modal auxiliary
verbs—those verbs that register possibility, such as “should,” “could,” “might,” and those that
on the other hand express necessity, such as “will,” “must,” and “shall.” Modal verbs are used
whenever we wish to make statements about the likelihood of events or actions. We say that
sentences like “I am going out today” or “I will go out today” have high modality; sentences
like “I should go out today” or “I might go out today” have lower modality.

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High modality statements admit little doubt; low modality statements admit plenty. In the
course of a conversation, most speakers will range up and down the modality ladder,
organically representing their convictions or doubts about all manner of things by way of
their modal verb choices. Their confidence when asserting beliefs about reality or projecting
the course of the day (epistemic modality); their estimations of their obligations to other
people, themselves, and other things in the world (deontic modality); and their capacities to
accomplish certain tasks (dynamic modality): all of these routine matters are modalized,
because most of what we need to understand as “true” in the human social world really
comes down to assigning percentages. From a discourse analytical perspective, we want to be
confident that the new information and new options for action with which we are constantly
confronted are conformable with our own predispositions and others’ expectations, so that
the likelihood of failure or disapprobation is low. In other words, in the sea of discourse in
which we are immersed, our truth-confidence is buoyed—for good or for ill—more by social
proofs than empirical ones.
In literary texts, modality statements are likely to be more carefully circumscribed. No
probability statements, as it were, are left to chance. One of my favorite ecoliterate texts, in
part for its subtle critique of industrial culture, is Gary Snyder’s poem, “One Should Not Talk
to a Skilled Hunter About What is Forbidden by the Buddha.” In this poem, Snyder
describes in clinical detail the corpse of a dead gray fox: its weight and length, its coldness,
its smell, its stomach contents. Those contents include “one lizard foot,” a “whole ground
squirrel well chewed” and, inside the squirrel, “a bit of aluminum foil” (66). Snyder, in
concluding his autopsy, writes this latter is “The secret.” He means, presumably, that the tiny
piece of foil killed the fox, cutting open its gut and causing it to bleed to death internally. But
he adds to that penultimate secret yet another: “the secret hidden deep in that.” Here I think
he is alluding to industrial civilization itself, which, among other travesties and perversities,
throws away its dangerous waste products into the unwitting maw of nature.
In effect, the powerful epistemic modality of scientific discourse—characterized by the
poem’s unqualified assertions of empirical truth through the high modality language of a
forensic examination—is ju-jitsued by Snyder to critique that selfsame discourse. “Just the
facts, ma’am,” and these facts tell a powerful story of unintended consequences. In a sense,
Snyder uses the master’s linguistic tools to take down the master’s house.
In another poem Snyder mixes in deontic modality cues to support a similar theme. In “The
Dead by the Side of the Road,” Snyder opens by wondering “How did a great Red-tailed
Hawk/come to lie—all stiff and dry—/on the shoulder of/Interstate 5?” (7). He notes its wings
will be used for “dance fans.” He then tells us of a skunk “with a crushed head” whose pelt will
be tanned. He mentions a fawn struck by a car that will go into stew and a “Ringtail” that will
be made into a pouch for “magic tools.” Concluding his inventory of the dead and their further
uses, he implores us to “Pray to their spirits” and “To ask them to bless us.”
In this poem, Snyder has again critiqued our brute force culture, but he also considers the
moral duties we owe to these dead. This theme is supported linguistically by many deontic
modality statements (provided most clearly by the opening rhetorical question, which doubles
as a cri de coeur, and the closing prayer, which is really an appeal for forgiveness). The stanzas
describing the repurposing of the dead animals (into fans, pelt, pouch, food) can be similarly
parsed for their implied moral obligations, which again are subtly supported by Snyder’s
lexical and grammatical choices. Those turn out to be mostly negative lexical choices, i.e.,
elision of deontically inflected verbs like must, may, or ought, so that the moral compulsion
not to waste these animals and instead honor them as involuntary sacrifices happens,
automatically and without deliberation, between the lines.

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Themes and rhemes

We use the term theme colloquially to mean the topic of a text (as I did in the last paragraph).
But in discourse analytical terms every individual sentence has a theme, usually the first
subject/agent section of the clause, which provides the given information. The second verb/
object part of the clause, the part that provides the new information, is called the rheme. Thus
you can find typical sentences that move from a point of departure (As he watched them—) to a
kind of fulfillment in which we learn the answer to the implied question, “and then what?”
(—they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again). The
sentence doesn’t need to be complex to have a theme and a rheme. Let’s look at a
prototypically terse Hemingway clause: The river was there. In this example, the theme is the
river. What do we learn via the rheme about this river? Merely that it was there.
This theme–rheme sequence tends to replicate the universal plot in which a human agent
or stand-in (another perceiving being like a god or a disembodied all-seeing narrator)
perceives or acts upon the world (I ate the apple, Nick watched them a long time, Pap he hadn’t
been seen for more than a year, The river was there, The bird ate the worm, The wind blew down a
tree). Note that the shape of the clause—the transitivity pattern of theme–rheme—is always
the same, regardless of whether the human is written into the sentence or not. So even when
the river is just there, the bird is eating the worm, or the wind is blowing down the tree,
human agents or their stand-ins are implied. We know that the river was there because we
know Nick was there to confirm that fact. Now, we don’t have any similar indication as to
who if anyone saw the bird eating the worm or the wind blowing down the tree; those are
free-floating assertions. But we know, without it being stated, that if these incidents can be
reported, an agent of some sort was on the scene—even if it was only the omniscient narrator
herself. It’s as if in even the most objectively rendered observations, we leave out the implied
framing perspective, “If you or someone else had been there, you would have seen this.”
Do ecoliterate texts contest this pattern of actual or implied human involvement and
centrality? What could that possibly look like? We need to back up a bit before answering. As
an undergraduate in science many years ago, I was riveted by physicist David Bohm’s book
Wholeness and Implicate Order (1980). What was most compelling to me was his discussion of
the theme-centric nature of language. Always, he argued, we fixate on discrete objects—the
nouns of the world, if you will—and de-emphasize the verbs/actions that bring them into
contact with one another. His claim was that reality, from a physics standpoint, is actually
more processual—more verblike—than nounlike, despite the fact that our language tends to
orient us to the islands in the stream rather than the stream itself. To move beyond that
cognitive style, Bohm argued, might require a new process-oriented language, what he
dubbed the rheomode. One of the benefits of that language is that it would follow trends in
ecology, which had already placed so much emphasis on interconnection and community, as
well as on flows of matter, energy, and genetic material. A rheme-inflected language would,
as a nice bonus, decenter the human agent, who in theme-centric languages is invariably the
biggest mover and shaker—who even when he’s doing nothing at all is there in some way as
a sort of lynchpin observer, describer, and meaning arbiter.
Well, I don’t recall Bohm providing a satisfactory solution to this problem—it was just a
thought experiment—and, to make a long story short, nobody believes a rhemic language
revolution is on the way. It may be the nature of our brains and bodies that the things of the
world simply have to take pride of place. But perhaps the ecoliterate text sometimes takes a
stab at a different approach. To illustrate, let’s consider the only poem in Mary Oliver’s
masterful volume American Primitive that contains no clearly named human agent (Oliver

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normally invokes a “I,” a “we,” or a “you” as a focal subjectivity interacting with or

observing natural phenomenon). In the uniquely dehumanized “Rain in Ohio,” Oliver
composes a series of short verses that form a snapshot of a landscape about to be hit by a
storm. In anticipation of it, “The robin cries: rain” and “The crow calls: plunder!” (40). As the
“thunderheads whirl up/out of the white west/their dark hooves nicking” a blacksnake
“pours himself swift and heavy/into the ground.” Meanwhile, the “crow hunches” and the
robin “flies for cover.”
What we can see in Oliver’s lexical choices is that a heavy verbal style, emphasizing the
powerful kinetic energies—the hunching, the nicking, the pouring, the whirling–of non-
human agents going about their business without humans in the picture, lends the poem a
kind of radical otherness (over and against the words put in the mouths of the focal animals).
Things are happening out there in Ohio, and they have nothing to do with us.
I’d argue that this felt otherness is more palpable here than even in that most stirring of
poems about animal otherness, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.”
Bishop’s poem is written in a noun-intensive style—in essence, nouns and their modifiers
do the work of the poem, vividly detailing what the narrator perceives about the magnificent
fish, which is opened up before her probing, anatomizing gaze. She notes “the big bones and
the little bones/the dramatic reds and blacks”; she observes its “shiny entrails” and its “pink
swim-bladder” that looks like a “big peony” (46). She looks into its eyes and notes they are
“far larger than mine.” Yet for all its piscine alterity, the fish is fixed, frozen, and
domesticated into our frame by the admiring narrator who concludes her visual inspection
with the poem’s crucial, unexpected but entirely humane action: “And I let it go” (48).
I don’t mean to claim that Oliver’s poem is more ecoliterate than Bishop’s. That would be
a different argument and, frankly, a misplaced one. Both authors have much to tell us. I only
mean to demonstrate the value of discourse analytical techniques to support an ecocritical
reading. Here what I’ve sketched is how attention to relative verbal intensities can produce
supplemental indices of the ecocentric/anthropocentric implications of the two poems.

The resources of CDA

I have just scratched the surface of CDA, and the suite of concepts I’ve discussed are probably
not the most important or even the most interesting. They have only the virtue of seeming to
be applicable to several texts I wanted to write about! So I have not mentioned presupposition,
implicature, functionalism, overlexicalization, anonymization, suppression, hedging, or ideological
squaring. I have not tapped into the rhetorical tradition’s vast compendia on figuration and
scheme, its work on punctuation and prosody, its long history on audience–speaker relationships. I
have not mentioned the value of copia and corpora. I have not discussed interaction control in the
context of represented speech.
A critical discourse analysis of this chapter might point to these suppressions and silences,
to my overwording on matters of modality and verb processes, and it might posit that my
own ecocritical biases include a fixation on anthropocentrism, as if it were the only matter of
consequence to ecocritics. It might note my explications of the poems and narratives cited in
this chapter focused more on how they said than what they said. It might conclude that my
text reveals an overweening commitment to linguistic reason itself (best epitomized by the
rejection of my own mutinous reading of Kay’s poem at the outset) when sometimes in
ecocriticism what is wanted is a commitment to reason’s other. All of that would represent a
strong reading of this text. But—and here I play my last card—the analysis would not be
complete until it dealt with the lexicogrammar I used along the way.

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Further reading
Bloor, Muriel and Thomas Bloor. The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis. Hodder, 2001.
Bradford, Richard. Stylistics. Routledge, 1997.
Fahnestock, Jeanne. Rhetorical Style. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Fairclough, Norman. Discourse and Social Change. Polity, 1992.
Fill, Alwin and Peter Mühlhäusler. The Ecolinguistics Reader. Continuum, 2001.
Halliday, Michael. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Arnold, 1985.
Machin, David and Andrea Mayr. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis. Sage, 2012.
Paltridge, Brian. Discourse Analysis. Bloomsbury, 2012.
Stibbe, Arran. “An Ecolinguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Studies.” Critical Discourse Studies. 11.1
(2014): 117–128.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Discourse and Practice. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Works cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems: North & South, a Cold Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1955.
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge, 1980.
Fowler, Roger. Lingustic Criticism. 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2nd edition. Routledge, 2013.
Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. 1925. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.
Kay, Jackie. Other Lovers. Bloodaxe Books, 1993.
Oliver, Mary. American Primitive. Little, Brown & Company, 1978.
Snyder, Gary. Turtle Island. New Directions, 1969.
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking,” Thoreau: Essays, edited by Jeffrey Kramer. Yale University Press,
2013.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Mark Twain Project edition. University of California
Press, 2001.
Walker, Alice. “Everything is a Human Being.” American Earth, edited by Bill McKibben. Library of
America, 2008, pp. 659–670.
Widdowson, Harry. Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature. Longman, 1975.

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 2
THE CLIMATE OF CHANGE
Graphic adaptation, The Rime of the
Modern Mariner, and the ecological
uncanny

Pramod K. Nayar

In Mediating Climate Change (2011) Julie Doyle examines the language of environmental
communications from three “actors”: scientists, environmentalists and the media. Left out of
this scheme, unfortunately in my view, is the literary scholar/critic.
It is my contention that the theme of climate change demands a change in not only our
consumption of the literary canon, but also a repurposing of canonical texts in order to deliver
the urgent news of climate change, eco-disaster and the fragility of human–nature relations.
For my specific purpose here, I take as a case study of such a “climate of change”: Nick
Hayes’s reworking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous narrative poem, The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner (1798) as a graphic adaptation, The Rime of the Modern Mariner (2011). Nick
Hayes is a cartoonist (his work has appeared in The Guardian and New Statesman) and
writer. He is the author of, besides the Rime, Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads. In
Rime Hayes retells Coleridge’s tale of the Mariner, but sets it in the contemporary.
The Mariner’s story, even in Coleridge, had environmental overtones: the killing of the
albatross, the consequential weather and tide changes that maroon the Mariner’s ship,
the redemption that follows the Mariner’s acceptance of the natural world. Hayes’s text
renders the poem in image and word, and the onus is on the reader to read the two
together. Literally drawing seas of pollution and landscapes of eco-disaster, Hayes brings
alive in images the consequences of environmental pollution. Hayes’s is an environmentalist
text, and its modes of generating its eco-concerns in its graphic adaptation of Coleridge are
the subject of my chapter.
“Graphic adaptation” is a narrative mode that takes recourse to the medium of graphic
novels, which combines both word and image, and is considered by many scholars as not only
a form of literature today but also as a necessary development, in terms of form and medium,
that responds to the needs of the present moment when trauma, human rights, violence and
such subjects are part of public discourses and literary-cultural studies (Hirsch 2004, Chute
2008, Galchinsky 2016, Nayar 2016). “Graphic adaptation” is the transformation of a print
text into a narrative mode that demands verbal and image-literacy from the reader, even if the
“original” text (Coleridge’s poem) is a familiar one.

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Hayes, I argue, invokes the ecological uncanny as a structural feature of his narrative, both
visual and verbal. Texts communicating the possibility of eco-disaster and the future of
mankind and other lifeforms, often offer extrapolations, some bizarre, of today’s science or
lifestyle of human cultural practices (such as urbanism, hyperconsumption) in order to warn
us that if we continue to live like this, the world will one day look like that. These literary
and cultural texts replicate today’s world, so that it is at once recognizable and strange. As a
consequence, Timothy Morton tells us, we experience the “uncanny” in such settings (2010:
51–5). Siobhan Carroll, building on Morton’s idea, elaborates the “ecological uncanny” as
“exposing the human in the natural and vice versa” but also “as revealing the entanglement of
urban landscapes with natural elsewhere” (57–58, emphasis in original). Carroll, reading the
New Weird fiction of VanderMeer, among others, argues that “ostensibly ‘wild’ spaces are by
no means hermetically sealed. Instead, these New Weird tales reveal natural atopias—natural
spaces inhospitable to human dwelling—to be intimately connected with the manmade
atopias of global capital” (58).
Sites of disaster may generate an ecological uncanny, with a certain experience of the
ghostly, the mythic and the contemporary, the local and the alien, the familiar and the
strange, all within the spaces of disaster (Nayar 2017b).
This ecological uncanny is a composite one. First, I detect the antiquarian uncanny as a
prominent feature of Hayes’s text. Nicholas Royle proposes: “Uncertainties at the origin
concerning colonization and the foreign body, and a mixing of what is at once old and long
familiar with what is strangely ‘fresh’ and new” (2003: 12, emphasis in original) is at the heart
of the uncanny. There is something alien, atavistic, unexpectedly out of time at the heart of
the uncanny, producing what I term the antiquarian uncanny. Second, the decadent sublime
of endless waste in Hayes’s text also generates an uncanny effect. Finally, I argue that the
irrational, the superstitious and the mythic remain a part of the ecological uncanny as well,
just as it was a constituent of Coleridge’s poem.
Hayes’s tale opens with an office-goer stepping out of the air-conditioned confines of the
building into the “drowsy world of autumn, of overripe excess,” a clear nod to John Keats’s “Ode
to Autumn.” Sitting in the park, amidst swirling leaves, the office-goer chews a “rubber
sandwich” and sips from a “Styrofoam” cup. There he encounters a seaman who begins his
tale with a geographical measure: “I took a ship across the sea to the ports of Old Japan”
(unpaginated). The signaling of “old” alerts us to the arrival of the uncanny already, since the
uncanny is the residue, hitherto hidden, of the past.

The antiquarian uncanny

Hayes’s seaman foregrounds the precarity of ecosystems in the opening panels of the seaman’s
story. Lifeforms disappear, and are embodied only in their remains such as fossils. On one page, the
second of the seaman’s story, we are presented with the image of a dinosaur fossil. The image
spreads across both pages, and occupies nearly half of both pages. The tail and the snout protrude
outside the panel, almost as though these cannot be contained within human frames, narrative or
otherwise. The referencing of a now-extinct form of life draws attention to the precarity of entire
ecosystems that were no longer able to sustain the giant lizards, and points to the inevitability of
species-death. The modern mariner (and the readers, by extension) reflects upon this eventuality
indirectly when we contemplate the remains. The precarity of ecosystems is a part of extinction
discourse. The return of a popular interest in fossils, remains and excavation in films such as Jurassic
Park recall the “morts” of the early modern and later curiosity cabinets—collecting and exhibiting
fossils, bones and remainders/reminders of the past. Darwin simply directed attention to a specific

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thought: that humans, like all species of life, are “subject to the same forces and vulnerabilities”
(Chernela 2011: 22). As Genese Sodikoff puts it, “extinction events propel the evolution of
cultural productions, including science and technology, politics, history, and art. The prospect of
human extinction has animated a doomsday genre of film and fiction. . .” (2011: 2).
The words accompanying the images say, “I had a hankering for dominoes made of
whalebone, a rarefied accessory to decorate my home” (unpaginated). Two things strike us
about this anecdote. First, the retrieval of a fossil/skeleton of an extinct lifeform that implies
time passing, with lifeforms disappearing and, second, these same lifeforms re-appearing only
in their remnants, an ecological uncanny in the return of the past. Woven into the depiction
of this segment of the story is the implicit eco-critique: the human greed for whalebone.
Bored of shooting “plastic sitting ducks,” the seaman shoots a live bird in the sky. He claims:
“its death seemed no great loss, it looked as old as time itself,” once again invoking the
ancient and the antiquarian that somehow survives into the present. Then, when the ship’s
engines fail and they stall in the midst of the “subtropic brine,” the fishermen on board begin
to blame the seaman, and this they did “in ancient tongue,” he reports.
Hayes’s antiquarian uncanny is essentially a merger of present and past, of the haunting
nature of pollution whose timeframe is far beyond anything we humans understand. Even as
the fishermen speak in an ancient tongue, he turns away, to see an ocean with “swathes of
polystyrene, bobbed with tonnes of neoprene, and polymethyl methacrylate stretched across
the scene.” The juxtaposition of the very contemporary with the very old indicts the human
race: for the ship is not marooned within algae or any oceanic objects but within man-made,
non-biodegradable materials. The images show boxes, shoes, gloves, Styrofoam cups and
other detritus. Just as the ancient tongue is indestructible, so is this plastic detritus.
Hayes’s ecological horror transforms the “antiquarian” uncanny into a prognosis: the
antiquarian of the future will be these bits and pieces of flotsam. That is, the return of the
repressed will not be a ghost as we know, but a ghost made of plastic and chemicals. Hayes’s
text images this uncanny in the form of the sailors’ dreams: “in fits they dreamt of a ghost
below nine fathoms deep, a Medusa’s head of nylon nets, a clotted, ragged knot . . . acrylic,
foam and polymers that still refuse to rot.” Hayes anticipates a future uncanny wherein the
antiquarian rising from the ocean floor will not be ghosts as we understand it, but plastic
pollutants. These now constitute the past and the future. The uncanny, Nicholas Royle
informs us, is the foreign at the heart (2003: 2). The plastic debris, which is foreign to the
ocean and its lifeforms, is now the heart of the ocean. This debris defines it for the future.
Hayes gives the antiquarian uncanny and its ecological horror yet another twist. Just as in
Coleridge’s poem, a ghost ship appears. The “ghoulish apparition” that accompanies this ship
asks the mariner to discount his views of ghosts and declares that she is the “real repercussion
of [the] hubristic human boast.” She claims she is the “blood of that beneath [humans].” The
images in the background show factories spewing smoke, and the ghoul says that she wept
“acid tears” but even these have gone dry now. She declares that the human hubris was to
“gamble” in which, initially, they (the humans) “won a hundred million tonnes.” The images
here are horrifying. What the gambler accumulates as chips at the gambling table morph into
factory chimneys and skyscrapers. Thus, what the humans earn in their gamble over these
centuries, the ghoul informs the mariner, is the potentiality of future assured eco-destruction.
The chips on the table reflect both the past—the human hubris, confident gamble—and the
future. As the chips accumulate, the ghoul says, humanity does not win, it loses.
What the ghoulish apparition does is to offer a vision of the future. Proceeding from the
past, she draws aside the veil to reveal the future, which is monstrous. This is a vision she
imparts the mariner himself, and as a result he sees in the albatross, which he now carries

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around his neck, “a fine nylon gauze . . . tangled in its chest” and a “plastic bag hung round
its bones.” In a macabre revision of the “reading the entrails” mode of prediction, the mariner
sees both, the past and the future in the bird’s innards. It is humanity’s detritus that envelops
the entrails of the bird. While the debris may be from the past it also gestures at the future of
the lifeforms on earth: man-made objects will cause widespread destruction. This is the future
that the visitor from the past—the ghoul—forces the mariner to “see.”
In Part Six, we are told of “Titanic feats of pride,” depicting the sinking of the most
luxurious ship ever built, which Hayes describes as “gilded glory sunk in dust.” Images here
include the famous staircase of the Titanic, across and down which hammerhead sharks float.
The turn in the Mariner’s narrative, as in the Coleridge poem, begins when he sees and hears
something beyond the human: “I heard an alien noise, a haunting, primitive sound,” he says.
He detects a “nadiral moan,” and a whale “emerged from the gloam.” “Gloam” here gestures
at the border of night and day, twilight or the crepuscular zone. The full-page spread of the
whale is followed by a page wherein the whale occupies the entire left side and curves into
the right, down the page, almost encircling the page, and the diegetic space represented in the
three inset panels. In these panels we see the trembling Mariner staring at the whale whose
eye, he says, was “regarding him.” The whale’s movement itself, as the Mariner sees it, is
“slow” and “in frozen time and space.” The whale represents the survival of something, a
lifeform, older than one can imagine. Hayes suggests that the earth belongs to such ridiculous
lifeforms such as the two-hundred-ton whale. The whale seems “frozen in time and space”
because it perhaps belongs to a different time, and yet appears to the contemporary lifeform,
the Mariner.
The antiquarian manifests as the ecological uncanny even after the Mariner is rescued by
the island-dweller hermit. On the island, vegetation grows thick. Here, says Hayes, “ancient
ivy climbed the trees.” This green space is the space of a resurrection or a second life: “green
renewing birth,” as Hayes puts it. The green renews the Mariner, gives him a second life.
The images here show coiling vines around massive trees. Facing this page is a page with
snapshots of vegetation in three panels. In the lower half of the page is one large panel,
crowded with creepers, leaves and flowers. Not a millimeter of the panel is empty. Across this
panel, and bed of vegetation, is a hand, sprawled. The hand is shown from the wrist onward.
The hand appears to be growing out of the land, amongst the leaves and flowers. The human
hand, metonymic of the human itself, has thus far been embedded in buildings, machinery
and cities, as noted. In this place, surrounded by “ancient” lifeforms, the human’s rebirth is
envisaged away from all that he has built. Here, the hand is a part of the natural growth, the
human embedded within other lifeforms, connected and organically linked. The reference to
the ancient ivy perhaps signals a warning to humans: to return to older connections, with the
earth and its lifeforms, instead of assuming a distinct identity as separate from the rest. That is,
the metonymic hand embedded in nature indicates a species companionship—to show, as
Donna Haraway argues (2008), that humans do not evolve outside of nature and lifeforms,
they evolve with them. The narrative proposes a “rebirth” for the Mariner immediately after
depicting this embedding, inviting the argument that any hope of regeneration, redemption
and rescue for the humans can only emerge from acknowledging this embedded, co-evolving
nature of humanity. This connection is ancient, and Hayes symbolically marks the human’s
rescue and rebirth as contingent upon a return of and to the ancient. This is Hayes’s
ecologically uncanny where the ancient asserts itself in many ways, most notably, as the
source of healing and recovery.
The process of recovery is incessantly portrayed in terms of this ecological uncanny and
the return of the ecological repressed.

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First, Hayes’s Mariner says he “raised myself upon a bed of pyroclastic stone.” The fact
that he is stark naked symbolically suggests he is experiencing a rebirth, “naked as a baby,” so
to speak. It is on pyroclastic stone, which is essentially a remnant of volcanic eruptions. The
image shows an Adamic Mariner staring out at the hills on the horizon. But he stands on
ground that has been dissected for us, the readers. And we see the layers of soil, with fossils
and skeletal remains of earlier eras. Thus, the new-born Mariner rises up again on ancient
ground, on the foundations of destruction and reconstruction with the “pyroclastic stone”
signaling, perhaps, the end of that ancient world, like Pompeii, beneath volcanic ash and lava.
On the remainders of old lifeforms, the new man rises.
Second, the new man has begun to pay attention to the ecological history of his own
context, setting and life. Later, the Mariner says: “[I] felt four hundred million years compacted
in my bones.” This is a crucial moment of recognition: the Mariner realizes that his very
corporeal ontology is a sedimentation of years of life on earth. The bones are “compacted” over
centuries, and have assimilated the neighborhood in the process. This yet again reinforces the
contemporary posthumanist position articulated by Haraway and novelists like Octavia Butler
(adapting the work of biologist Lynn Margulis): that human life has always co-evolved with
other species. That is, posthumanism treats the “essential” attributes of the human as always
already imbricated with other lifeforms, where the essential human qualities and attributes,
whether physiology, anatomy or consciousness, have co-evolved with other lifeforms. It rejects
the idea of an innate human feature, arguing instead for a congeries of qualities developed over
centuries through the human’s interactions with the environment, including non-organic tools
and organic but nonhuman lifeforms. The Mariner now recognizes this.
The image on the next page, accompanying the text about compacted bones, shows the
Mariner in silhouette. The odd thing about this silhouette is: it is drawn as geological lines,
traditionally used to depict layers of soil on the earth’s surface. The layers, as we know,
represent geological timelines as well. The Mariner’s feet in this silhouette flow into the soil,
and one cannot separately identify his feet: it is one mass with the top layer of the earth.
Hayes’s image is evocative, showing a different form of embedding from the earlier one of
the man’s hand merging with nature embodied as vegetation. Here the man is the soil, the
soil makes the man. The image could be read as the soil climbing up into the man,
becoming his very constituent. Man is of the elements here: he is earth.
In the next set of images Hayes builds on this theme of man being made of the elements.
His feet, says the Mariner, “dug down like wooden roots,” his “fingers felt like leaves.” He
then “drew upon the earth and air, like every living tree.” All his breath is part of the natural
setting, his “budding alveoli inhaled in perfect time,” like the trees. Even his neurons are like
“mycelium” and “exhaled in hopeful spores.” The elements are older, a part of the world the
human race inhabits, in which humanity is a relatively recent entrant. By depicting the
Mariner’s revival within the nature, Hayes implies that it is only a return to ancient
connections, such as with Nature, that can help man redeem himself.

Waste and the decadent sublime

In the episode describing the stalling of the ship, Hayes draws the ship in silhouette. In a
brilliant imaging of the complete destruction of the oceanic environment in the contempor-
ary age, having already drawn boxes, shoes, gloves, Styrofoam cups, among others, he
positions this silhouette against a background of blue—for the mythically blue ocean and the
mythically blue sky/horizon. On closer inspection we see that the ocean and sky/horizon are
chemical structures in blue, made of carbon, hydrogen and other elements. Octagonal structures

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are visible at the lower end of the sky, and they congregate densely towards the upper reaches
of the sky. The ocean, in a symbolic image, is thick with these chemical formulae. Waste,
shows Hayes, determines the nature of the sea and the sky. This is the decadent sublime,
borderless in terms of both space—because of the expanse—and time—because the detritus is
non-biodegradable. The sublimity of natural formations such as oceans and skies have been
replaced, suggests Hayes, by the man-made decadent sublime. Waste is the central component
of this sublime.
The decadent sublime does not elevate, unlike the traditional sublime. Rather, it:
brings modern individuals, who are intent on divorcing themselves from their
earthly origins, back to earth in a downward vector that is decadent n the primary
sense of the word, which is derived from the Latin de- and cadēre meaning ‘to fall
down’.
(Presto 2011: 578)
This sublime is one of global catastrophic collapse, of boundariless pollution and infection, of
incomprehensible destruction and degeneration. “Decadence” here is the widespread collapse
of not only values but also environment, making the latter unfit to live in. Jenifer Presto
writes of the decadent sublime that, unlike the traditional sublime, this does not elevate but
rather “brings modern individuals, who are intent on divorcing themselves from their earthly
origins, back to earth” (578). Presto continues:
[M]odern individuals are able to employ the advancements of science and technol-
ogy to elevate themselves above the earth, this mechanical elevation is, unlike the
mental uplift discussed by Kant, powerless to counteract the contagious effects the
earth has on people; it only serves to provide them with a celestial vantage point
from which to look down upon the earthly destruction.
(578)
In Hayes, there is a sublimity of waste, where waste extends beyond the horizons, beyond
even time. That is, the decadent sublime in Hayes is an aesthetic of debris that know no
boundaries—of either space or time.
Yet, human time is itself measurable in terms of the quantum of waste produced and which
now chokes the oceans in Hayes. Patricia Yaeger speaks of waste and debris: “as vision, as
violence, and as an alternate site of reading history” (2003: 106). Along similar lines Gay
Hawkins and Steven Muecke write: “waste itself has become a historical force; it becomes
monuments to catastrophic loss” (2003: xiv). One engages with waste as monuments, but
they embody a history of catastrophe, loss and various shifts in value: from the necessary
to the luxurious, from the essential to excess. As Hayes’s text demonstrates, the desire for
whalebone—excessive, inessential—the practices of hyperconsumption (embodied in the
seas of Styrofoam cups and such materials) and the gratuitous cruelties—the Mariner
shoots the bird because he is bored—that humanity perpetrates are all indices of a certain
kind of history.
The “ancient” Mariner here is one who has aged before his time: he is not ancient in
terms of longevity but in terms of what he has experienced and witnessed. This experience is
of witnessing the decadent sublime, of the earth rotting under the weight of the human-
generated waste. But there is another witness as well. The ghoul that appears on the ghost
ship says to the Mariner: “I am the real repercussion of your hubristic human boast . . . the
blood of that beneath you . . . the composite of time.” The accompanying images are horrific.
The ghoul’s fingers drip black fluid, either blood or oil (Hayes does not use colors other than

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blue, black and white, so we have no clue whether the fluid is blood). Facing this image is
one of a city by the sea. We see the cityscape of chimneys, high-rises and square buildings.
The sea itself is turbulent and occupies two-thirds of the page, with the city at the top. The
effect is of the seas rising to devour the city (a routine image/prognosis of global warming
discourse today). In the center of the sea, coiled, is the ghoul, now reduced to a skeletal
frame. The ghoul is the “composite of time,” she claims. Here the “composite of time” is the
accumulation of time as measured in the debris of human-making. The tears (acid) have run
dry, the gambler’s luck has run out and the tide has literally turned. The “composite of time”
is a sublime moment, where an entire history of wrong-doing results in the climactic and
climatic disaster of rising sea levels that inundate a city. That is, Hayes via the ghoul asks us to
reflect on the history of mankind as a history of waste and wasting—because wasting, as noted
above, is also excess, and excess is a mark of the sublime—that has brought us to the brink of
disaster. The debris-filled sea is an embodiment of history (and one recalls here Derek
Walcott’s powerful “the sea is History” (1992), when referring to the Middle Passage and
the number of slaves who died on the voyage), with human time compressed into, and as, the
Styrofoam and plastic on the sea’s surface.
Sublime spectacles of destruction and waste, as I have elsewhere argued adapting the work
of Amanda Boetzkes, are variants of more traditional landscape descriptions (Nayar 2017a).
Boetzkes writes:
In replacing wild natural phenomena with plastic trash, the artist composes the
landscape out of a manufactured and potentially toxic double. This waste is a far
more insidious danger than nature, for it is positioned as the elemental basis of the
scene and thus contaminates the very foundation of the landscape.
(26)
Thus, in the place of swirling winds and the endless horizons of the ocean that make up the
traditional sublime, we see in contemporary films such as The Book of Eli or I Am Legend,
swirling paper, detritus and automobiles. Nature has been replaced by the debris from and
detritus of human life, industrial modernity and the so-called civilizational processes. Hayes’s
focus is the ocean, and we see a similar “landscape” of waste.
Neil Hertz (1985) argued that the sublime is an obstacle to be overcome. Hayes leaves us
with little hope that it can be overcome, principally by telling us, via the antiquarian uncanny
and the decadent sublime, that the history of man or urban modernity and its future are both
determined by waste, wastage and wasting. The land is beyond repair, as are the seas. When the
novel ends, we are shown the unrepentant office-goer, despite the Mariner’s story, return to his
life. He returns, Hayes says, “to a world detached of consequence.” And then Hayes says
“where he would not live for long.” Hayes leaves it uncertain whether this means the world
will end or the man will die. The tenor of the book has thus far suggested a state of no return,
given the piling up of debris waste, rising sea levels, and such. The Mariner’s story, Hayes
suggests, leaves the man unmoved—and instead he gives the Mariner some coins for the time
spent—and therefore the “detached” consequence, so characteristic of the human race itself.
Perhaps the decadent sublime constituted by waste is not something mankind can
comprehend. When Hayes makes the ghoul the principal messenger communicating the
news of “composite time”—which I take to be Gaia time, the time of the earth itself—it
implies that mankind does not understand geological time. The Mariner’s story, and Hayes’s
evocative images, both signal the failure to comprehend the true nature of ecological disaster.
The decadent sublime, like the traditional one, is beyond comprehension, perhaps. Eco-
disaster and eco-precarity is a “hyperobject,” as Timothy Morton (2013) terms it. Morton

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proposed that things that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans,”
such as black holes, the biosphere or the solar system (unpaginated) are hyperobjects. More
importantly, Morton argues that even a “very long-lasting product of direct human manu-
facture, such as Styrofoam or plastic bags” could be hyperobjects. These hyperobjects are
viscous (they stick to anything that comes proximate to them), nonlocal, molten (they trouble
the notion of fixed space–time constraints), interobjective (they “can be detected in a space
that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects”).
The Mariner, like the office-goer who is the recipient of the tale, is, like all humans,
unaware of the environmental consequences of humanity across history. The debris and waste
on the sea is part of the sea’s sublimity, incomprehensible and vast. But that this “natural
sublime” of the sea has morphed into the decadent sublime of a degraded environment is
something the humans refuse to observe. That is, the humans continue to see the oceans as
oceans, whereas the ghoul sees it as a sea of waste. As a hyperobject the oceans and seas are
not just vast water bodies but bodies of waste, beyond scales of space and time. They extend
beyond the lifespan of an individual and beyond the immediate spatial borders of a nation.

The mythic uncanny

In Parts Five and Six, when the Mariner has his dream, it is full of ancient and mythic
materials: Thor, myrmidons, Mephistopheles, among others. The ghoul also is a mythic
creature from the past. Hayes, opening his story with contemporary urban life, retreats into
myth. Central to the uncanny is an unformed primitivism (Freud 1971: 393–97), which
Hélène Cixous develops as its “mythic anthropology,” a “foundation of gods and demons”
(1976: 539). The uncanny is also connected, Cixous adds, to a series of anecdotal examples,
literary and biographical mini stories (539).
The Mariner, whose body is “comatose,” has visions. In these he beholds the majesty, the
horror and the terror of the ocean. He now recognizes the ocean as “Poseidon’s lair.” Thor’s
hammer seems to be coming down on his head and the Myrmidons constitute an army that
raises a “tsunami.” That is, the Mariner not only recognizes the ocean’s mythic roots, he
concedes an entirely different narrative explanation for the events. The storms, the rain and
thunder are divine in origin, he now believes: it is Thor, the Myrmidons and Poseidon
himself who are wreaking havoc on their ship. I suggest that the invocation of the myths
signals the uncanny. The uncanny is about uncertainty attendant upon any form of knowing.
Here the Mariner, having thus far come equipped with his modern, rational views, discovers
that the sea has its own mythic anthropology, which may be the only explanation for the
events unfolding. That is, existing, modern explanations no longer suffice to explain the
stalling of the ship, deaths and suffering at sea. The uncanny is the space of this uncertainty; it
emerges in the moment of hesitation that results from the confused narratives that generate
both familiarity and strangeness: is the raging sea and the unrelenting rains the result of
weather patterns, eco-pollution or the rage of the gods? The sea’s mythic anthropology is
precisely this mix: the necessity to invoke gods and demons, and yet consult the modern
systems of knowing. The Mariner’s systems of knowing seem ill-equipped to deal with the
sea, and hence he retreats into the mythic.
The mythic is at the heart of the tale’s ecological uncanny because the older forms of
knowing, which may involve religion, superstition and older beliefs, often converge upon the
“modern.” Then, the Mariner’s experience at sea demands a return to older forms of thought,
and thus literally, scrambles his perceptions. As Samuel Weber proposes, the uncanny of
experience presupposes only a partial surmounting of the archaic modes of thought (Weber

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1973: 1108). For the Mariner, there is no such surmounting: instead, he is uncertain. Caught
between the modern and the mythic, the Mariner’s perceptional matrix is troubled.
Occurring roughly half-way through the tale, the invocation of the myths of weather,
storms, sea and water, Hayes alters the perceptional matrix of the Mariner, who is of course
troubled. But in the process, Hayes also seeks a mythic order of Nature, a return to theological,
religious and spiritual bases for “reading” Nature. Whether this is tantamount to a different kind
of critique of the modern world, Hayes does not help us decide.

Conclusion: climate graphics

The graphic adaptation of a much-adored poem is demotic ecocriticism. Just as Maus helped move
the Holocaust from the subject of “high” literature or academic discourse into the language of the
“funnies,” or the masses, texts like Hayes’s, or the more serious graphic text, Climate Changed,
enables us to shift the discourse of climate change into the realm of the popular. Graphic texts are,
as critics have argued, literature too. Hillary Chute in particular points out that the medium of the
graphic novel directs us to domains and subjects of extreme import, and in new ways:
I use “graphic narrative,” instead of the more common term “graphic novel,”
because the most gripping works coming out now, from men and women alike,
claim their own historicity even as they work to destabilize standard narratives of
history. Particularly, there is a significant yet diverse body of nonfiction graphic
work that engages with the subject either in extremis or facing brutal experience.
(2008: 92)
Marianne Hirsch presciently asked: “What kind of visual-verbal literacy can respond to the
needs of the present moment?” (2004: 1212). Assuming climate change and eco-disaster are
pressing needs of the present moment, Hayes offers an answer: the graphic medium and its
demanding verbal–visual and critical literacy. I have elsewhere argued that the graphic narrative
in the Indian context “takes the tensions, dilemmas and concerns of traditional IWE (Indian
Writing in English) and discusses these in a popular medium, offering, therefore, not only a
democratizing of forms of socio-political commentary but also a democratizing of the language of
cultural analytics” (2016: 7, emphasis in original).
If climate change has to become a lingua franca of the contemporary social imaginary, it
demands a demotic language. Adapting key texts and recasting them in the language of
popular writing, as Hayes has done with The Rime of the Modern Mariner, might just be the
way to go.

Works cited
Boetzkes, Amanda. “Waste and the Sublime Landscape.” RACAR: revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art
Review 35.1 (2010): 22–31.
Carroll, Siobhan. “The Terror and the Terroir: The Ecological Uncanny in New Weird Exploration
Narratives.” Paradoxa. 28 (2017): 67–89.
Chernela, Janet. “A Species Apart: Ideology, Science, and the End of Life.” The Anthropology of
Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, edited by Genese Marie Sodikoff. Indiana University
Press, 2011, pp. 18–38.
Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies Quarterly.
36.1/2 (2008): 92–110.
Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Fantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’).”
New Literary History 7 (1976): 525–48.
Doyle, Julie. Mediating Climate Change. Ashgate, 2011.

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 The climate of change

Freud, Sigmund. The ‘Uncanny’. Collected Papers. Trans. Joan Riviere. Vol. 4. Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1971.
Galchinsky, Michael. The Modes of Human Rights Literature: Towards a Culture without Borders. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hawkins, Gay and Steven Muecke. “Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste.” Culture and Waste: The
Creation and Destruction of Value, edited by Gay Hawkins and Steven Muencke. Rowman & Littlefield,
2003, pp. ix–1.
Hayes, Nick. The Rime of the Modern Mariner. Jonathan Cape, 2011.
Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. Columbia University Press, 1985.
Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage.” PMLA. 119 (2004): 1209–1215.
Morrison, Susan Signe. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2010.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota
Press, 2013.
Nayar, Pramod K. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History, Critique. Routledge, 2016.
Nayar, Pramod K. “Dystopia, Waste and the Decadent Sublime in Contemporary Culture.” Indian Journal
of English Studies. 54 (2017a): 32–42.
Nayar, Pramod K. Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Precarity, Disaster and the Biopolitical Uncanny. Lexington,
2017b.
Nayar, Pramod K. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. Routledge, forthcoming.
Presto, Jenifer. “The Aesthetics of Disaster: Blok, Messina, and the Decadent Sublime.” Slavic Review. 70.3
(2011): 569–90.
Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester University Press, 2003.
Sodikoff, Genese Marie. “Introduction: Accumulating Absence: Cultural Productions of the Sixth
Extinction.” The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, edited by Genese Marie
Sodikoff. Indiana University Press, 2011, pp. 1–16.
Walcott, Derek. “The Sea Is History.” Collected Poems 1948–1984. Faber and Faber, 1992, pp. 364–67.
Weber, Samuel. “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment.” MLN. 88 (1973): 1102–33.
Yaeger, Patricia. “Trash as Archive, Trash as Enlightenment.” Culture and Waste: The Creation and
Destruction of Value, edited by Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003,
pp. 103–16.

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 3
ECO CHURCHES, ECO
SYNAGOGUES, ECO
HOLLYWOOD
21st-century practical responses to
Lynn White, Jr.’s and Andrew
Furman’s 20th-century readings of
environments in crisis

CA Cranston

Raising the red flag

In 1942, Lynn White, Jr. commented on the relationship between history and religion, saying
that “we stand amid the debris of our inherited religious system” (1942: 156). Later, he was to
carry this thought further, attributing ecological crisis to “the Judeo-Christian dogma of
creation.” Fifty years on, his essay, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” (1967),
remains a compelling, if controversial, example of how readings of semi-historical texts such as the
Bible can direct ideas and behaviour that impact future events. In particular, White points to the
“dogma of creation, which is found in the first clause of all the Creeds” (1206).1

Selective, and exploitative

Time and again, the Biblical evolutionary chronology that appears to peek with the arrival of
man2 sees, in Genesis 1:26 to 1:28, man supposedly given “dominion” over all that was
previously created. That one word “dominion” appears, historically, to justify man’s God-
given relationship with the world. This has conveniently, and catastrophically, led to a belief
that humans “are superior to nature”; and that we are “contemptuous of it, willing to use it for
our slightest whim” (White 1967: 1206). There are an estimated 930,243 words (in the King
James Bible);3 this kind of disproportionate emphasis has prompted academic theologians such
as Richard Bauckham to ask “Why have we placed so much weight on three short passages
when Chapters 38–39 of the Book of Job are the longest passages in the Bible about the non-
human creation?” (2010: 38). (Indeed, why have we ignored Genesis 6:6: God “was sorry that
he had made man on earth”?). Bill McKibben calls the Book of Job “the first great piece of

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 Eco churches, eco synagogues, eco Hollywood

modern nature writing” (qtd. in Bauckham 2010: 38). Meanwhile, Eric Katz, inspired by
McKibben’s research, suggests a reason for the textual preference of Genesis rather than Job:
“The Lord is reminding Job that humanity was not present when God created the universe.
The world was not created for humanity” (2001: 154; original italics).
In other words, readings of selected Biblical texts have exacerbated the ecological crisis (a)
by being self-serving interpretations of the Torah, and the Old (and New) Testament,4 (b) by
building on those self-serving interpretations, which reinforce Western thinking (specifically
the marriage and rise of science and technology in the West) and (c) by applying – and
justifying via Biblical sources – anthropocentric interpretations that have had little regard for
the organic world, its creatures, and the biosphere.
White’s essay elides differences between the Christian and Jewish Old Testament;5 its
concern lies mainly with specific readings embedded in the language of the creation creed,
common to what he calls the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. Consequently, the second half of
this chapter looks at the Jewish aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition. There we turn our
attention to Andrew Furman’s ecocritical essay, “No Trees Please, We’re Jewish” (2000), a
title that promises to be a woeful endorsement of the charges levied by White. So, too,
Furman’s startling comment that “Jewish American fiction writers in this century [20th] have,
by and large, created a literature that either ignores, misrepresents, or, at its most extreme,
vilifies the natural world” (4).

Assessing the audience: religious responsibility

White states that “since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also
be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not” (1967: 1207). He calls for us to
“rethink our axioms” (1204). Since his death in 1987, indications of axiom rethinking include
the rise of environmental movements in Christian settings, the very settings that bear the
brunt of White’s criticism. Richard Bauckham cites the Evangelical Environmental Network,
Plant with Purpose, the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies, the Evangelical
Ecologist blog, and the cross-cultural ecological ministry, A Rocha (2010: 208–9). He notes
that indeed, the church (let us add also synagogue) is a “largely untapped resource” for getting
the environmental message across. On 27 January 2016, A Rocha launched the eco church
project at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, UK. A Rocha is in partnership with Christian Aid,
which is chaired by Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams spoke
at St Paul’s about the “tectonic shift in the Christian mind”; in the changing “DNA of our
churches”; of churches having the “leverage to bring about change that is good for all of us”.
White, who claimed that “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has
seen” (1205), would have been cheered to hear Williams urge the church to be “faithful to
the wider creation” (Eco church launch 2016).

Prefacing some difficulties for ecocritical exegesis: translation, and

translating values
Lynn White, Jr.’s article has been “rightly criticized as overly simplistic” (Burbery 2012: 196)
and found to be “deceptively simple but profound” (Nelson 2016). It stirred detractors and
concessionists, among them biblical scholars Moncrief (1970); Santmire (1985), and Habel et
al. (2011). It stimulated discussion about embedded hierarchical dualisms where historical
prejudices of classic civilisation are carried through into Christianity (Bookless 2014); it
energised and broadened (eco)feminist positions by interrogating the conceptual apparatus of

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sexism, naturism and speciesism (Plumwood 1993). And, conversely, it brought out those
who thought the concern of the Bible was not with the organic world, but with faith, social
justice issues, and human history (Derr 1973). Indeed, that environmental movements are
open to charges of anti-humanism (Derr 1992).
In the jargon of yesteryear, we could say that the Bible is a contested text. It is also rich
ecocritical territory. Lawrence Buell notes that those opening chapters in the Bible “blamed
as the root cause of western technodominationism” also “call attention to the antiquity and
durability of environmental discourse” (2005: 1). Those in the humanities are well aware of
the foundational importance of Biblical, Roman and Hellenistic pantheons in informing the
literature, past and current, of the English-speaking world. Whether the Bible is perceived
of as a metaphysical text, as is the case with Australian farmer poet Les Murray (who
dedicates all his work “To the glory of God”); or – as in the case of philosopher poet,
Judith Wright – as a prodigious but secular text, a work of art,6 Westernised Christian
readers are exposed to Biblical ideas and allusions without necessarily having read the
Biblical text (though they have probably seen the movie). In fact, few are able to read the
primary text except in translation.
Take David Bookless’s point, above, regarding the historical prejudices of classic civilisa-
tion. He demonstrates how the translation of the Hebrew phrase nishmat chayyim (‫שַמת ַחִּיים‬ ְׁ ‫)ִנ‬
suffers as a result of translation and of Greek dualistic thinking. For whereas God blows “the
breath of life” into Adam as well as into animals and birds (Genesis 2:7; 2:19), the King James
version and older Christian translations:
conceal this by translating the phrase “living soul” for humans and “living creature”
for animals, but the Hebrew is identical. The Hebraic biblical worldview integrated
material and spiritual reality but in contrast Greek philosophy, which heavily
influenced translation and interpretation, was deeply dualistic.
(Bookless 2014: 2)
Assuming that Bookless is correct, the above translation reveals the values of its translator,
values that are pre-existing, cultural and self-interested. The value hierarchies that follow
include an assumption that the soul exists, that humans have souls, but that animals do not.7
Hence, the idea of the soul’s existence has had long-term ethical consequences for non-
human creatures. (The idea that women, like animals, do not have souls (and other
misquotations and mistranslations) is discussed in Nolan’s “The Myth of Soulless Women,”
(1997).) The preceding recalls an earlier observation, that for White the ecological crisis stems
from self-serving translations of the Hebrew and Old Testament texts. So that although Rabbi
Yogi Robkin (who can read Hebrew) presses the point that “only the human being [is]
created with a divine soul,” he reasserts the humanimal’s dualistic existence – for without the
soul, Robkin argues (quoting Ecclesiastes, 3:19), “the superiority of man over beast is nought,
for all is vanity” (Robkin 2018).
As Bookless implies, the value-laden concept of the soul has proven useful in setting up
hierarchical dualisms. It does so by furthering speciesist, sexist, racist – Otherness discourses –
dualisms which are absolutely contrary to holistic, ecologic connectedness. So too, the
possession of speech can be divisive; it can be used to discriminate between what has value
(i.e. humans have speech) and what has not (Derr 1992: Ch. II). White’s concern is with the
application of anthropocentric interpretations of the Bible as justifications for disregarding the
health of the organic world.
One Old Testament story, an animal studies parable you might say, offers a critique of
anthropocentric legitimations of superiority through the device of anthropomorphism. It is

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 Eco churches, eco synagogues, eco Hollywood

the story of Balaam, the diviner, so-called because God speaks through him. Balaam,
however, is shown to be less numinous than the donkey he rides. When the donkey refuses
to move because there’s an angel in her path, Balaam beats her. It’s only when the donkey is
given the power of speech and rebukes Balaam that Balaam, too, sees the angel. If we
entertain the idea that possession of a soul and the power of speech is proof of humanity’s
claim to superiority, we must ask what is being suggested in this text when a donkey can see
an angel; can act as an intermediary for the Lord’s voice and, critically, is deemed worthier of
being spared from the Angel’s sword than is Balaam? (Numbers 22:21–32).8 Texts champion
values and moral equivalences (or not) that, unexamined, can impact significantly on the
nature-culture world.9 According to Greg Garrard, one of the key challenges for future
ecocriticism is its relationship with animal studies. Another is “understanding and translating
native naturecultures” [my italics], given that value-embedded tropes in a Western worldview
are likely to be understood differently in different geographies (Garrard 2012: 203).

Further questions of value: ecocriticism and assessing unfamiliar, and

ancient, landscapes
Biblical landscapes and seascapes are necessarily representative. Wilderness, famines (desertifi-
cation), plagues (invasive species), floods – suffer from contextual colouring, and risk being
rendered metaphorically by critics with little or no knowledge of Middle Eastern environ-
ments or ecology.10 Then again, this is what ecocriticism does: it examines “the relationship
between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xix). Roder-
ick Nash claims the portrayal of “wilderness as a cursed land” is pervasive in the Old and
New Testaments (Nash 1989: 91); Robert Leal holds that there is a “widespread biblical
attitude” to wilderness as “the realm of chaos, lawlessness and evil” (qtd. in Bauckham 2010:
103). The negative values ascribed here to wilderness tropes demonstrate how the natural
world has been translated and interpreted through foundational texts that are instrumental to
Western thinking. Biblical vestiges inform aesthetics, civilisation, and value responses to the
biological and geological world, a world that is constantly shifting. Similarly, White notes
“All forms of life modify their contexts” (1203). And, as with the polysemic Biblical texts, it
follows that the organic world is subjected to multiple interpretations as a result of lived and
textual influences. The connotations of “wilderness” in a Middle Eastern context might, in an
Oceanic context, denote “sacred space.” Bauckham insists that not only wilderness (an
imagined desert) but also forests are perceived as “wild nature” in the Bible (116). This
interplay between culture (human productions such as text) and representations of the organic
world is again the remit of “ecocriticism.” Ecocriticism is here additionally defined as
criticism of the creative arts, consciously driven by current real-world responses to environ-
mental crises. Ecocriticism apprehends the arts through chemical integers – CO2, NaC1,
PCBs, CFCs11 – their very excess the product of exploitative and negative values acted upon
the natural world. The ecocritic acknowledges conscious anthropocentricism in the critiquing
process and, since White’s critical approach to the Judeo-Christian impact on ecology, the
passage of time has produced collections such as The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology
(2016), essays such as Joan Latchaw’s “Shudder for the Covenant Broken” (2018), and
Timothy J. Burbery’s “Ecocriticism and Christian Literary Scholarship,” which finds
common ground in the “inherent goodness of Creation” (2012: 189). Burbery proposes
“ecocriticism as a viable theory for Christian scholars” (189) and addresses White’s criticism
with a volte-face, suggesting that Christian scholarship can enrich ecocriticism (190). Clearly,
the clergy has not been deaf to entreaties such as White’s.12

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 CA Cranston

Raising the green flag: introducing the concept of eco churches

The eco church concept originated in 1983, the initiative of A Rocha,13 an international
NGO that is “intentionally international” with missions in 20 countries. A Rocha (Portu-
guese for “The Rock” – a replacement of the symbolic with the material and organic)
advertises its concerns consonantly, as “Christian, conservation, community, cross-cultural,
and cooperation”. Significantly, it aims to change the anthropocentrism of church culture, in
order to take into account “the wider creation”. Its logo, “Conservation and Hope”,
demonstrates resistance to apocalyptic readings of the environment. “Hope” – a faith-based
trope14 – is supported by research and science, with a number of A Rocha’s directors
employed in the environmental sciences, but volunteering under a Christian framework.15
In 2015, A Rocha established two eco church projects in Australia, both in New South
Wales: Capernwray, in the Southern Highlands, and Tahlee, Port Stephens, a para church
organisation supporting the work of churches.

“Tahlee Centre for creation care”, NSW, Australia

I’m at Tahlee to see if and how Biblical interpretations and practice have changed since White’s
pointed disapproval of Westernised thinking and its ensuing ecological damage. It’s summer 2018,
and I’m “ground truthing,”16 checking out the physical side of A Rocha’s website, walking the
ground on the lookout for signs of creation care. Aerial images of Tahlee’s 170-acre secluded
settlement show it to be neatly organised amidst native and ornamental trees. A rectangular
swimming area bites into the waters of the Karuah estuary that lies within the Port Stephens–Great
Lakes Marine Park. Off-site but online, I’ve learned that historically, the environmental impact of
this modest settlement is Australia writ small. It was here, in 1824, that the Australian Agricultural
Company (AA Co.) laid its foundations, the result of a grant from the British Parliament, entitling it
to a million acres for a million pounds (Bairstow 2003).
It is contextually ironic, then, that in his essay White should signal the technological advance of
the plough as the tool that “profoundly changed” humans’ relation to the soil, stating “[f]ormerly
man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature” (1205). Asking rhetorically “What
did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment?” (1205), White questions the
commonly held position at that time, that humans were supreme and “no item had any purpose save
to serve man’s purposes.” This appears to have been the mindset of the 19th-century coloniser in
Australia. Not only was the impact of the plough on Australia’s light top soil a contributing factor in
soil erosion and drought, but the axe cut swathes through the NSW forests (described as “intermin-
able” by AA Co.’s Commissioner Robert Dawson (qtd. in Bonyhady 1998: 76)). Forests were
transformed into pasture for the Company’s importation of sheep and then cattle. Although the head
office of AA Co. long ago shifted to Brisbane, the company still operates 18 cattle stations, or
400,000 cattle – human food and goods resources – throughout Australia (Australian Agricultural
Company n.d.).
But as I said, I’m ground truthing; the company has moved on, the grounds have changed
hands several times, beginning with what was originally Worimi Country.17 I’m here to meet
Tahlee’s director, Reverend John Anderson. I park up and notice that there are Nissan huts as
well as Grade 2 listed buildings. I am ambivalently fond of Nissan huts, having lived in similar
corrugated half-moons on military bases and at the migrant camp at Altona (Victoria) as a Ten
Pound Pom. Sure enough, the photos in the main hall inform me that I am encountering the
vernacular remnants of the Greta Army Camp, built during World War II. After the war, the
camp was assigned to the Department of Immigration, which went on to process thousands of

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migrants. The buildings, auctioned off in 1980, were transported from Greta to Tahlee –
irrefutable proof of social and material recycling in action. Reception, located behind the
proscenium of the transported Greta camp movie theatre, raises funds for the mission by
offering holiday and conference accommodation, history tours, and English language training
by TESOL accredited teachers.
John walks me up to where morning tea is held, a ballroom in a Grade 2 listed building, its
pine-clad interior replaced after a white ant invasion. Rainwater tank levels are down to the
bottom rungs. Under fans, beside open windows, staff and students share food and the
morning’s lesson. John offers up a prayer for rain. The students are primarily Asians, here for
the three-month TESOL term. Mostly urbanised youth from wealthy families, they are open
to the anxieties of being in a country that Big Notes the dangers to humans of even its
smallest creatures. And in rural Australia there’s no escaping “nature.” John’s wife, Jacinta,
recounts the ordeal of a student, fresh from her flat on the 18th floor in Hong Kong, and her
response to antipodean moths pummelling night lights. According to the CSIRO, there are
more than 20,000 moth species in Australia, but such moments probably aren’t the right time
to drive home a lesson in diversity. The moths’ phototaxis contrasts with what Jacinta calls
“nature blindness” among the students. Understandably they seem initially disconnected from
the wilder community of their unknown landscape. Which is why they take the unit “Living
with Dangerous Neighbours,” its textual cue taken from the New Testament, Matthew
22:39, “love thy neighbour as thyself.” Students go bush, make campfires, and learn about the
littoral zone of the Karuah, the relationship between tides and the moon, the habitats of
jellyfish, blue-ring octopuses, sharks. They learn about the creatures of the air and those that
creepeth upon the earth – from frantic moths to fearless goannas (Varanus) strolling
predatorily towards the camp’s chicken shed.
Teachers utilise Bible stories in the classroom to instruct in grammar and vocabulary.
Outside the classroom, it is hoped that the environmental encounter confronts and transforms
fear of the unknown into an appreciation of the Community of Creation. John’s handout,
“The Biblical Basis of Creation Care”, references Psalm 104, the second longest biblical
account of non-human creation, after Job (Bauckham 2010: 64). Animals, their habitats, their
behavioural characteristics, are presented alongside a “pervasive sense of the world as God’s
gift to all living creatures” (67). The students’ anxiety regarding their place in nature bears
little resemblance to man’s assumed dominion over “every living thing that moveth over the
earth.” There’s the account of one Japanese student’s understanding of neighbourly equiva-
lence, when she attempted to engage a red-bellied black snake in a non-aggressive pact,
repeating reassuringly “You peace, me peace.”
Jacinta, born in Bolivia to Australian missionary parents, is a passionate bird-watcher.
Concerned about biomagnification in the food chain, she is in domestic negotiation with
John about how to get rid of the Tahlee mice. Mice are an introduced species with no natural
predator, reaching plague proportions and decimating crops, on average every four years
(“The Bizarre Mystery of Aussie Mouse Plagues” 2015). John, who lived through house mice
plagues in Humpty Doo, in the Northern Territory, in this instance tends towards a less
forgiving view of creation care. I ask John how Christianity, as practised at Tahlee mission,
intersects with conservation. John, a preacher for a number of years in Queensland, is an
agriculturist and an agronomist. With Oxfam, he worked with Punjabi farmers in Pakistan
under the Green Revolution (also known as the Third Agricultural Revolution), planting
high-yielding varieties of quick-growing dwarf rice. Then, in East Indonesia, he worked on a
project involving Brahman Cattle (Bos Indus) with the World Bank. There he discovered that
local farmers relied on the straw from the tall rice for their cattle. And that the tall rice could

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 CA Cranston

survive monsoonal floods that decimated the dwarf varieties. Shaking his head, John acknowl-
edges that disconnects between Christian intentions and ecological practices do happen,
referring to his part in it as “first-hand knowledge of the folly, if not danger, of isolating
aspects of the environment” (23 February 2018).

Connecting the local: small mob motivation

Contextually, White’s “Historical Roots” essay springs also from the Green Revolution period,
when technology transfer, irrigation, pesticides, and hybridized seed distribution contributed to a
worldwide increase in agricultural production and biotechnology in an effort to offset the spike in
starvation due to human population increase. John was also involved in the breeding programmes of
triticale, a hybrid of rye and wheat. It was during this period of high activity that Rachel Carson
recorded the backlash resulting from large-scale applications of agricultural pesticides on food crops
(a case of ecological damage in pursuit of social justice) in Silent Spring (1962). The title refers to the
projected scenario of chemical bioaccumulation in the food chain and eventual extinction of bird
life. As John Anderson notes, there’s danger in “isolating aspects of the environment.” In confirming
its anthropocentrism, the church admits to a creation care that previously isolated the human from
the environment. Influential figures such as Dr Rowan Williams along with the eco church
movement actively teach an ecological consciousness, to be “faithful to the wider creation.”
Tahlee hopes to do this on a practical level by developing a sanctuary for koalas, which are
currently diminishing due to road kill, bushfire, and the spread of the chlamydia virus. The material
evidence of Tahlee’s attempts to assume responsibility and live lightly on the earth includes the
installation of 100 solar panels (a savings of over AUS$60,000 per annum, says John); 20 rainwater
tanks of varying capacity; grey water and septic tank irrigation; food waste recycling to an off-site pig
farm; and their own timber mill. Students’ technological experience is restricted by default due to
poor satellite communication. They share a smart phone to talk to parents and their multi-media
experience is limited to a video clip on how to operate a vacuum cleaner.
At the end of our conversation we return to John’s interpretation of Genesis 1:26 to 1:28
and man’s supposed dominion over all that was previously created. John chooses the language
of Tahlee’s predecessors, the Worimi, preferring their phrase “custodians” of the land.
Whereas indigenous lore/law arises from a worldview of interconnections between theism,
humans, non-humans, plants, the topography, the biome – the cosmos, Tahlee is a Christ-
centred community, applying theoretical and practical aspects of Christian teaching to their
immediate environment. It is a good example of small mob motivation.

A global response from the city of 0.17 square mile

In his 1967 essay, Lynn White, Jr. wrote that “What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of
the man-nature relationship” (1206). Given that, it is fair to say that there are significant attitudinal
shifts, as with the founding of the A Rocha eco church movement in 1983 (Blanch 2017), which
takes up the appeal for a caring relation with “the wider creation.” Similarly, an accessible Christian
overview of ecological disquiet on a global scale is to be found in Pope Frances’s Encyclical Letter,
“Laudato Si”, subtitled “on care for our common home”.
Importantly, the Encyclical Letter (published in 2015) builds on the concerns of previous
Popes, thus demonstrating a sustained concern with ecological issues. The Letter cites Pope
Paul VI’s 1971 warning that “[d]ue to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs
the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation” (Apostolic Letter,
pp. 416–17, qtd. in Frances “Laudato Si,” p. 4). Included also is Paul’s earlier speech to the

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United Nations, stressing “the urgent need for a radical change in the conduct of humanity”
(Apostolic Letter 1970, p. 833, qtd. in Frances pp. 4, 5). Pope John Paul II, in 1988, urges
respect, not only for the human person, but also for “the nature of each being and of its
mutual connection in an ordered system” (Encyclical Letter, p. 559, qtd. in Frances p. 6).
And respect for the environment, according to Benedict XVI, can only be reclaimed by
“eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting
models of growth” (Address to the Diplomatic Corps 2007, p. 73, qtd. in Frances p. 6).
These Papal readings that address the lived world are commensurate with environmentalist
concerns and signal the need for ethical human agency. Benedict’s statement that “the book of
nature is one and indivisible” goes on to include the environment, family, social relations and so
on; nature/culture boundaries begin to fade in his warning that “the deterioration of nature is
closely connected to the culture which shapes human coexistence” (Caritas in Veritate 2009,
p. 73, qtd. in Frances p. 6). The comment that “[s]ince the roots of our trouble are so largely
religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious” (White 1967: 1207) is being met by a
growing number of religious communities who are engaging, through action and education.18
Though, in an echoing of White’s title, in what appears to be a papal riposte, “The Human
Roots of the Ecological Crisis” (Ch.3) returns agency to the human collective, not just the
religious. The role of the Church today is “not only to remind everyone of the duty to care for
nature, but at the same time ‘she [the Church] must above all protect man-kind from self-
destruction’” (Benedict 2009, p. 687; Francis, p. 58). Here, the religious rationale behind the
ecological politics coincides beneficially towards what Eric Katz calls a blending of “anthropo-
centric self-interest of humans with the ecocentric interests of entities in the natural order”
(2001: 16).

Typology and plurality: ultra-orthodoxy and liberal Ashkenazim

The passages above are from a Roman Catholic encyclical (public record). It would be
egregious to assume that all Christians are Roman Catholics just because they share common
texts. Similarly, a corrective of Judaic representation is required for the second part of this
chapter, with its enquiry into the taken-for-granted “Judeo-Christian” nexus. The title of
Andrew Furman’s “No Trees Please, We’re Jewish”, an ecocritical essay on Jewish-American
writers and their preference for urban settings, assumes a homogenous Judaism. Furman does,
however, point out that the writers he discusses are mostly Ashkenazic (of Eastern European
origin), descended from the rationalist, or Mitnagged, tradition (51).
Differences within Ashkenazic communities, both Israeli and diaspora Jews, were high-
lighted recently when ultra-Orthodox parties reneged on the 2016 plan to end apartheid at the
Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem (Sherwood 2017). The plan would have allowed men and
women to pray together, removed the ban on women praying aloud, reading from Torah,
wearing the tallit (prayer shawl) and other perceived male-only apparatus.
The Netanyahu cabinet decision to maintain the status quo banning women from the Kotel
was, in effect, a ban on Jewish diaspora communities such as Reform and Liberal Jews. This is
because Liberal Jews follow the secular social move towards inclusivity and egalitarianism,
allow interfaith marriages, recognise Jewish descent not only through the mother, but also
through the father; carry out bat mitzvah (female), as well as bar mitzvah, ceremonies;
recognise mixed- and same-sex marriages performed by male or female rabbis, and (as with
modern nuns) have a relaxed dress code (see Rigal and Rosenberg 2004). Although it is no
longer possible to identify a Jew through the grammar of garments,19 Orthodoxy, or
Rabbinic Judaism, adheres to a code of conduct for all aspects of life, the halachah laws,

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codified in the Middle Ages (Goldberg and Rayner 1987: 10, 11). Consequently, the
imagology of “a Jew” is often that of the Orthodox individual dressed in the Hebraic
vernacular of black, who considers Liberal Jews “to be second-class Jews who ordain
women and gay people and are overly inclusive toward converts and interfaith marriages.”
(Sherwood 2017).

“People of the book”: a text-centred worldview

All observant Jews, however, identify as “People of the Book” (‫עם הספר‬, Am HaSefer).20 This
can be problematic when considering religious interpretations of the “man-nature relation-
ship” (White 1967: 1206), especially given Furman’s comment that “the natural world rarely
muscles its way into the margins of the Jewish-American imagination” (49). The “People of
the Book” have declared sides. The Book – the Torah – is regarded as proof of God’s special
Covenant with Israel (Goldberg and Rayner 1987: 18). And as Creator of the universe “God
is necessarily different from, and greater than, any of its parts” (237). Says Furman, Jewish
text-centredness has ensured Jewish survival, but has “bolstered a Jewish ethos wary, if not
downright hostile, to the natural world” (52). That statement, along with the incident at the
Kotel where women continue to be segregated, demonstrates ecofeminists’ contention that
“women’s and nature’s liberation are a joint project” (Tong 1998: 247). And that worldview,
given its egalitarianism and pluralism, is why UK Reform/Liberal Judaism, not UK Ortho-
doxy, has initiated the eco synagogue movement.
Another potential sticking point in motivating a Jewish response to environmental crisis is
the Law, derived from oral and written Torah. Furman goes so far as to say that from the
Talmudic era Jews have been compelled “to regard the natural world as a dangerous threat to
the Law that has sustained them” (54). A solution to the impasse might be to emphasise those
Laws that identify environmental issues, so that duty to the Law rather than biophilia shapes
environmental response. Those other books (the Mishnah, the Gemara) contain extensive
critiques of the Law and divergent opinions stand side by side (Rayner and Hooker 1978: 10).
Thus, they offer interpretive flexibility, but with the codicil that flexibility be confined within
the unshakeable belief in the Covenant of the Torah. It follows, then, that a Jewish response
to “the natural world” can never be ecocentric, “it is a theocentric view” (Katz 2001: 164;
Goldberg and Rayner 1987: 307).21
A theocentric view – a God-centred view of nature at one remove – intervenes, like text and
film, as a distancing mechanism, a protective barrier between the self and the “threat” of nature.
For instance, the perceived threat of nature-immersion can be seen by critiquing the autumn
festival of the week-long Sukkot. Temporary outdoor huts, roofed by palms, festooned with fruit,
symbolise the wilderness experience of the slaves freed from Egypt. The sukkah is a kind of ersatz
camping experience except one does not have to sleep outdoors if it is cold, or if it rains.

Shifting focus: Hollywood, ecocriticism and ecomedia

The editors of this “Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication” collection state that the
“new emphasis in ecocriticism indicates a potential rapprochement between ecocriticism and
environmental communication studies” and that the objective “is to reinforce the common concerns
and methodologies of the sibling disciplines”. To that end, this section extends Furman’s premise
regarding resistance to natural world representation in the Jewish-American imagination by
investigating how that statement holds up when applied to environmental communication in the
visual arts.

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For instance, cinematography is well represented by Jewish creativity. In Motion Picture

Biographies (2015), John Cones reiterates his early statement published in Who Really
Controls Hollywood (1996) that a “small group of politically liberal, not very religious
Jewish males of European heritage” controls Hollywood (3). The observation that the
Jewish males are “not very religious” (how does he know?) suggests Cones’s disappointment
with Jews who are not performing to type (i.e. the observable rituals and dress of Orthodox
Jewry). Twenty years on, a similar, less judgemental, observation is made in Lisa Klug’s
tongue-in-cheek article, “Who said Jews run Hollywood?” (2016). It is not this study’s aim
to argue either way who “controls” or “runs” Hollywood; it is enough to establish that the
Jewish contribution to the industry is sizeable, allowing opportunities to influence envir-
onmentally-themed contributions. But according to media critic Phil Hoad, Hollywood
films appear unsuited as the medium for popularising environmental concerns (and motivat-
ing community). Hoad notes: Hollywood – “loyal to its eco-sceptic audiences in middle
America – has always been frosty towards environmental movies” (2017). Hoad’s and
Furman’s observations hold water when considered alongside the “7 must-see films” from
the 2017 Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC (D’estries 2017), where no
Jewish directors were represented;22 and the 27th Annual Washington Jewish Film Festival
(17–28 May 2017),23 where directors are Jewish, but thematic concern lies primarily with
history and cultural identity.24

Jewish Hollywood and ecology

The contribution of diaspora Jews in raising environmental awareness through the medium of film
does not look promising. Nevertheless, Soylent Green (1973), set in 2022 and directed by Richard
Fleischer, portrays the elderly Solomon Roth, seeking to escape a degraded world in exchange for a
good death, via assisted suicide. That is, to die watching a film featuring wildlife and landscapes that
haven’t existed for decades. In the closing chapter of his life, Solomon chooses the comfort of visual
representations of the organic world rather than “The Book”. The final revelation is apocalyptic:
“Soylent Green” refers to pellets fed to humans in a resource-depleted world. Ecological disconnect
within the film – the loss of the haptic natural world now reduced to representation, the rise of
denatured humans transformed into industrial commodities – is over-ridden by horror, with the
realisation that (quote): “Soylent Green is people.” The film is a graphic turn on Pope Paul VI’s 1971
warning that “[d]ue to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying
it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation” (Apostolic Letter, pp. 416–417 qtd. in Frances
“Laudato Si” 4).
Two years later, again tapping into the apparently horrific idea that, outside of their
constructed environment, humans are merely food,25 Stephen Spielberg directed Jaws (1975).
Displacing alleged human dominion over the animal kingdom and transferring so-called
human traits (intelligence, vengeance, object recognition) to an Other animal, the great
white shark, the film stirred up inadvertent, real-time, indiscriminate killing of sharks,
regardless of type (Chapple 2005: 3). Described as “the piscine whipping-boy of individuals
pandering to shark-attack paranoia”, with poor survivorship following capture, poached for
jaws, teeth, fins for the black market, and suffering habitat degradation, the Red List authors
recommend the great white (Carcharodon carcharias) “be removed from international game fish
record lists, and needs consistently rational and realistic treatment by entertainment and news
media to counter its notoriety and inflated market value” (Fergusson et al. 2009). The
response confirms the film’s impact on the public, but demonstrates a misalliance between
conservationists and Hollywood. Certainly not a “green” movie.

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Also casting doubt on the effectiveness of film in general or rather, the effectiveness of the
director to intentionally communicate environmental issues in a persuasive and motivational
manner, is John Parham (2016).26 Parham does, however, acknowledge the power of the
documentary, crediting Academy Award Winner An Inconvenient Truth (2006), directed by Davis
Guggenheim,27 with being “one of the most iconic green media texts” (190). He also acknowledges
the critics Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s “scathing analysis” regarding contradictions between Al
Gore’s rhetoric and his over-sized energy footprint (2007: 125, qtd. in Parham 2016: 197). The
disjunction between saying and doing makes for bad press, name-calling, and sets back the
environmental movement (Parham 2016: 124). Parham contends that environmentalists are engaged
in forms of rhetoric “that don’t engage the public” (122). In order for environmentalism “to be a
popular movement, it has no choice other than to engage with, in the hope of re-shaping, popular
media and popular culture” (Parham 2016: 266). In effect, this is what Fergusson et al. suggest above
in relation to films like Jaws viewed as entertainment, but requiring corrective media engagement
about the real-life counterparts.
The same would seem to apply to animated critters. As Parham’s chapter “The ‘Hope’ of Green
Animation” intimates, the transformative politics of animation exceed the expectation of narrative
realities. Animation allows the cute and funny to present their own stories in engaging ways that
seldom alienates its audience in the manner of environmentalists armed with data. Furthermore,
green animation addresses two audiences, parent and child, with the child potentially inducted into
green messages as a result of repetitive viewing (primed for future green thinking), drawn into
animated representations of the world through colour, song, humour, a world where a child can
identify with the narrative joys and fears of an other-than-human, battling the environmental
disasters of its particular niche. And there’s the attraction of quirky animated characters, be they
deer, penguins, dolphins, clownfish or even a reconstructed male, the great white shark, named
Bruce, in Finding Nemo (2003, co-directed by Lee Unkrich). But even animation cannot escape
environmental backlash – this time against clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris/percula) over-harvested for
aquariums; again, hardly a “green” response (Militz and Foale 2017).

Becoming animated: green media and Jewish tzedakah

Parham balances animation’s ability to imagine ecological futures by looking at the actual-world
context of its cultural production, the major animation studios, and their ideologies (230). He
singles out Michael Eisner, who headed Walt Disney Studios between 1984 and 2005. Eisner is
credited with releasing Disney from its right-leaning mainstream politics by “instigat[ing] an
overt, pragmatic, and educational engagement with environmentalism” and co-founding the
Environmental Media Association (EMA) in 1989 (Parham 2016: 231), along with Cindy and
Alan F. Horn. The EMA encourages green production, public environmental awareness, and
presents awards for productions with the lowest footprint. Notably, these projects are educa-
tional and pragmatic; they reveal their Mitnaggedism, or rationalist roots, rather than the
“Jewish-American imagination” that Furman discusses. They are materially green28 and
uphold the tzedakah (‫ )צדקה‬or righteous behaviour tradition. This is one tradition that lends
itself to engaging Jewish responses to environmental crises through “The Book.”
Alan Horn, EMA co-founder, worked with Fox (The Simpsons Movie in 2007 and Avatar in
2009, though Fox “avoids any real engagement with green issues” (Booker 2010: 124, 132, qtd.
in Parham 2016: 231). Like Eisner, he too served as chair at Disney, in 2012. Admittedly, it’s
cosy. Cones’s criticism that a “politically liberal, not very religious Jewish males . . . control[s]
Hollywood” (Cones 1996: 3) misses the mark in the case of Steven Spielberg, who identifies as
Orthodox. Spielberg, along with David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenburg co-founded

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DreamWorks (SKG) in 1994. Katzenburg, who was brought to Disney (again by Eisner), was
chair at Disney from 1984 to 1994, the year when The Lion King brought the ecological mantra
“the circle of life” into popular culture. The musical track engaged adult and child, as did
humour, with a bit of Zen thrown in. The co-animators, Robert Minkoff and Roger Allers,
were Jewish.
The impact of leonine animation on real-world responses is critiqued by David Bennett, who
questions the public outcry in 2015 over the killing of Cecil, an African lion, by Walter Palmer, a
dentist. Why this one lion should be so mourned he attributes to “childhood linked memories” of
The Lion King and Madagascar (2005, a DreamWorks Animation). Just as animation anthropomor-
phised Simba, Western media ascribed “a distinct personality” to Cecil, but “none portray[ed] him
hunting, eating prey, fighting or in any situation that could cast him in a negative light” (Bennett
2017). This is a reversal of the Jaws response but is still a call for responsible media reporting (as per
Fergusson et al. 2009). Western ownership of Cecil’s image contrasts with the unsentimental
response from “most Zimbabwean communities [who] were left wondering what the fuss was all
about” (Mutori 2015, qtd. in Bennett 2017).

From the representational to the material space of an eco synagogue

By extending Furman’s imaginative terrain, the text, to the imaginative terrain of cinemato-
graphy we see that the man–nature world is there, it just isn’t always green. Furman attributes
the preference for urban settings in writing to the immigrant Jew experience of making a
living in “the gritty streets of New York and Chicago” (50), hence its frequency in work by
Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Isaac Babel, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and
Philip Roth.29 Furman suggests the urban focus “merely betrays the sociological realities that
have defined their experience” (50). The same could be said for diaspora Anglo-Jewry
experiences of migration to London in the late 19th century.30 The entanglement of Judaism,
nature, and conurbation finds its practical translation at the urban eco synagogue, Finchley
Progressive, in London. It exemplifies the back-handed assertion that non-Orthodox move-
ments place “[e]mphasis of actions over belief system” (Frank 2012).
Finchley Progressive Synagogue (FPS) is situated on a battle-axe block off a side-street in
London, where houses surrender their square-footage gardens to parking space. A security guard
checks incoming cars. It is Shabbat, and a Bar Mitzvot is scheduled at the one-storey 1960s-era
building that holds 350 people. Nature is In Memoria with commemorative rose bushes shouldering
the boundaries of the shul. FPS states that it is founded on Jewish values of tikkun olam (repairing the
world). Inside, there’s a drop-off box for their cold-weather night shelter; there’s a list of items
required for the last of the co-sponsored Syrian families, an initiative of FPS Rabbi Rebecca Birk.
Listed as one of “London’s most influential people”, it was her campaign that persuaded her local
council to take in refugees (Welby 2016). A poster for Mitzvah Day (mitzvah: a commandment;
religious duty) seeks volunteers to work with a local mosque collecting for the food bank and
clearing weeds from the cemetery. Unsurprisingly, tikkun olum refers to social rather than environ-
mental repair of the world. This is because Torah predates global environmental crises and its
halachah laws, codified in the Middle Ages (Goldberg and Rayner 1987: 10, 11), have ossified as
social concern. As Mitzvah Day demonstrates, to act in the interest of society is in line with religious
duty. The shul’s tzedakah confirms a social and community ethos on a par with the socialist principles
of kibbutzim.31 Environmental laws are plentiful,32 but the rereading and application of its precepts is
only recent.
The new Green Team runs a seminar on climate change and clean energy, revealing that
for many, the grasp of environmental issues is rudimentary. Despite information about plastic

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waste in the shul’s magazine Shofar, the morning’s Bar Mitzvah kiddush features large plastic
trays of food purchased from the supermarket. Yet on 30 January 2018, FPS was one of four
synagogues that stepped forward to establish the eco synagogue project.33 Piggy-backing on
the eco church programme, the synagogues invited former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr
Rowan Williams, to speak at the launch.
Joined by their wish for action, the anti-environmental dogma of the “Judeo-Christian”
tradition that Lynn White, Jr. refers to, now emerged as a genuine Judeo-Christian melding
of concerns about the environment.
Because of how recently FPS initiated the programme, it is too early to assess how effective
environmental communication is within the synagogue, though initiatives are in place. The two
main drivers are Prof Adrian Lister, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum, London, and
Michael Lassman, Director of Equality Edge. The harsh responsibility of honouring the command-
ment “Repair the World” with its aleph-bet of catastrophes (Aral Sea; Bhopal; Chernobyl; Dioxin
Cloud; Exxon Valdez) is made humanly bearable in the secular Jewish “Ethics of the Fathers”, with
its implied burden sharing: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you permitted to
cease from doing it” (Pirkei Avot 2:21). So Lister runs beit midrash (adult education) programmes and
delivers lectures at the shul on climate change. Lassman recycles food waste and, leading by example,
washes dishes rather than using plastic. The eco synagogue survey (adapted from the A Rocha eco
church survey to reflect Jewish festivals) includes questions about the integrity of buildings, land,
food purchases, green teaching and preaching, and changing environmental behaviours in the
congregation. Lassman changes at least one aspect of congregational behaviour by banning meat
products in the shul, and is lobbying to change the shul’s energy supplier: small, positive, domestic
changes.
As Liberal Jews who respond to the contemporary world, and as People of the Book whose
“man–nature relationship” is theological and indirect, the application of environmentally themed
Biblical texts as mitzvahs to assist in change might help to bypass congregational resistance to
“environmentalists and their data” as well as forestalling “obstinate displays of inertia” when it
comes to climate change action (Boyce and Lewis 2009: 3, qtd. in Parham 2016: 148).

Conclusion
This chapter presents evidence of a slow movement towards hope – hope in the manner Bill
McKibben means when he makes a distinction between hope that is wishing, and hope that “implies
real willingness to change” (2007: 5). Two essays, Lynn White, Jr.’s “The Historical Roots of our
Ecological Crisis” (1967), and Andrew Furman’s “No Trees Please, We’re Jewish” (2000), provide
the ecocritical benchmarks by which to examine current changes in preaching and practice regarding
the ecological crisis. The rise of action-focused eco churches and eco synagogues goes some way
towards addressing and mitigating White’s 1967 indictment that the crisis has its roots in “the Judeo-
Christian dogma of creation”.
The Hebrew Bible and Old Testament are mother texts informing transnational responses such as
the eco church, “Tahlee” in rural New South Wales, Australia, the eco synagogue, Finchley
Progressive in urban London, and the Hollywood industry. Both church and synagogue are shown
to be theocentric in their approach to the environment, but now are less anthropocentric, with a
wider approach to creation care than at the time of White’s and Furman’s writing. Furman’s overall
indictment of Jewish attitudes towards the organic world introduces the opportunity to compare
small mob motivation with the Jewish contribution in Hollywood, beginning with the myth and
typology of the homogenous Jew. The films discussed reveal their capacity for environmental
backlash, whereas underlying religious obligations such as tzedakah (donations or duties arising from

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ethical obligation) show a preference for real-world influence over representation, as with the
establishment of the Environmental Media Association, and the Goldman Environmental Prize.
Whereas the film industry plays to audiences who form a temporary community and then
disperse, we ask if there might, after all, be hope for the climate-change cause with the rise of
these international (eco)interfaith movements that target and support integrated long-term
communities, rather than the transient Hollywood “masses”. As Bauckham notes, religious
communities (whatever is meant by religious) are a “largely untapped resource” for getting the
environmental message across.

Notes
1 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three major monotheistic religions following the Genesis
creed.
2 “Man” is gender-specific. Eve had not yet arrived on the scene.
3 This word count includes the New Testament. The Five Books of Moses (or the Pentateuch)
contain fewer words, being shorter. See www.artbible.info/concordance/
4 The New Testament is not under sustained discussion because it is not part of the Judeo-Christian
tradition.
5 The creation creed occurs in the Christian Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and Quran. The
Christian Old Testament contains additional books that are not in the Hebrew Bible (the TaNaKh,
an anagram of Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim). Additionally, the canonical order in the Christian Old
Testament is altered, creating further opportunities for differing interpretations.
6 Both poets are contemporaries of Lynn White, Jr. and both are from New South Wales, the state
where this case study took place.
7 Selective reading is evident: The Book of Proverbs states “A righteous man has regard for the soul
of his beast” (12:10).
8 An equivalent story is when an Inuk hunter disrespectfully laughs at a walrus when it speaks, causing
the entire huddle to leave. See Joseph Bruchac, “Understanding the Great Mystery,” pp. 99–104.
(Bruchac’s interpretation differs from mine.)
9 See the anthology The Soul of Nature (1996) for essays from the eco-spirituality movement.
10 Here I should state my reading position as a Westerner brought up in the Middle East.
11 Carbon dioxide, sodium chloride, polychlorinated biphenyl, chlorofluorocarbon: some of the
chemical compounds involved in environmental degradation.
12 Indeed, Nash notes in his “Greening of Religion” chapter that by the 1980s the word “‘ecotheol-
ogy’ had not only become a new word but a compelling world view” (1989: 120).
13 Peter and Miranda Harris from the UK were working at a field study centre in Portugal, on an estuary
threatened by development. They initiated eco congregation projects prior to the eco church initiative.
14 Perhaps “faith-based” is too harsh: Bill McKibben makes a distinction between hope that is wishing,
and hope that “implies real willingness to change” (5). As such his position is closer to White’s
than is Tim Flannery’s, where hope is aligned with technology – the “news of exciting tools in
the making that could help us avoid climatic disaster” (2015). White’s argument considers reliance
on science and technology of little use when addressing the ecology problem given that the problem
is a result of the use of science and technology, saying “I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic
backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology”
(1206). The film Geostorm (2017) perfectly exemplifies technology-fix rebound.
15 For example, Roger Jaensch (natural resource management, wetlands); Jen Schabel (biodiversity);
Anna Radkovic (environmental science); Philip Hughes (ornithology); Stuart Blanch (ecology of
water plants, environmental law); Julia Brown (urban planning, environmental impact assessment);
John Anderson (agricultural scientist, agronomist).
16 The “ground truthing” concept, less tricky than “authenticity”, is explored in Carter 2010.
17 Worimi lands extend over 1500 square miles (Tindale 1974: 201–202) and include the Stockton
Bight Sand Dunes to the North, near Newcastle.
18 “Laudato si” implicitly addresses the kind of charges White makes regarding Judeo-Christian
accounts of Genesis and man’s “dominion” over the earth. See Ch. 2, “The Gospel of Creation,”

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Article 67, p. 49. Indeed, Ch. 3, titled “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” focuses on the
“technocratic paradigm”.
19 Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1967) addresses the dualism still in play at the Kotel; it
tells of a woman who must cross-dress in order to infiltrate the yeshiva to study the Talmud. Filmed
as Yentl (1983).
20 Several Christian denominations also identify with the term.
21 Katz’s response when comparing Judaism and deep ecology is more ambivalent when measured
against his own Jewish and environmental beliefs (164; 165–6).
22 A director’s Jewish affiliation is often included as a driving factor in his or her biography. It is
possible some directors chose not to include that fact.
23 Neither did the “10 [must-see] things” from the 21st UK International Jewish Film Festival
(London Library) include environmental communication as a topic.
24 My Hero Brother (2016) directed by Yonatan Nir, about a group with Down Syndrome travelling in
the Himalayas, and Fanny’s Journey (2016) directed by Lola Doillon, about children fleeing cross-
country from Nazi-occupied Italy, lend themselves to ecocritical investigation but the primary
concern of the directors is with human struggle.
25 See Val Plumwood’s philosophical approach to her encounter with a crocodile, in “Human
Vulnerability and the Experience of Being Prey” (1995), pp. 29–34.
26 Parham engages in thorough examination of the complexities of green media, which this chapter
cannot do justice to.
27 Davis Guggenheim is the son of Jewish producer Charles Guggenheim, who directed the doc-
umentary The Johnstown Flood (1989).
28 As is the Goldman Environmental Prize, or “Green Noble”, an annual award to grassroots
environmental activists from the six geographic regions. Australian farmer Wendy Bowman won it
in 2017, for her stand against Yancoal, in New South Wales. (Hunt 2017).
29 A cursory look at the more than 80 books presented during London Library Jewish Book Week (3–
11 March 2018) shows very little nature muscling in; thematic concentration lies mainly with
national histories and biographies. The exception, a session titled “Gardens of Delight”, showcased
Penelope Lively’s Life in the Garden (2007), and Charlotte Mendelson’s Rhapsody in Green (2016).
30 Although Jews have been settled in England for over three centuries since the Expulsion, almost 150,000
Jew migrants arrived from Russia, Romania and Galacia between 1881 and 1914 (Lipman 1961: 108).
31 To avoid homogenising the Liberal movement as nature-wary, we need only look at the Reform
Kibbutz Lotan in the Negev Desert. Lotan is a member of the Global Ecovillage Network. Like
“Tahlee”, it raises funds through tourism and educational initiatives with a focus on attracting
overseas students. Subtitling itself “Where spirit and earth meet”, the community produces goats’
milk and Marjoul dates. Their Centre for Creative Ecology runs a strict recycling programme:
plastic and tin cans are placed inside discarded tyres and transformed into adobe tyre-bale domes.
Trash becomes somewhere for students to live, to house bird-watchers, to accommodate tourists.
32 For instance, the Fourth Commandment requires rest for livestock as well as humanity on Sabbath
(Exodus 20:10; Deut. 5:14); schmita – that the land rest every seven years (Lev. 25:4); the law bal
tash-chit (do not destroy); the New Year for Trees festival of Tu B’Shevat, the planting of a tree; the
preservation of trees even in wartime (Deut. 20:19); vegetarianism (Gen. 1:29); tza’ar bal’alei chayim,
not causing suffering to animals; Sukkot, formerly agricultural harvesting, and so on.
33 The others are Finchley Reform, New North London–Muswell Hill (United), and Alyth.

Works cited

Film and documentary

An Inconvenient Truth. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, Lawrence Bender Productions, 2006.
Finding Nemo. Directed by Andrew Stanton, Co-directed by Lee Unkrich, Pixar, 2003.
Geostorm. Directed by Dean Devlin, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017.
Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1975.
Soylent Green. Directed by Richard Fleischer, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1973.
The Lion King. Directed by Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers, Walt Disney, 1994.
Yentl. Directed by Barbra Streisand. United Artists, 1983.

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Other media
21st UK International Jewish Film Festival, www.ukjewishfilm.org/festival/21st-uk-international-jewish-
film-festival/ (accessed 14 September 2017).
Arvill, Robert. Man and Environment. Penguin, 1969.
Australian Agricultural Company, www.aaco.com.au/.
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 4
COMMUNICATING
RESISTANCE IN/THROUGH
AN AQUATIC ECOLOGY
A study of K.R. Meera’s The Gospel of
Yudas

Gayathri Prabhu

“A traitor can never sleep” is the pithy and provocative first sentence of K.R. Meera’s novel
The Gospel of Yudas (3), originally published in Malayalam as Yudasinte Suvisesham in 2009,
and translated to English in 2016. The traitor is a former Naxalite (a radical communist)
whose guilt about betraying his colleagues during police interrogation pushes him to a
tortured nomadic life of dredging up corpses from lakes and rivers. Narrated in the first-
person voice of Prema, a young woman whose passion for this social and political outcaste
spans two agonizing decades, the novel is intricately constructed around an aquatic ecology,
the trope of water taking many forms—baptismal, destructive, rehabilitative, and ultimately
redemptive. The image of the unsleeping traitor of the novel’s first sentence extends to his
eternal hunger, and his insatiable thirst, for “the burning inside his body won’t be doused”
even if he immerses himself in water or drowns in alcohol for he would still remain
“intensely conscious” (3). The contrast of drowning and intense consciousness, the watery
submersions that foreground the stirrings of conscience and guilt, propel the protagonists of
the novel through a maze of dense memories and visceral experiences. This chapter makes an
argument to read The Gospel of Yudas as a postcolonial text that engages with the fields of
ecocriticism and environmental communication—for the narrative simultaneously negotiates
state violence and ecological degradation.
Set in the southern and coastal Indian state of Kerala, the novel revolves around Prema and
her love for Das, who insists on the name Yudas (Judas), because he has betrayed his fellow
Naxalites, especially Sunanda, the woman he loved, and caused her brutal death. The novel is
sharply focalized on Prema’s obsession with Yudas, and her scattered encounters with him
over many years, all written in a sparse minimalist style that impactfully locates people in
specific landscapes but allows limited access to the characters’ histories. Yudas is sympathetic
to Prema but cannot reciprocate her love because of his choice to live as a social outcaste on
the run. The resolution of the novel occurs when Prema tracks down Sunanda’s niece,
Sangeeta, who is also an activist doomed to a mysterious violent death like her aunt. Prema

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dives into a gorge and retrieves Sangeeta’s body, which finally becomes her own act of
courage and revolution, cut loose from the pangs of conscience that condemn Yudas.
K.R. Meera has been described by the feminist historian J. Devika (2011) as “undoubtedly
one of the stars in the contemporary Malayalam literary scene” (221) and credits her
“ebullient and defiant fiction” (223) with being able to “force the feminist problematic to
confront much of what it excludes” (226). What Devika identifies from the feminist lens
would be true of the ecocritical as well. The Gospel of Yudas is scaffolded by an extensive
waterscape that is not merely a narrative conduit or cause, but the only effective mapping,
articulation and resistance available for individuals crushed by their political and ethical
choices in contemporary India. The state of Kerala is among the most densely populated in
India (819 persons per square kilometer in 2001) with an extensive coastal belt of nearly 590
kilometers and inland water spread of around 4 lakh hectares (including 44 rivers), according
to the India Planning Commission, the Indian Government’s foremost policy-making body
(51, 372). Consequently, waterscapes are the dominant trope in the state’s self-representation,
as policy and as cultural object, and it is this centrality of the aquatic ecology in environ-
mental communication that informs the approach of this study.
The case of Kerala has an added significance—it was the first state in the world that
democratically elected an explicitly Communist government in 1957. This government did
embark on extensive land reforms; however, the rank and file, inspired by the Maoist Cultural
Revolution, were dissatisfied with these reforms, and openly challenged the Indian adminis-
trative system and the state for being mere instruments of oppression (Ajitha 2008: 155–157).
The late 1960s and 1970s were particularly marked by violence. The state government inflicted
violence on this group with impunity, “leaving a gory trail of broken limbs and fractured souls”
(Ranjan 2016: 67) and this was especially the case during the Emergency (1975–1977) declared
by the central government. The boundaries between the political discourse and the natural
world turn porous in The Gospel of Yudas as water-bodies swallow/reveal the corpses of state
brutality and as the water of the village wells are lost to the ecological blindness of factory
owners. This use of water as melting the contours of the “human” and the “natural” is integral
to the vision of the novel. There are repeated immersions in the revelatory depth of lakes,
rivers, gorges, as the characters find and lose their social footing. Water as emblematic of the
environment is thus employed to “liquefy” various binaries—such as state-citizen, man-woman,
human-nonhuman—within the postcolonial predicament of the novel,
A postcolonial/ecocritical alliance, for Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, suggests the
continuing centrality of imaginative literature on the one hand, and on the other, the
mediating function of social and environmental advocacy “which might turn imaginative
literature into a catalyst for social action and exploratory literary analysis into a full-fledged
form of engaged cultural critique” (2010: 12). In fact, The Gospel of Yudas would strongly
support Huggan and Tiffin’s claim that “postcolonial ecocriticism is broadly eco-socialist in
inspiration” [emphasis in original] (15). Some of the most poignant moments in the novel
speak for the lot of the disenfranchised in its representation of unidentified corpses, homeless
corpse-dredgers, and starving workers on strike. Prema’s obsession with traitors, corpses and
cyclical life-death immersions in stagnant and moving waters, plays out in a world blinded by
a meld of political brutality and environmental crisis.
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee concurs with theorists such as Arif Dirlik (1997), Aijaz
Ahmad (1994), Neil Lazarus (2004), and Robert J.C. Young (2001) to take “postcolonial”
as “a historical condition of intensified and sustained exploitation of the majority of humans
and non-humans of the former colonies by a cartel composed of their own and ‘core’
metropolitan European/north American elites” (2010: 5) and applies “the postcolonial” to

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 Gayathri Prabhu

contemporary India as a “site of intensified exploitation (and as ever, struggle against this
exploitation) by a globalized ruling class” (6). Mukherjee studies the contemporary Indian
novel in this context as occupying “a privileged cultural position in the globalized market
regime of neo-colonialism” (8) but using “its inventiveness, alterity and singularity [to] offer a
critique of its own status as desirable commodity” (10). Though one is in agreement with the
broad contours of this argument, the insufficiency of this vein of postcolonial critique is that
the “contemporary Indian novel” is implicitly assumed to be the Indian English novel. There
is a need to extend the argument to regional languages, which often have a much larger and
more engaged readership. No more can the regional and the English novel be assumed to be
“vernacular” and “global” respectively—they both belong to a global economy. Translations
have routinely become part of the core list of major global publishers, and win international
acclaim and awards. Thus a sense of the self-critique of the globalization must be found in
both the English and the regional languages—and indeed this is the case with many
sophisticated regional novels that have a deep sense of being implicated in the global order.
The novel discussed here offers trenchant critiques of global capitalism, the industrial
economy that ravages rural spaces, as well as of the police apparatus of a democratically elected
communist parliamentary party. As Deane W. Curtin states, “if we want to fully respond to
colonialism and globalization as they have unfolded over the last five centuries, we need an
environmental ethic that connects social justice with environmental justice” (2005: 25). K.R.
Meera, in her fiction, offers this nuanced sense of both the global and the local, of the
specificities of ecological and political dispossession, as well as the place of that violence and
dispossession within a global discourse of financial capitalism.
Both the central characters in The Gospel of Yudas are unable to break out of the political
underpinnings of their subject positions—the twisted narrative sinews of individual resistance
works through a public/performed desire (the many plunges into water) and collective state
oppression that transcend individual loyalty or betrayal. Prema keeps stalking and wooing
Yudas, even if this means an annihilation of her youth, and Yudas keeps dredging corpses of
strangers so that he can atone for the comrades he betrayed. The only way to break the
infinite loop of desire and suffering is then in the physical space that sustains them, a complex
wetland ecology and its many life-forms, as also the parallel struggle for protecting this
geographical space, not just in memory but in the contemporaneity of social struggles. The
colonization that the protagonists resist is as much of spirit/conscience/political rights as it is
of their alignment with their environment, the lakes and gorges being depleted and exploited.
The achievement of the novel is the embodied and instantiated communication of these
powerful narrative vectors.
The field of environmental communication, according to Tema Milstein, hinges on the core
assumption that “how we communicate powerfully shape[s] our ecological perceptions and
these perceptions inform how we act with/in the more-than-human world” (2017: 2). Phaedra
C. Pezzullo and Robert Cox call environmental communication a “crisis and care” discipline
(2018: 3) for precisely this ability of the discipline to mean both the pragmatic and constitutive
modes of expression—in other words, the “interaction that convey[s] an instrumental purpose”
as well as a particular perspective that “imbues an entire attitude” (13). This spectrum helps us
appreciate how a novel like The Gospel of Yudas articulates its ecological sensibility through
several literary tropes and plot points, and how this in turn shapes discourses and experiences
around the literary experience and lived reality of the novel’s geographical setting.
The novel opens by the shore of a lake, which the author K.R. Meera identifies as
Sasthamkotta in Kollam district of Kerala, the terrain of her childhood experience and imagina-
tion (Meera). The largest freshwater lake in the state of Kerala, Sasthamkotta has been included

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in the Ramsar list of wetlands of international importance. Despite regulatory efforts and the
declaration of the area as protected wetland, studies have documented the steady shrinkage of
the lake in recent years. A recent study of the lake area conducted by scientists from the
National Centre for Earth Science Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, and the Cochin University
of Science and Technology, Kochi, have confirmed “the severe degeneration consequent to
different kinds of human intervention” mainly due to “indiscriminate sand mining” which
have led to a wide range of environmental problems, including drinking water scarcity in the
region (2016: 391). K.R. Meera explains bearing witness to the degeneration of the lake area
over the decades:
When I was a child, the most delightful experience was to walk along the lakeside
and talk to myself while picking flowers and fruits. There were a number of plants,
small ones, with small flowers of different colours. Now the banks of the lake are
encroached and water pollution is very severe.
(personal communication)
In her novel, as the characters age, the literary topography degenerates too: “The lake lay
wearily among the hills like a beached whale. The lush green had vanished from the slopes.
The tall rubber trees beyond the faraway mound had been cleared to make way for new
plantations, leaving the mound barren” (57). Meera’s fictional exploration of this personal/
ecological distress can be read as taking the form of a “public narrative.” Marshall Ganz
describes public narrative as linking “the three elements of self, us and now; why I am called,
why we are called, and why we are called to act now” (2011: 274), drawing attention to the
self-reflexivity that impels and makes worthwhile any act of advocacy. In K.R. Meera’s
fictional extension of this question, the ecological, the interpersonal, the social and the
political dilemmas are closely packed, where the individual consciousness must necessarily
ventriloquize in the world, even when each of the particular individuals may seem too self-
absorbed to speak or act. The main protagonists thus do not explicitly make a gesture for the
environment until the very end of the novel—and yet, by the time of the end of the novel,
the link between purely human political rights and environmental rights and consciousness is
demonstrated as inseparable and indissociable.
An in-depth textual reading of the novel will uncover this braiding of the environmental
and the socio-political. Yudas, as we are told and shown repeatedly in the novel, can only
live in the vicinity of water, to which he has lost many things dearest to him, and the
compulsion to dive is to express and recover the lost object or person (Meera 2016: 145).
The surfacing of corpses in the lake and the repetitive baptismal atonement of the “traitor”
cannot be seen as distinct from the oppressive machinery of the state, for he always finds
policemen waiting on the shore. Yudas can only offer a bathetic performance of a past
revolutionary persona as he shouts to the policemen—“Long Live the Revolution! Nax-
albari Zindabad!” (5). The year is 1985 and 15-year-old Prema is watching Yudas. The
reader is updated on the context, the state of Emergency (1975–1977) that had been
declared by Indira Gandhi and the subsequent crackdown on the Naxal movement. It is
the adolescent Prema’s gaze that initially orients the reader. But it is a fraught gaze—for
Prema’s father turns out to be one of the policemen who had tortured the Naxalites in the
1970s. In contrast to her father, Prema dreams of being one with the Naxal cause, and her
political stirrings are aligned with her fantasy for a romantic alliance with the tormented
Yudas. It takes the shape of two overlapping desires—to learn swimming from Yudas, and
also to learn to dive and recover dead bodies. Water takes the form of both desire and death
for the young Prema—a double-edged trope that persists throughout the novel.

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Yudas too can neither embrace nor escape his past, just as water both traps and soothes
him. After he pulls out a corpse from the floor of the lake to its shore, and drinks away his
wages, he promptly returns to submerge himself in the water, his selfhood one with the lake.
In this space, where violet butterworts and brown-eyed droseras bloom, Yudas emerges from
the “turgid green” of the lake in the shade of “morbid blue” (3–4). His home is on the shore
of the lake, in a “windowless shack that looked like a morgue” (4). The character is thus
inserted into the ecology of the lake where all things human and more-than-human are in a
non-hierarchical continuum.
One of the most powerful scenes takes place early in the novel: the deliberate sinking of
the desire-laden Prema as she drags herself through mire and leafless water-plants, the lake
seems to turn “into a husband waiting for his bride” (15). The only sanctioned way in a
conservative village that she as a young woman could legitimately ask for Yudas’ attention
was to ask him to teach her swimming—he was already well known as the man who boldly
plunged into the lake for bodies. However, he refuses. Stung, Prema responds impulsively by
plunging into the water, craving “for water like a fish thrown out of it” and similar to “a
baby jostling to get out of its mother’s womb” (15). Shimmering green, pale yellow, orange
of ravenous depth, deep red—the colors of the lake unfold as a vision to the sinking woman
(16). And at the bottom of the lake, just as she begins to lose consciousness, just as she closes
her eyes, she sees a corpse, and “my memory flapped its open gills like a pearl fish out of the
water before it became still” (17). This coming together of desire and rebellion, impulsiveness
and obstinacy, memory and experience, youth and death, all in the deep watery solitude of
the great lake, sets the tone for the rest of the novel. This approach works—Prema is rescued
from this drowning by Yudas, which many years later she remembers as “a kingfisher yanking
out a pearl fish” (147), and their destinies are tied together through years of seeking love and
redemption by the shores of Kerala’s many lakes, rivers, and gorges.
The water-bodies in the novel function both as metaphors for psychological underpin-
nings, as well as signifiers of ecological distress. We are told that Prema’s mother had
drowned in the lake, “her blistered body as though it was a giant chromide hidden amidst
the crevasses in the mud” (36) and the body of Prema’s brother, who might have died in
custody, also emerges from the lake “stiff and bent inwards even before he was pulled out of
the water” (59). Her only surviving family member, the father, is visibly haunted by waters
and the drownings he had orchestrated in the past when he was a policeman of little scruple.
“Water rumbles!” he often cries in his sleep (64)—both father and daughter dream of water
and gorges that bring the oppression of death and suffering, but their experience of water can
never be the same.
Not only are the protagonists entirely tied to the waters, whether to consummate their
passions or to drown their miseries, but the readers are also suspended in the fluidity and
viscosity of an aquatic imaginaire. The lake turns into a palimpsest of narratives, and so does
the reading—words and images are repeated. Not all layers are intelligible or accessible, but
one is given many indications that a wounded psyche can be best indicated through such
words—for example, during Prema’s attempt at drowning, she talks about the lake within the
lake. “There was another lake boiling beneath the bed of this one. [. . .] The upper lake tried
to stop me” (15). And all along, in nearly every page, the reader encounters green waves,
pearl fish, algae, chromides, the odor of mud—these water associations are scattered
throughout to conjure effects such as decay, fertility, beauty. Each chapter quickly gravitates
towards either a recollection or an experience of water. Several years of absence and silence
punctuate the few encounters between Yudas and Prema, and when they do meet, it is
always in the vicinity of water. The cramped land-spaces where they meet over the years

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(shacks, tarpaulin, on boats) are lapped by lakes or rivers that witness this unusual, passionate,
unconsummated love. The closing scene of the novel contains Prema’s lament about the
endless quest for Yudas, about being a 36-year-old virgin “hauling this ageing body like a
crocodile trudging along the shore” (141). Yet, though formally unconsummated, several
instances in the novel indicate the traversal of a passion realized in and through the aquatic.
Prema describes one of their meetings thus: “like I was lying on top of a thin layer of dirt
below which the lake billowed” (68). At times, the water itself is as an extension of her
lover’s skin: “I felt the waves sway under the mat. I was slumbering in his lap atop a carpet of
water” (76). Thus a consummation of unrequited love is allowed through these moments of
empathy and the blurring of edges between water and land, and between their bodies.
While all of Prema’s experiences of water are of immersion and sinking, the true claimant
of Yudas’ love, the brave and betrayed Sunanda, is unsinkable even though drowned. “The
waves couldn’t conquer her. Instead she conquered the waves,” says the lover, who describes
her body falling right through wild currents so powerful that they bounce stones (70).
Sunanda had been Yudas’ great love in the time of the Emergency, the past of the novel.
Much of Prema’s quest is envy of the courageous martyrdom of Sunanda—there is the sense
that her death gave Sunanda a power over Yudas that Prema could never attain.
The locations where the Naxalites were killed are never just narrative backdrops, but
instead are artistic expressions of the earth—“The turns, twists, trees and flowers. Yudas
began to hang rocks again on the tattered veins of my broken heart” (102). The dead body
joins the earth, and thus death is a return to the womb of the earth or water, and not
necessarily a purely human loss. Hupert Zapf’s definition of “cultural ecology” as a mode of
thinking “through the two axiomatic premises of an ecological epistemology, connectivity
and diversity, relationality and difference” [emphasis in original] (2016: 138) offers us a way of
appreciating the literary disjunctions that emerge between political, personal, and geographical
topographies in the novel.
The characters not only endure but need to communicate and hand each other these
metaphors of empathy—of love across political and ecological dystopia. In their meeting by the
river, as Yudas boils water on the stove, Prema’s thoughts go to the wild current of the river:
There will always be something floating on it, come summer or monsoon, mostly
tree trunks, coconuts, sometimes even animals. You can’t blame the river for the
current. It’s the humans who ought to be blamed. They cut down all the trees on
the mountains, let the soil go loose. Some rivers have dried up and some others have
become little gorges. Yet man is not done with them. He will dig out the sand;
encroach upon the shorelines. Hmmm. . .it may seem like nothing more than water,
but when pushed to the brink, it can destroy everything!
(41–42)
The domestic and intimate moment of water boiling on a stove is extended to the metaphor
of a river in spate. Water is the destructive force, and the causality is unambiguous—human
encroachment and destruction of shorelines have precipitated the ecological crisis. Nature
does not always forgive human transgression. And the only consistent link between Prema
and Yudas, through time and distance, remains this morphing aquatic ecosystem that holds
both of them hostage. Just as love is tied to water, so is injustice. Yudas describes this
politicized ecology/ecological dishonesty of politics thus:
We took up arms. Our goal was to rid this world of injustice. We longed for a
fertile earth, clean air and pure water. [. . .] Charmed by the colour of money, the

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 Gayathri Prabhu

representatives of people who had grown up in poverty themselves, forgot every-

thing. They wrote off our land to money launderers and black marketeers [. . .]
Everyone was afraid of the machinery of the state.
(73)
The ideology of the revolutionaries in the novel makes no distinction between the state
machinations and the capitalist/commercial exploitation of natural resources. To rid the world
of economic injustice is to equally fight for fertile earth, clean air, pure water, land reform—this
is Yudas and Sunanda’s utopian premise.
In contrast to Yudas, Prema is a late entrant to Naxalite thinking, and this absence of first-hand
experience, she is aware, will always be the chasm between her and the lover she idealizes. Her
only access to the revolution is through the memories of others and through the people who have
survived. In her efforts to know more about Sunanda, the valorized revolutionary martyr,
she meets Sunanda’s niece Sangeeta, who is in the midst of a contemporary political struggle
regarding, again, labor and environmental rights. It is the forty-fifth day of a public uprising
against land exploitation. This time the struggle is completely nested in the collective ecological
consciousness—indeed, in recent decades, environmental issues have become an integral part of
a progressive discourse in Kerala. K.R. Meera recounts the environment movement in the
1980s “when all the writers and intellectuals had come together to fight for nature. But the
following years we saw a well-organised attack targeting them, tarnishing their credibility and
integrity” (2016). Activism at the ground level is about the several relentless everyday battles.
These are the sentiments that a pregnant Sangeeta shares with Prema:
They dig up all our lands. But we won’t back off until we put an end to this. One
way or another. We need our lands to farm. We’ll sow the seeds. We’ll reap the
harvest. Our cattle must have fields to graze on, and move about. Our wells must
have water.
(121)
Water that has so long been about corpses and desire, now takes on a newer rhetoric of livelihood
and sustainability. The idiom of revolution is still necessary, over so many decades, to sustain the
narrative. This section of the novel is as much about activism around earth and harvest as it is
about how these issues are communicated to the community. The current scholarship on
environmental communication, as Jessica M. Prody claims, “intervenes in environmental debates,
clarifies knowledge needed to make policy decisions, provides insights into historical controver-
sies that help illuminate contemporary ones, and raises challenges to debates that exclude
marginalized voices (both human and non-human)” (2017: 24). This is the engagement that the
novel explores through Sangeeta and her activism, especially in the moment when she stands up
to the local bureaucrat to ask, “where should we go for water when the wells have been dried
up?” (122). Even as she negotiates the agitating crowds and the police station, Sangeeta continues
to explain what had become the thrust of the protest: “I am frightened by man’s capacity for greed
and deception. What kind of world is this?” (125). This sentiment resonates with the postcolo-
nial/ecocritical imperative that Huggan and Tiffin describe as “the philosophical possibility of the
wrongness of rights while remaining committed to the moral imperative of righting wrongs as
well” (2010: 19). The novel complicates the morality of being an activist in an irredeemably
unequal world—and it does this through political and environmental changes from the 1970s to
the first decade of the twenty-first century.
When Sangeeta goes missing, Prema jumps into a gorge to find her body, an act of
conscience but also an offering of love to Yudas, who had lost Sunanda in a similar gorge.

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“This is my revolution” Prema thinks to herself as she sinks deep in the 30-feet-deep water of
the gorge (128). And as she continues to sink, the sounds she hears in the deep waters are
human noises—of sobs, of a thousand men and women bellowing—until she reaches
Sangeeta’s corpse. A disembodied voice calls back to her “Oh, Liberty!” (128–29). Prema
passes out and it is only after she surfaces, and is dragged to the field, that the lake makes its
presence felt, as blood and churned-up mud comes gushing out of her mouth.
Two decades have gone by since Prema was first rescued by Yudas, and the closing pages of
the novel reveal Prema’s thoughts about how her lake “was lucid” now while Yudas would
have to keep swimming to recover what he had lost in the waters. Outside the “breached
wreckage of a boat” (136) where they are taking shelter that night, “a trove of enigmatic secrets
lay snuggled in the lake’s depth, tucking their flaps above their heads, beneath the nests of
grinning chromides” (148). In this aqueous atmosphere, the novel finally drops anchor around
Prema’s resolve—“I will take him to my shore when he wakes up” (148). Just as there is a diver
for every corpse, her voice tells us that it is the job of the living to watch over each other, but
we are not sure whose lot that would be. “One of us, or perhaps all of us” is the last line of the
novel, once again placing individual destiny firmly within the ethic of collective resistance.

Postscript
While this chapter was being edited, the state of Kerala experienced its worst monsoon
season since 1924, leading to unprecedented flooding and landslides across several districts.
According to a Briefing Note released by the Geneva-based international humanitarian
group ACAPS, this situation was exacerbated by the collection of flood water in reservoirs
and release of water from 27 dams in the state (3). The Report of the Western Ghats
Ecology Expert Panel, chaired by the ecologist Madhav Gadgil, and submitted to the
Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, in 2011 had presciently
recommended that the entire Western Ghats tract be considered as an Ecologically Sensitive
Area (15) and had expressed caution about large-scale storage dams in the region (58). On
January 31, 2012, the state of Kerala filed objections to the Ecologically Sensitive Area
zonation proposed by the Report. The recent calamity has again opened up a public debate
about ecological mismanagement of land and water use in the state. As of August 26, 2018,
302 people were declared dead in the floods and over 460,000 people were in relief camps,
according to the Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan (Hindustan Times).
This chapter is dedicated to the many humans, domestic animals, and wildlife killed in
the floods.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to K.R. Meera for discussing her work at length with me during her stint as a
writer-in-residence at Manipal under the Dr. TMA Pai Chair in Indian Literature. For
research assistance, I am thankful to Yadukrishnan PT, doctoral scholar at the Manipal Centre
for Humanities.

Works cited
ACAPS. “India: Floods in Kerala.” 15 August 2018. https://www.acaps.org/special-report/india-
floods-kerala.
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Verso, 1994.

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Ajitha, Kunnikkal. Kerala’s Naxalbari: Memoirs of a Young Revolutionary. Shrishti, 2008.

Curtin, Deane. Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.
“Death Toll in Kerala Floods Rises to 302, Over 4.6 Lakh People Still in Relief Camps, Says CM Pinarayi
Vijayan.” Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/kerala-struggles-to-get-
back-on-its-feet-state-govt-races-to-clean-houses-and-public-spacesand-public-spaces/story-Wf9mrq
NN8Fay4gyhErZ4pM.html. 26 August 2018.
Devika, J. “Translator’s Note.” Yellow Is the Colour of Longing, edited by K.R. Meera. Penguin
Books, 2011.
Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Westview, 1997.
Ganz, Marshall. “Public Narrative, Collective Action, and Power.” Accountability through Public
Opinion: From Inertia to Public Action, edited by Sina Odugbemi and Taeku Lee. The World Bank,
2011, pp 273–289.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routle-
dge, 2010.
Lazarus, Neil. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Meera, K.R. The Gospel of Yudas. Penguin Random House, 2016.
Meera, K.R. “Personal Interview.” 6 April 2018.
Milstein, Tema, Mairi Pileggi, and Eric L. Morgan, eds. Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice.
Routledge, 2017.
Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India. Report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert
Panel, 2011.
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel
in English. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Pezullo, Phaedra C., and Robert Cox. Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Sage, 2018.
Planning Commission, Government of India. Kerala Development Report. Academic Foundation, 2008.
Prody, Jessica M. “Pedagogy as Environmental Communication: The Rhetorical Situations of the Class-
room.” Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice, edited by Tema Milstein, Mairi Pileggi, and
Eric L. Morgan. Routledge, 2017, pp 24–35.
Ranjan, Sudhanshu. Justice, Judocracy and Democracy in India: Boundaries and Breaches. Routledge, 2016.
Sreekumari, Vishnu Mohan, Shiekha Elizabeth John, Rajimol Thengumparambil Rajan, Maya Kesavan,
Sajan Kurain, and Padmalal Damodaran. “Human Interventions and Consequent Environmental Degra-
dation of a Protected Freshwater Lake in Kerala, SW India.” Geosciences Journal 20.3 (2016): 391–402.
Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Wiley Blackwell, 2001.
Zapf, Hubert. “Cultural Ecology of Literature—Literature as Cultural Ecology.” Handbook of Ecocriticism
and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf. De Gruyter, 2016, pp 135–154.

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 5
TRANSFORMATIVE
ENTANGLEMENTS
Birds and humans in three
non-fictional texts
Wendy Woodward

Birds have always been a distant delight for me – from the Cape robins in my garden to
the fish eagles who fly almost invisibly above, reconnoitring suburban stretches of water
now that dams in the vineyards have dwindled to puddles in the drought. But the three
texts I want to consider here have birds positioned closely in relation to human beings:
swifts in Charles Foster’s Being a Beast (2016), a rook and a magpie in Esther Woolfson’s
Corvus: A Life with Birds (2008) and a goshawk in Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk
(2014). Foster is the most physically remote from the beloved, etherealised even sacred
avian. He obsessively follows swift migration from Europe to West Africa, attempting to
become a swift himself. Esther Woolfson is lovingly close to practices of domestication as
she lives with rescued corvids in her home. She recognises bird cultures, bird emotions
and the ways that various individual birds “define something of [her] life” (210). Helen
Macdonald, in a state of agonised grief after the unexpected death of her father, takes on
the training of a goshawk. As this challenge becomes addictive, Macdonald turns feral,
becoming hawk as the goshawk produces her even as she produces a hunting bird who
returns to her fist.
In considering how Foster, Woolfson and Macdonald depict their entanglements with
their respective avian subjects, I shall read their narratives with recourse to the theorising of
Vinciane Despret in her essay “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis”
(2004). For Despret, human–animal interconnections involve the minds and embodiment of
both parties. Instead of a romanticised human metamorphosis in response to an encounter
with an animal, she proposes a “being with” (131) in which the bodies of both human and
animals “affect and are affected” (115) to such an extent that they even “produce” each other
(133 n 24). Anthropo-zoo-genesis, then, is “a practice that constructs animal and human”
(122). In the connection between Konrad Lorenz and his beloved geese, for example,
“practices of domestication” transform the identities of both.
Lorenz and his goose, in a relation of taming, in a relation that changes both
identities, have domesticated one another. Lorenz gave his birds the opportunity to

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behave like humans, as much as his birds gave him the opportunity to behave like a
bird. They both created new articulations, which authorized them to talk (or to
make the other talk) differently.
(130)
Such transformative entanglements with birds manifest very differently in Foster, Woolfson
and Macdonald, as will be discussed below.
Charles Foster is an English scientist who recounts, in Being a Beast, his attempts to “be” in
a “sort of literary shamanism” (xi), a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox and a swift. He admits that
all his efforts – from living in a badger sett and eating earthworms to mimicking urban fox
behaviour, lying in his own excrement in a London suburb, eating pizza from a rubbish bin –
are doomed to failure. His practices seem eccentric, even ridiculous, as he strives for a literal
becoming-animal. How then can he even approximate the being of a swift?
Swifts, the “ultimate other” (182), live miraculously in the air where they hunt insects like
cheetahs or peregrines (186). In their migrations over their lifetimes they cover the distance
from the earth to the moon more than two and a half times (188–189). Foster climbs trees in
an effort to get closer to them, and consumes airborne insects as they would. Any embodied
connection with them is urgently desired rather than achievable. From the outset, he
acknowledges that he “might as well try to be God” as to be a swift (182). Swifts are
ethereal, holy, sacred and cannot be figured in human discourse: “all poetry fails when it
comes to swifts” (191). Foster’s obsession with swifts takes the form of his following their
migration from West Africa back to Oxford. Conjecturing that habits in common will take
him closer to the swifts, he follows their flight patterns, feeling that as he “shared some swift
habits and habitats already” (197), Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance” (196f) was
pertinent to his experience. For Sheldrake, “morphic fields” are the “forces” that propel birds
into migration. “Everything in the universe is bound together (Foster summarises) by some
sort of field but family resemblance [and habits] increase [] the strength of the field” (196).
Foster’s response to his craziness, “a gnat’s breath from psychosis” (193) he admits, is the
compensation of the human “capacity for vicariousness” (209). Empathy, as he calls it, ushers in
either a becoming-swift or a joy in their screaming flight paths. His projection of himself into
swift lives lacks any involvement on the part of the birds themselves, however – a recurring
pattern in most representations of animals. In The Lives of Animals (1999), J.M. Coetzee’s character
Elizabeth Costello seems to praise “sympathetic imagination” in poems about animals, but
she observes that it “has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object”
(34–35). Sympathy may be defined as “a fellow-feeling, a (real or supposed) affinity between
certain things” (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Vol 2 2221); empathy as “the power of
projecting one’s personality into, and so fully understanding the object of contemplation”
(The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Vol 1 648). Whatever differences are inherent in these
concepts, Vinciane Despret, echoing Costello, holds that empathy is about the subject rather
than the object:
Certainly, empathy transforms the subject (the one who feels empathy) but this
transformation is a very local one as long as it does not really give [the] object the chance
to be activated as a subject . . . While pretending to be inhabited (or locally transformed)
by the other, the empathic in fact “squats” in the other. Empathy allows us to talk about
what it is like to be (like) the other, but does not raise the question “what it is to be
‘with’ the other.” Empathy is more like “filling up oneself” than taking into account the
attunement.
(2004: 128)

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In Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), Thom van Dooren honours empathy
but in a very particular corvid context. He observes that “empathic responses” of rooks and
common ravens “seem to point to a kind of emotional and social entanglement” (136).
A reciprocal relationship between human and bird in which both may transform each other
seems barely attainable for Foster. Konrad Lorenz noted (qtd. in Despret 2004: 129) that there are
two kinds of field ethologists – “hunters” go out into the field to observe their animals; “cattle-
breeders” retain the animals in the “most natural conditions” (129). Foster is more like a “hunter”
as he follows his passion for swifts, travelling obsessively in the hope of spotting their flight paths.
Woolfson is more like the “cattle-breeders”, living with corvids in her home, but the analogy
becomes more strained with Macdonald as she never entirely domesticates the goshawk. In their
relationships with birds in their homes neither experiences the dramatic becoming that Foster
yearned for. Instead the women and the birds are drawn into the apparently more mundane
“practices of domestication” in which both animals and human become together (Despret 2004:
122). In this context “domestication” does not involve power issues like subordination (as Yi-Fu
Tuan1 would have it). Domestication does not require the docility of the bird or animal, but that
both human and animal are “available” to each other, “active” and consequently open to
creativity and transformation (Despret 2004: 123–25). Availability includes interest and trust, the
latter defined by Isabelle Stengers as “‘one of the many names for love’” (qtd. in Despret
2004: 122).
Play exemplifies how humans and animals make themselves available to each other in
relationships of trust. In What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (2016), Despret
suggests that “playing can only exist on the basis of an agreement and attunement” between
the parties (78). Added to that, “a code of translation” confirms repeatedly that this is play and
not real aggression. Woolfson considers that Spike the magpie’s “football” in which he runs
after a ball he had propelled with his beak (167) is a demonstration of play, a “behaviour that
would bestow no advantage in terms of survival or reproduction” (167). Evidence of play in
her relationships with both the magpie and the rook enraptures Woolfson, who regards play
“as a point of similarity between us” with “apparently purposeless play” as evidence of “minds
free enough of concern to do it” (169):
I am astonished, always, by the way they’ll appear to know without knowing, to
understand, anticipate, react, for it makes me feel as if I live in an indivisible world,
that my belief that we’re nearer in every respect than I could have imagined is
correct, that we are, whatever we are, something of the same.
(169)
Macdonald’s narrativising of play with the goshawk Mabel (superstitiously, hawks are assigned
names that do not encapsulate their wildness) is evidence of an exceptional availability to each
other rather than any enforced docility of the hawk. After noticing Mabel watching her with
her beak pointed at the celling, a play gesture in baby falcons but one she had never seen in a
goshawk, Macdonald initiates play with a piece of paper, then with a rolled magazine in
which she peers at Mabel who peers back at her through the hole. The goshawk’s embodied
response, one that Macdonald can read, is evident in her eyes “narrowed in bird-laughter”
(113) and in her tail shaking as she “shivers from happiness” (113). Because the expectations
she had harboured of Mabel were endorsed by the literature on falcons which had never
conceived of goshawks playing, Macdonald confesses to an “obscure shame” (113) for
believing this and to a tremendous sadness that no one had ever played with them.
Together woman and goshawk negotiate their attunement through training and common
lifeways. From the start Macdonald knows that she will use “[k]indness and love” (57)

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although goshawks are “famously difficult to tame” (56); due to their speedy nervous systems
they “live life ten times faster than we do” (56). Macdonald’s life centres on the hawk
exclusively as she eschews all social contact in the interest of her “practice of domestication”.
The roles are reversed in their first sortie into the outer world: the goshawk is delighted,
examining everything with “greedy intensity” (98) while Macdonald is desperate to return to
the safety of their domestic interior. On a subsequent outing Macdonald is also full of fear:
“Somewhere in my mind ropes uncoil and fall. It feels like an unmooring, as if I were an
airship ascending on its maiden flight through darkness” (99). But then the goshawk relaxes
and the woman has a moment of seeing the world through the hawk’s perceptions:
I’ve been with the hawk so long, just her and me, that I’m seeing my city through her
eyes . . . I stare at traffic lights before I remember what they are. Bicycles are spinning
mysteries of glittering metal. . .. What’s salient to the hawk in the city is not what is
salient to man. The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there’s a
clatter of wings. We both look up.
(101–102)
While this quotation begins with a moment of alienation from the city, concomitant with
Macdonald’s imaginative attunement to the goshawk’s perceptions, her availability to the
affecting body of the bird opens her senses to the inherent violence of the hawk’s experience,
and to the latter’s embodied response to other birds as prey.
Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It’s as if all her weapons
systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes
her neck . . . Some part of the hawk’s young brain has just worked something out,
and it has everything to do with death.
(102)
Foster’s “literary shamanism” pales in comparison with Macdonald’s transformative immer-
sion in the violence of the hawk’s world:
The world . . . made absolute sense. But the only things I knew were hawkish things,
and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk:
hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill.
(195)
For Woolfson there is far less at stake psychologically in relation to the birds who inhabit her
domestic space. Corvus: A Life with Birds is a chronicle of many birds over a number of years.
The birds are an adjunct to her life as an academic, a mother, a wife. Consequently serial
relationships with corvids in her home lack the drama and putative violence of Macdonald’s
relationship with a goshawk as Macdonald lives in solitude and in mourning, which intensify
the woman–bird attunement. Woolfson worries that her birds may be tamed, defined by her
dictionary as “cowed, de-natured, docile” (115), but she comforts herself that not only have
her birds displayed none of these traits, but they have also displayed elements of wildness in
their fear of other corvids, “of some people, of hands and perceived danger, of cats and
hawks” (117), a fear she considers “sensible” and “judicious” (117). They have always been
“their own birds” and as “resolute as iron” in Barry Lopez’s words (qtd. in Woolfson 2008:
117). The practices of domestication that the birds experience in Woolfson’s home are not
practices of taming with the concomitant loss of their identities.
Wildness recurs in people’s responses to corvids via their images of the birds as threatening
and destructive, with visitors to her home displaying fear of the resident rook. Woolfson does

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acknowledge that her “ease in the presence” of birds is “still sometimes surprising” (117) to
her even as she recognises the otherness of birds: “How can one understand a creature born
but not hatched?” (4) she asks at the beginning of the book. Yet her bodymind has been
profoundly affected and transformed; the corvids especially “have altered forever my relation-
ship with the rest of the world, altered my view of a hierarchy of form, intellect, ability; my
concept of time” (7). Even Macdonald, who lives so intensely with Mabel, training her so
resolutely, is aware of the otherness of goshawks: they are “wild and spooky and reptilian”
(18), “spooky pale-eyed psychopaths” (22), “murderous, difficult to tame, sulky, fractious,
foreign” (23). Yet these birds have a doubleness; not only does she repeatedly describe them
as reptilian but a hawk kept in a box prior to her purchase is a “fallen angel” (53), even
approximating a child at one stage in her training. Still, nothing can gainsay that the birds
need to kill; Macdonald is amused when the young goshawk on her glove has an innate
killing response to the high notes of an aria on the radio, but chilled when she has the same
response to a baby crying in a pram (83).
Falconry itself has this doubleness, a “balancing act between wild and tame” (234). For
periods of Mabel’s training, Macdonald tips over into a wildness that overlays hunting with
the goshawk, when she initially scouts out rabbits for her to kill. In “Figures” Despret
suggests that when Lorenz is with his geese that he is not merely being with a goose, but
rather “he became ‘with a goose-with a human’” (131). Lorenz brings the goose into his
world whereas Macdonald crosses a boundary into the domain of an avian killing machine,
the hawk in training, as she becomes with a hawk-with a human. At the start she wants to be
the hawk: “solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life” (85).
As Macdonald emphasises, every animal trainer has a sixth sense essential to the training of
an animal until you “don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels”
(86). For a large part of training Mabel, it is the hawk’s world which seems the dominant one.
In her vulnerable grieving state, Macdonald over-identifies with the hawk, so much so that
she experiences her “humanity burning away” (86). Such an entanglement goes beyond
Despret’s notion of the “miracle of attunement” (2004: 125, emphasis in original); Macdo-
nald’s initial connection with the hawk is excessive, even “mad” (a word she uses). If the
woman’s body is produced, to use Despret’s terms, by her availability to the body of the
hawk, then this propensity is most dramatically obvious in her burgeoning sense of ferality
and the loss of her human self.
In How We Grieve: Relearning the World (2011), Thomas Attig suggests that “grieving
involves relearning physical and social surroundings, aspects of oneself, ways of living with
mystery, and ties with the deceased” (xxvi). The bereaved Macdonald relearns her world and
her self by turning feral, by embracing the violence that is an integral part of hunting with the
hawk. So strongly and effectively did she experience this “relearning” that the practice of
hunting took her “to the very edge of being a human” (195). The constant living with a bird
of prey brings her to a Buddhist perception of the now:
The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or
mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only and that was my
refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings.
(160)
Even in the depths of her grief Macdonald has the perceptiveness to realise the paradoxical
texture of this entwinement: “I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up
in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too” (160). In losing hold of being human
Macdonald becomes a hawk, but such entanglement is not psychologically stabilising: she

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“only [had] wildness” (222) she acknowledges. Living in solitude and in mourning for her
father: “I’d fled to become a hawk, but in my misery all I had done was turn the hawk into
a mirror of me” (218). She instinctively understands that this is not attunement but an
assertion of human subject over avian object, as she projects her pain onto the hawk in
misplaced identification.
Yet hunting with Mabel requires a certain dissolution of the self for Macdonald. Redolent
of a “romantic model of fusion”, to borrow a term from Ralph Acampora (114), the human
self “dissolve[s] into the other” (114). In what she calls “hedgerow ontology” (187)
Macdonald is unassailed by grief or worries in the moment, as she views the landscape with
murderous “hawkish desire” (187). She takes on the characteristics of the hawk as she “let[s]
slip havoc and murder” in the woods:
My attention was microscopically fierce. I’d become a thing of eyes and will alone.
Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing.
It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle.
(175)
Marc Antony’s “Cry ‘Havoc’ and let slip the gods of war” (Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene i, line 273)
echoes here in Macdonald’s complicity with the assassin. Like the hawk, she plots the fields drawn
by “hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill” (195); but once Mabel has
caught a rabbit it is her “responsibility” which “balloon[s] out into a space the size of a cathedral”
(196) to euthanise the creature before Mabel begins to dismember her prey alive. Macdonald is
constantly split by her involvement in the hawk’s modus operandi, recognising that “[h]unting
makes you animal but the death of an animal makes you human” (196). Her involvement in the
practices of killing means that she “wasn’t a watcher any more. [She] was being accountable to
[her]self, to the world and all the things in it” (197); she realises this occurred “only when [she]
killed” (197) and that “[t]he days were dark” (197). Anti-depressants bring about a balance for
her. As the separation between her and Mabel increases, she understands that “her world and my
world are not the same, and some part of me is amazed that I ever thought they were” (234).
Charles Foster’s notion of wildness does not include the loss of the human self. He notes
in the foreword to Being a Beast that the book is about “my own rewilding, my own
acknowledgement of my previously unrecognised wildness, and my own lament for the loss
of my wildness” (xv). The repetition of “my own” signals, perhaps unwittingly, that Foster’s
endeavours to be various different animals are rooted in the assertion of the human self. One
could criticise Foster as at no time does he have a substantial connection with any of the
“beasts” he professes to love. Thus Despret’s “miracle of attunement” (2004: 125) with an
embodied animal eludes him. His “own rewilding” is underpinned by evolutionary biology,
and in spite of all the accounts of his bodily suffering, it approximates an intellectual exercise.
For Woolfson, on the other hand, being with Chicken, the rook, with a human “offer[s]”
her a “new identity” (Despret 2004: 128). This new identity can only be engendered if the
bird is “give[n] . . . a chance to be interesting, and to articulate other things [than are
expected] . . . [then] subjectivity and objectivity are redistributed in a new manner” (128).
Inherent in this process, according to Despret, is the bird’s “ethos”:
it is still more an ethos, pervaded with humans, an ethos for which the “natural
conditions” are, in an undetermined manner, of the nature of the animal and of the
nature of the one who questions him, an ethos where “natural condition” never
means neutral condition . . . the ethos of domestication.
(129)

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Despret’s reconceptualising of domestication brings in the body of the human “who uses his
own body as a tool for knowing, as a tool for asking questions, as a means to create a relation
that provides new knowledge” (129). This is the case in Woolfson’s relationships with the
resident corvids in her home and with Spike standing on her knees or on her book. She and
Spike communicate in close proximity:
we’d look into one another’s eyes in silent, inexplicably profound conversation. He
would hold my gaze, look at me straight for a long time, and when he did I knew
him in every respect my equal, more than my equal: he made me aware that my
only advantage was one gained through evolutionary time.
(206)
Woolfson’s relationships with the corvids, in her words, “reclassified [them] both, readjusted
[her] observations, [her] consideration of both [their] places in the world” (170–71). Being with
a bird with a human includes the performance of an intricate ritual with Chicken, the rook:
On meeting in the hall of a morning, we bow. She caws and I greet her. We bow
again. She caws. I bow. She bows. I ask after her health. She caws. Eventually, we
reach the kitchen.
(252)
The ritual between rook and human is made possible by the rook being zoomorphic in
Despret’s terms (2004: 128), by her “see[ing] others as other ‘selves’” just as Woolfson
zoomorphises herself.
Woolfson’s love for the various corvids in her domestic space permeates the personal
narrative as well as her recounting of natural history. Macdonald believes that flying the
goshawk free without the creance is love “as the old falconers” imagined it: for there is
“nothing . . . but the lines that run between us; palpable lines not physical ones” (158). Love
for swifts by necessity involves distant worship. The swifts, in constant flight, are never
available to Foster, so that neither human nor bird becomes transformatively entangled. Louis
J Halle (qtd. in Woolfson 2008: 206) refers to the “blankness” of their eyes which seems to
preclude the kind of communication with humans that “a parrot, duck or canary” would be
capable of. Foster tells of a Lebanese hairdresser in a West African town who has a private
temple to a common swift, a “gently demanding goddess” (197). In the final words of his
book Foster “cringes at the thought” that he “love[s] these creatures” (210) he has attempted
to become. He reprimands himself for being guilty of anthropomorphism, but then goes
further, suggesting, unconvincingly and egocentrically, that some anthropo-zoo-genesis has
transpired: “the sort of love I’m talking about (whatever it is) is necessarily reciprocal. I can’t
really love X unless X loves me” (210).

Conclusion
Given the state of our planet’s species loss, one needs to ask to what extent each author’s
attunement (or attempted attunement) with a hawk, corvids and swifts respectively takes
cognisance of the possibility of extinction of the particular bird species they love. Van Dooren
suggests that telling lively complex stories of birds on the edge of or beyond extinction
induces “a sense of wonder” (8) to counterbalance grieving. The narratives of both
Macdonald and Woolfson have the complexities and possibilities that van Dooren praises.
Macdonald describes the wonder she feels in relation to Mabel. She is keenly aware of the
impermanence of bird species, but the “visceral, bloody life” (181) she and the goshawk share

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contradicts the tendency to see animals who are distant and dying out as symbols, she
suggests. At an art installation on condors, Macdonald muses that the condor has been
reduced to being “an icon of extinction”, that “[i]t is a shadow, a figure of loss and hope; it
is hardly a bird at all” (181). When she puts a rabbit suffering from myxamotosis out of its
“misery” (198), the disease so prevalent decades ago returns her to her childhood fears of
atomic apocalypse and to her awareness of the deaths of birds, animals and trees including
“[h]awk populations . . . in free fall” (198).
Woolfson is comforted that corvids, with a few exceptions, are not set “on the increasingly
swift pathway to extinction” (64–65). It is a paradoxical consolation because the myriad
beauty of the different corvid species goes unrecognised, “[t]heir voices are perceived as
harsh, unvarying, and except in rare cases, denying humanity the opportunity to hear
reflections of themselves” (64). Foster’s narrativising of his passionate, empathic quest for the
swift and their migratory trajectories may not include new articulations, which both
Macdonald and Woolfson experience, but he is consumed by anxiety for their vulnerability
to extinction. When they arrive, late, he confesses to his young daughter that he is weeping
“[b]ecause it’s all right . . . [b]ecause the world still works” (184). Faced, like all three writers,
by such impermanence, we urgently need stories of grace and attunement between human
and nonhuman animals to help us relearn the world as it changes.

Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the National Research Foundation for funding my research.

Note
1 For Yi-Fu Tuan, all connections between humans and their “pets” are “tainted” (5) because of
human desire to dominate any disorder inherent in nature.

Works cited
Attig, Thomas. How We Grieve: Relearning the World. Revised edition. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals. The University Center for Human Values Series. Edited by Amy
Gutmann. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Despret, Vinciane. “The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body and Society Vol. 10
(2–3) (2004): 111–134.
Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Translated by Brett
Buchanan, Posthumanities 38, Cary Wolfe Series Editor. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
“Empathy.” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1. 3rd edition. Clarendon Press, 1978, p. 648.
Foster, Charles. Being a Beast. Profile Books, 2016.
Macdonald, Helen. H Is for Hawk. Jonathan Cape, 2014.
“Sympathy.” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 2. 3rd edition. Clarendon Press, 1978, p. 2221.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. Yale University Press, 1984.
van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. Critical Perspectives on Animals
Theory, Culture, Science and Law, Gary L. Francione and Gary Steiner, Series Editors. Columbia
University Press, 2014.
Woolfson, Esther. Corvus: A Life with Birds. Granta, 2008.

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 6
DISCOVERING THE
WEATHERWORLD
Combining ecolinguistics, ecocriticism,
and lived experience
Arran Stibbe

Introduction
In this chapter, I explore the power of ecolinguistics, ecocriticism, and lived experience to
help people rediscover and reconnect with nature: not just the relatively solid forms of plants,
animals, soil, and landscapes but also the more transient wind, sun, rain, mist, and snow.1 The
combination of the solid, slowly changing forms of nature and the quickly changing forms of
weather is what Tim Ingold (2010) describes as the Weatherworld. One task for environmental
communication is to encourage people to live in the Weatherworld, experiencing and
enjoying the local nature around them in all weathers, rather than staying indoors being
entertained by gadgets, shopping in a covered mall or flying off in search of the sun. Living in
the Weatherworld can not only help people fulfil their needs without excess consumption; it
can also encourage them to value their local plants, trees, wildlife, and the larger ecosystems
that life depends on. Ecolinguistics can play a role in encouraging people to reconnect with
the Weatherworld through critical awareness of how language encodes the stories we live by.
One of these stories, found often in travel agent discourse and the discourse of weather
forecasts in the UK, is that anything aside from still, hot and sunny weather, is nuisance and
inconvenience – from clouds, mist, and grey skies to rain. This story discourages participation
in the Weatherworld and works against true belonging to place.
I begin the chapter by analysing discourses of travel agents and weather forecasts to
reveal how linguistic choices encode the story ONLY SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD. I then show
how lived experience – running each day in the Weatherworld and comparing that direct
experience with how the weather is described in weather forecasts – can lead to new
insights into the Weatherworld. Finally, the chapter takes an ecocritical look at nature
writing: both new nature writing in the UK and Japanese Haiku, to see how authors write
in ways that value a great variety of different weathers and encourage participation in the
Weatherworld.
The writing style of the chapter is deliberately personal and concrete since one of the aims
is to search for language which brings us closer to the Weatherworld, rather than language

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which isolates us from it in a cloud of abstractions, technicalities and jargon. And ecolinguis-
tics, ecocriticism and direct participation in the Weatherworld are tools that can be useful for
everyone, not just a specialised group of scholars.

Sunshine holidays
There is a story told within UK culture, repeated countless times in conversations with
strangers, in weather forecasts, and in the advertising of the travel agents, that ONLY SUNNY
WEATHER IS GOOD, and all other kinds of weather are bad. We can investigate this story using
ecolinguistics, an approach which uses linguistic analysis to reveal the stories we live by and
questions them from an ecological perspective (Stibbe 2015).
The words “sun” and “sunshine” are splashed across British travel websites, even appearing
directly in some of their names: sunshine.co.uk, sunshineholidaysltd.co.uk, lowcostsunshine.co.uk,
justsunshine.com, and sunshineholidayscornwall.co.uk. On Thomson’s “Sunshine Holidays” webpage,
the words “sun” and “sunshine” appear 23 times in its 504 words, a clear case of what linguists call
“overlexicalisation”. Overlexicalisation is when words appear abnormally often, giving a sense of
over-persuasion that suggests something is problematic or contentious (Machin et al. 2012: 37).
The words “sun” and “sunshine” are collocated with (i.e., placed near to) positive adjectives
such as exotic, great, favourite, fantastic, perfect, ideal, popular, and world-famous. In contrast, the
weather closer to home in Britain is represented negatively as:
Fed up with wet summers and ice-cold winters? Take a break from the traditional British
weather and get away to one of our destinations for all-year-round sunshine holidays.
(Thomson)
Asking the reader if they are fed up with wet summers and ice-cold winters presupposes, first,
that summer in Britain is “wet” (which is arguable since there are usually plenty of dry days)
and winter is “ice-cold” (which is again arguable since few days are actually frosty or snowy).
It also implies that wet and cold are the kind of things that the reader would be expected to
be fed up with, planting this association in their minds.
Other travel websites and newspapers also represent British weather negatively in a variety of
linguistic ways. The following examples are extracts from a corpus of news and travel agent sources:

Fed up with wintry Britain? Here are ten destinations where you’re likely to find more
pleasant temperatures.
As the cold, dark nights drag on, summer seems further away than ever . . . but in
Orlando fun-in-the-sun never stops.
Autumn is a fantastic time to jet off somewhere sunny. You don’t need to go far to find
better weather than British clouds.
Winter in the UK can be a depressing experience; freezing temperatures, grey skies and
sleet that can keep you indoors for days.

The first implies that temperatures in Britain are unpleasant; the second sets up a strong
contrast between the negative term “drag” and the positive “fun”; the third implies that there
is something wrong with cloudy weather; and the last associates a clearly negative emotion,
depression, with cold, grey, sleet. All of these use a problem frame to set up a “problem” (bad
weather), and then provide the “solution” (the holiday).
Other travel websites and newspapers in the corpus represent the sunshine holiday as a
form of “escape”, framing British weather negatively as a kind of prison:

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 Discovering the Weatherworld

• Are you looking to escape the gloomy British weather with an amazing summer holiday?
• It’s time to start planning your escape from the UK this winter.
• . . .escape from the unreliable British weather. There are many other countries and resorts
where sunshine is more predictable.
• escape to the sun and leave the rain behind.

One travel website talks about sunshine as a “remedy for the chilly British winter weather”,
which frames British weather negatively as a disease. By contrast, the sunshine holiday is framed as
the cure.
I could, of course, go on and on, but the pattern is very clear already. Using a number of
linguistic devices such as framing, collocation, contrast, and presupposition, newspapers and
travel agents are telling a clear story. The story is that ONLY SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD. Cloudy,
cold or wet weather is associated (rather unfairly) with Britain while the good weather
belongs to the distant holiday resort. The intention is to encourage the reader to feel
dissatisfied with the place they live in and the diversity of constantly changing weather in
that place, in order to goad them into purchasing holidays in the sun. Yes, it can be cold in
winter, but flying off for a week in Spain is an extreme, expensive, and only temporary
solution compared with buying a warm coat from a second-hand shop.
These holidays, of course, are ecologically destructive because of the fuel used in transport,
the environmental impact of the hotels and the huge amount of shopping that tends to go
with them. But another concern is that the holidays are just for one or two weeks a year,
whereas the green spaces near home can be experienced and enjoyed all year round, with the
diverse and changing weather providing variety and interest.
This problem goes to the heart of what is wrong with the capitalist society we live in. No
one makes a profit from people gaining wellbeing for free in their local surroundings. The
economy does not grow, even if people are healthy and happier. So there are no advertise-
ments describing the wonderful places and experiences that can be had nearby, just advertise-
ments for holidays in the sun. The travel companies are taking something which is
quintessentially free, the weather, and packaging it up into sunshine holidays to sell to the
consumer. The newspapers, which rely on advertising for their profit, amplify the pattern.
The pattern can be broken, though, with critical awareness of how advertisements and
newspapers use language to convey stories – stories which generate dissatisfaction and
encourage us to harm the environment. With critical awareness comes the possibility of
resisting these stories, both by exposing them and pointing out their deficiencies, and more
practically by taking a “holiday” in whatever green spaces can be found nearby.

The weather forecast

It was not the travel companies who invented the story that sunny weather is good and any
other kind of weather is bad, although they certainly amplify and promote the story.2 No, the
story runs much deeper than that, and goes to the heart of British culture. When strangers
meet they greet each other with “Lovely weather, isn’t it?” (meaning only that it’s hot and
sunny) or “Terrible weather, isn’t it?” (meaning there’s even a hint of mist, rain or cloud).
Perhaps the stranger has different political or religious beliefs, but the one thing they can be
counted to agree on is that sun is good and rain is bad.
The story ONLY SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD is so widespread that it can be considered one of
the stories we live by in Britain. The stories we live by are ways of viewing the world that exist
in the minds of many people within a culture, and appear frequently in the everyday texts

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that surround us, from conversations with friends to weather forecasts. Sometimes they are
helpful, but sometimes they are damaging and dangerous. A story like ONLY SUNNY WEATHER
IS GOOD can be damaging if it stops people enjoying the place they live in, alienates them
from nature for large parts of the year, and encourages them to travel in cars, go shopping in
covered malls, escape to virtual worlds, or fly off to the sun.
Aside from everyday conversation, the story that ONLY SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD is most
strongly promoted by the seemingly innocent and mundane language of the weather forecast.
Weather forecasters never seem to talk about rain as something cooling, refreshing, invigorat-
ing or life-supporting, just as a disappointment or an inconvenience.
My interest in the weather forecast started a few years ago during a long heatwave – three
weeks of searing temperatures in July when I felt exhausted every day and oppressed by the
sun beating down on my head and shoulders whenever I left the shade of the house. I longed
for the cool, refreshing rain that would not only revitalise me, but also the wilting plants and
the birds who were longing to splash their wings in puddles. What surprised me was how the
weather forecast described the heat and sun so positively. This is a typical example, from the
hottest day in the heatwave:
It’s going to look fantastic weatherwise for tomorrow . . . anything that you’ve got
planned outdoors will be unspoiled, glorious sunshine, some very high temperatures
. . . a very low risk of rain so broadly speaking a glorious weekend
(from my local weather forecast, BBC Points West)
The pattern is clear: hot, sunny weather is positive (fantastic, glorious), and anything else is
negative. There is the implication in “unspoiled” that any other kind of weather would spoil
the sunshine, and rain is a “risk” rather than a welcome and tantalising possibility.
All through the heatwave I watched weather forecasts and wrote down the expressions
they used to talk about different kinds of weather. I found that dry, hot and sunny weather
was represented positively using the words fine, pleasant, nice, lovely, beautiful, best, fantastic,
glorious, decent, good, perfect, glorious, and cracking. And all other kinds of weather (misty, cloudy,
rainy, overcast, thundery, muggy, showery, damp, breezy, wet, dull, or grey weather) were described
negatively.
The words for describing what are actually completely normal British weather conditions
are almost comically negative. One forecast uses the adverb alas in “Alas, a lot of cloud. . .”
indicating total despair. There are outbreaks of rain and a plague of cloud, as if they were a
disease. Clouds encroach, linger, mull about and are a nuisance, as if they were teenagers up to no
good. Emotions are brought in when sadly Scotland will be “a bit showery” (while England is
“basking in lovely weather close to 30 degrees”), and “bits and pieces of rain” are described as
disappointing. Low coastal mist, fog, and showers are described as a threat. When at last the
heatwave broke and there were heavy showers, the weather forecast described this is as nasty
weather.
Looking closely, it is clear that everything that is treated negatively in the weather
forecast is related either to water (cloud, rain, mist, or humidity) or to darkness (dull,
gloomy, grey weather). This suggests a profound cultural fear of water, and a fear of the
dark. In terms of sustainability, this is worrying, since 60 per cent of the human body is
water, and we, along with all other life on the planet, depend on water for our continued
survival. And darkness: in the UK there is certainly far more time that is dark, dull, or
grey than bright sunshine. This cultural fear of water and dark could stop us from
enjoying the world we live in for most of the year, and the weather forecast could be
accused of stoking this fear.

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Running in the Weatherworld

“Another glorious day, no threat of rain.” As I sat sweating in the 33-degree heat, I realised that
the weather forecast had got it wrong. Not that it had failed to predict the weather accurately,
but that it had failed to predict me, the viewer, correctly. The weather forecast had
presupposed that I was the kind of person who obviously thought that hot sun is good, and
hated the mist, rain and clouds. My worry is that if weather forecasts constantly presuppose
that hot sun is obviously good and any other kind of weather is obviously bad, viewers may
eventually end up thinking like that.
So I decided to do some unusual research. I would check the accuracy of the weather
forecast by listening to it carefully, then going out running every morning in the fields
outside my house, in all weathers. I would experience the weather directly with my body,
noticing very carefully how I felt, and compare it with images in the forecast. If the forecast
said, “A murky and disappointing start to the day”, I would check its accuracy, not by
looking at the weather conditions around me to see whether it was actually murky or not,
but whether I felt disappointed. I would write a diary about my experience, comparing the
accuracy of the weather forecast with other sources, such as nature writers who describe the
fog rolling in off the hills in reverent tones rather than as a nuisance.
Looking at my Weatherworld diary, I can see that at the beginning it was hard to get out
of bed at 6:30am into the dim morning light and cold and push an unfit body to run. The
weather forecast that first September morning stated: “It’s a bit of a cold start to the day tomorrow
morning, some mist and fog around at first as well but otherwise I think a nice bright picture, some good
sunny spells.” It was wrong. Wrong in the sense that it put the positives on “bright” (a nice
bright picture) and sun (good sunny spells) and used “but” to contrast this with the mist and
fog, as if mist or fog cannot be nice and good in itself. But the mist was “nice” and “good”. I
wrote:
Still light on this morning’s run, coolness in the air. It looked like the sun, but it was
a low full moon, hazy behind the thin clouds. The tops of hedgerows poking out of
the cold light mist; heavy dew on the grass showing up the spider webs; feet getting
wet.
(abridged from diary entry)
I wrote that something had changed by the time I got home, and that was because of the
beauty of the fog and mist and moon and trees, the feeling of being alive and running
through this, through the Weatherworld. The realisation that this was there outside all the
time, but I had not noticed it. And that it would be waiting for me tomorrow morning and
every morning.
The next day the weather forecast talked about an “invasion of cloud” and used the
negative word “linger” for the mist, then “hopefully we’ll get some sunny spells.” There
were clouds, but in the sunrise they gradually became tinged with red and gold and became a
thing of beauty, not of threat.
I brought my camera to capture the spectacle, but when I got home and uploaded the
photos I realised how impossible it is to capture the experience in a flat, square photograph.
The experience of being in the same mist as the trees and grass, smelling it, breathing it in,
taking in the wide sweep of the hedgerows and trees. It’s a theme I returned to often – the
impossibility of capturing the experience of being out in the Weatherworld in either words or
photographs. I hear a chorus of birdsong in a bush and as I peer in I see the shadowy shapes
of birds flitting from stem to stem. I want to capture this – in a photograph? Impossible. In

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words? Also impossible because there was something wonderful about what I saw that is not
captured at all by the word “wonderful”. I’ve been searching among the most talented of
nature writers and poets, and some seem to get closer than others to describing the Weath-
erworld, but none can capture it fully. And that is why it is essential to be out there, in the
Weatherworld and experience it directly, not just on the internet, on TV, in books,
photographs or magazines.
The weather forecast said “disappointingly grey to start with” but I notice that the sky is
never grey, it’s an ever-changing swirl of different greys and whites as the cloud thins and
thickens, sometimes with blue or pink patches opening and closing. I am not “disappointed”
at all. I started looking at Gilbert White’s weather diary, to see his thoughts on the weather
on the same day in 1768, and on October 30th he wrote, “Fine grey day. Fallows glutted with
water, and full of weeds.” The phrase “fine grey day” would now be considered an oxymoron,
a complete contradiction.
I’m running in the same place each day, but it is never monotonous, never boring,
because it is always changing. Slow changes as the winter warms to spring, flowers start
appearing and dying; and fast, minute-by-minute, second-by-second changes as clouds sweep
overhead or a fox runs across my path. I write:
I felt strongly this morning how unique each experience of the Weatherworld is.
There was warmth, a peculiarly warm wind, a hint of rain in the air, a black line of
clouds in front and the pink, white and blue of the sunrise behind. As I walked the
black line of clouds swept overhead, unstoppable, and as I broke into a run the rain
swept down. An instinct of wanting to hide or take shelter gave way to a feeling of
exhilaration and being alive as I ran through the rain, getting wetter and wetter.
I noticed that in the rain and wind I can hear the trees around me as well as see them. I hear the
leaves as they rustle in the wind and are hit countless times by droplets of rain. And the leaves are
responding to the same rain and breeze I feel on my cheek – we are together in the Weatherworld.
The weather forecast was almost always negative about the rain, of course: “a rogue shower”,
“rain creeping in”, “a rash of showers developing towards the afternoon”, “the day we’re worried
about I think will be Friday when the showers could turn out to be slow moving.” It’s the “we”
in “we’re worried about” that concerns me because it brings the viewers in and includes them
(and me), as if we are the kind of people who are worried about a little rain.
John Ruskin once wrote, “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up,
snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good
weather” (Ruskin, qtd. in Sutton 2007: 43). Ruskin may be overstating it, however. Not
every moment in the Weatherworld has been enjoyable – the driving hail stinging my face
was surprisingly painful, the frost soon soaked through my thin running shoes and my feet felt
like blocks of ice. There are often practical problems that the weather causes – it may be
highly inconvenient to be soaked through on the way to work, trainers getting mouldy. Or
more seriously, the floods and droughts and heatwaves caused by climate change will become
increasingly severe and life-threatening.
What I can say about my running in the Weatherworld is that I have had experiences that
have increased my wellbeing and helped me learn about myself and the world around me.
And I have had these positive experiences in a far wider range of weathers than the narrow range
praised in everyday conversation and the weather forecast. If I had a fear of the dark and a
fear of water in my mind from being immersed in UK culture, I have banished it, and now
will gladly throw myself into the rain at 6:30am, looking forward to the feeling of being alive
and at one with the Weatherworld.

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UK nature writing
In her article “Longing for Clouds—Does Beautiful Weather have to be Fine?”, Mădălina
Diaconu (2015) criticises what she calls “the poor blue-sky thinking that underlies widespread
consumption of tourist destinations at long distances”. The problem, she says, is that we like
dry sunny days because they allow us to ignore the weather and get on with other things like
transport, sport, or leisure activities that are unconnected with appreciating the ever-changing
diversity of the weather conditions around us. It is this diversity which fulfils our deep
psychological need for variation in life, and living in a paradise of endless sunny days would
end up monotonous and boring. Diaconu calls for “a reflective aesthetic attitude on weather,
as influenced by art, literature, and science, which discovers the poetics of bad weather and
the wonder that underlies average weather conditions”.
To put it another way, in the UK, the story ONLY SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD is so deeply
entrenched in the culture that it is a story we live by. We need to become aware of these
stories, question them, and if we find there are problems with them, we need to search for
new stories to live by. Ecolinguistics has the power to “discover the poetics of bad weather”
through critical discourse analysis of texts which represent “bad weather” in positive ways.
One place to turn in order to find such texts is literature.
Over the last few years I have been reading contemporary UK nature writing to help me
see the world around me through the eyes of other people, people who go out into the
Weatherworld and explore it with a sense of wonder and appreciation. They go out into the
rain, into the dark, into the mist, and in stark contrast to the messages of their culture, find
something wonderful there. And not only that, they find ways of expressing what they
discover in vivid prose that conveys the essence of their experience to the reader. Of course,
they cannot capture the full experience in words, but they can encourage us to go out and
explore the world around us for ourselves, approaching it in a new way and making new
discoveries.
Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature is a book by Chris Yates (2012), who is best
known as an advocate of fishing as a way of getting closer to nature. In Nightwalk, however,
he leaves the fish alone (luckily for them) and instead explores nature at night: “This evening,
the ponds and lakes will be jumping but I will be elsewhere” (6).
Yates’s description of his dusk-to-dawn journey from his garden, over hills and through
woods, resists the deep-seated fear of the dark that is built so deeply into British culture. He
makes the point that in the dark it’s possible to see things which are impossible during the
day: “At night there were no people anywhere [just] all kinds of . . . creatures, each one
casually going about its night-time business, a whole secret world coming alive in the
undisturbed dark” (15). Or to see familiar things in, quite literally, a new light: “I like the
way my familiar surroundings are differently transformed by the twilight as I walk through
them” (10).
As he walks across the shadowy hills and woods he encounters deer, hares, birds, trees,
hills, woods and rivers. But at the same time, he is intensely aware of the weather, pointing
out “a single vaguely fish shaped cloud that was drifting from the south” (5), beech trees
“quivering restlessly in an isolated nocturnal breeze” (28), and how “the interior of the valley
below filled with a blueish mist” as the moon rose (46). He is exploring not just the world of
the night, but the Weatherworld of the night.
The positivity Yates gives to the Weatherworld comes partly from the detailed descrip-
tions of the sights, sounds and smells around him. Just mentioning them indicates that they
are noteworthy or special in some way, for example:

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Everything along the ridge above me was in solid unilluminated silhouette: a heart-
shaped hawthorn, a young ash tree, several clumps of thistle and at least five pairs of
rabbit ears.
(Yates 2012: 23)
By mentioning the light and shapes rather than giving an objective description (“there was a
hawthorn, a tree, some thistles and some rabbits”), Yates is placing the reader in his position,
looking up at the ridge and seeing the outlines of other beings above. And that is what this
writing does – it places the reader in an ordinary place and conveys a sense of positivity about
being there, encouraging readers to go out themselves and have similar experiences.
As well as the detailed description, Yates also draws on a particularly powerful lexical set (a
group of words from the same area of life). It is a lexical set of myth, magic and religion.
Here are some examples:
the antlered deer appeared “slightly unreal—a mythic descendant from the time
when all this was one vast medieval deer forest”
(24)
a wood pigeon began to coo, repeating his familiar soft-toned mantra—a mesmerizing
sound in that setting
(46)
the magical light, the intoxicating air. . .
(24)
there is something miraculous about the way the bird materializes out of a clear
night sky
(29)
In using these powerful and positive words, Yates resists the cultural story DARK IS BAD and
replaces it with THE DARK CAN BE GOOD, very good indeed. He opens up the Weatherworld
at night as a place of wonder and mystery instead of being somewhere we cut ourselves off
from by closing the curtains. The new experiences that can be had in the dark contribute
to the diversity and variety that is necessary for a satisfying life, in a way which does not
require buying shiny new things or travelling to distant countries. The story THE DARK CAN
BE GOOD is therefore a useful counter story to ONLY SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD, a story we
could live by.
What Chris Yates does for the dark, Melissa Harrison (2016) does for the rain in her book
Rain: Four Walks in English Weather. She walks in Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley
and Dartmoor, in four seasons, in the rain, and discovers that the rain can be inconvenient
but also wonderful. And more than that, she discovered that rain plays a role in making us
who we are as human beings. Together Yates and Harrison address the two deep phobias
built into British culture – fear of the dark and fear of water – and through vivid language
suggest new stories to live by.
Like Yates, Harrison goes out into the Weatherworld in conditions that would normally
deter us: “Because it’s something that sends most of us scurrying indoors, few people witness
what actually happens out in the landscape on a wet afternoon” (Harrison 2016: xi). The
solution to getting wet is simply waterproof clothing. Quoting Alfred Wainwright, she states
that, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing,” and then describes in
detail the sights and sounds of the world in the rain:

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That day, we walked from Keswick to Threlkeld along an old railway line in full
waterproof gear (even the dog had her coat on) and it absolutely hosed it down, as
the locals say. But . . . it was wonderful; we were dry and warm inside our clothes,
the River Greta rushed and roared white, a dipper dinked smartly from the
gleaming rocks and the leaves dripped green and glossy on the trees.
(xiii)
The theme of water on plants is one that she returns to: “There were a few bare hawthorns
hung with silver drops” (10), “I find a single tiny speedwell in flower . . . its petals close in
wet weather to prevent its pollen being washed away” (14). These images bring together the
weather and the world into a seamless Weatherworld.
One of the ways that Harrison gives positivity to the rain is to describe the claustrophobic
feeling of being cooped up on rainy days as a child, in contrast with the freedom of being
outdoors:
Being stuck indoors was the most terrible punishment: outside was where every-
thing exciting happened.
(11)
On fine days we had the run of the local woods . . . a really wet day . . . meant the
reduction of that vast territory to the smaller, duller, enclave of the house itself; and
we chafed at it.
(12)
What I like most about Harrison’s writing is the way that she represents nature actively. Rain,
she says, is “co-author of our living landscape” (xi), and it often appears as the agent (the one
doing something) in clauses: rain “dimples the surface of the lode” (9), it “begins to patter
invisibly once more on [the pub’s] blistered roof and streak its ancient, cloudy panes” (26).
And all kinds of living beings are also represented as active agents, getting on with their
business in the world:
April . . . is changeable, rainclouds tend to build and blow in (and over) quickly . . .
April is about change on the ground, too. Deep in the warm, damp-earth seeds are
germinating, the hedge-rows are coming into leaf, wild flowers are beginning to
bloom and insects breed, and everywhere the birds are at their most active, building
nests and defending their territories. Life is getting on with the grand business of
growing and reproducing; rain may feel like an inconvenience, but at this time of
year it’s essential.
(29)
This is one of the best descriptions of the Weatherworld that I have come across: it describes
the weather actively, with the rainclouds blowing in, and life active on the ground below,
with seeds, hedgerows, wildflowers, insects and birds all doing things, and then describes the
interconnection and dependence of that life on the weather. The human is not separate from
all this either – she is right there, in her waterproof clothes, seeing everything.

Japan
The search for new stories to live by can take us to distant places, and distant times, when
traditional cultures had very different ways of viewing the world. Robert Macfarlane (2007)
describes the Shan-Shui (山水, mountain-water) artists and writers of China:

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[Shan-Shui writers] explored their mountains in what they called the “dragon-suns”
of summer, in the long winds of winter and the blossom storms of late spring. They
wrote of the cool mist that settled into valleys at dawn, of bamboo groves into
which green light fell, and of how thousands of snowy egrets would take off from
lakes like lifting blizzards.
(32)
These writers lived in the Weatherworld, describing the changing weather, the changing
seasons, and the animals and plants whose lives were intimately linked with the weather.
They did not think of the “cool mist” as a disappointment, but as a part of nature as beautiful
as the bamboo groves or the snowy egrets.
My early research took me to China in the search for new stories to live by about life,
death and illness. But it was only much later when I lived in Japan that my outlook
broadened beyond the human world to consider and reconsider the natural world around me.
I was living in Futsukaichi, a village in the southern island of Kyushu surrounded by
mountains, temples, hot springs, and bamboo groves. I started reading Japanese haiku poetry,
short poems about nature in the form of a five-syllable line, a seven-syllable line, and another
five-syllable line. These poems spoke of a moment of connection where the poet stopped and
noticed something ordinary in the natural world around them: a frog, a shepherd’s purse flower,
a bee, a sparrow, a pine tree, the moon, cherry blossoms. The poems capture the experience
concisely and as authentically as is possible. And by framing an ordinary part of nature in the
form of a poem, they make a statement that it is worthy of attention, special, to be appreciated.
The haiku below is one of my favourites because of the tenderness it shows towards an
insect being swept away on a floating branch by the river:

鳴ながら naki nagara

虫の流るる mushi no nagaruru
浮木かな ukigi kana
still singing
the insect drifts away. . .
floating branch
(Issa qtd. in Lanoue)

Reading haiku poetry helped change the way I saw the world around me – I paid
attention to things I would have disregarded before: flowers by the side of the road, an ant
crawling across a leaf, a bee flying out of a cosmos flower, shiny colours reflecting from the
back of a starling.
In the same way that haiku poets find beauty in ordinary plants and animals, they also find
beauty in ordinary weather. Here are some examples taken from haiku anthologies:

• 夜はうれしく/昼は静かや/春の雨
Joyful at night/tranquil during the day/spring rain (Chora qtd. in Addiss and Yamamoto
2002: 18).
• おもしろし/雪にやならん/冬の雨
What fun/it may change into snow/the winter rain (Bashō qtd. in Addiss et al. 1996: 90).
• 山陰や涼みがてらのわらぢ茶屋
Mountain shade/while enjoying the cool air/straw sandals, teahouse (Issa qtd. in Lanuoe
2018).

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• 五月雨/ある夜ひそかに/松の月
Summer rains/secretly one evening/moon in the pines (Ryōta qtd. in Addiss et al. 1996: 39).
• 春なれや/名もなき山の/朝霞
Spring is here/morning mist/on a nameless mountain (Bashō qtd. in Addiss and
Yamamoto 2002: 16).
• 梅の樹の/かたちづくりす/初時雨
Sculpting the shape/of the plum tree/first winter rain (Kitō qtd. in Addiss et al. 1996: 91).
• 三たびないて/聞こえずなりぬ/雨の鹿
Calling three times/then no more to be heard/the deer in the rain (Buson qtd. in
Yamamoto 2006: 23).
• 春雨や/木の間に見ゆる/海の道
Spring rain/visible through the trees/a path to the sea (Otsuni qtd. in Addiss and
Yamamoto 2002: 25).

The positivity that these give to the rain, mist, dark, snow, and cool comes partly from just
appearing in haiku poems, which traditionally praise aspects of nature. It also comes from
combining the rain and mist with culturally valued natural features: mountain, moon, pines,
plum trees, deer, and the sea. The combination places the poet, and hence the reader, right there
in the middle of the Weatherworld, looking up and down and appreciating the surroundings.
Looking closely, it is possible to see the drops of water in the character for rain (雨). And
this character combines with other characters to create dozens of expressions for different
kinds of rain. Among the many expressions there is 春雨 (harusame), which the Goojisho
Japanese-Japanese dictionary describes as 春、 しとしとと静かに降る雨 (gentle, quietly falling
rain in spring). There is 村雨 (murasame), which the dictionary describes as “light stop-start
rain between the end of autumn and the start of winter”; 時雨 (shigure), “passing rain that
falls in large drops between the end of autumn and start winter”; and 夕立 (yūdachi),
“cooling rain that falls on a summer evening”. These expressions are often used in haiku
poems to distinguish, represent and celebrate a great diversity of kinds of rain, opening up a
new world of experiences to those whose reaction in the past would be to run inside at the
first drop of rain (Stibbe 2015: 102).
While reading poetry is not for everyone, Japanese animation has proved popular far beyond
the shores of Japan, and provides a route for vivid depictions of the beauty of the Weatherworld
to spread across the world. To pick one example, the animated film Tonari no Totoro (my
neighbour Totoro) has a highly memorable rain scene which lasts a full 11 minutes.
The scene begins with black clouds moving slowly in the background against a foreground
of pink flowers with green stems. Raindrops fall into the water of the rice paddy, rippling
into circles. Rain falls against a background of fields, hedgerows, trees, purple hydrangeas, and
wooden shrines. A frog walks slowly across along the path, taking its time. A last drop lands
in a puddle with a splash. The frog lets out a croak. The film represents the dark and rain as
another world, one that can be scary but is filled with beauty, wonder, and adventure. The
sense of wonder arises not only from the supernatural forest spirits who appear from time to
time, but also from the very ordinary frog walking slowly along the path in the rain. And in
the background, there are rich green plants and trees. The depictions of ordinary nature in
the scene, and across the whole film, resemble haiku – short moments where the shot lingers
on a snail, a leaf, a frog, a butterfly, in its full natural context, long enough to show that it is
special and worthy of attention, respect, and care.
The importance of representing ordinary nature in inspiring ways in haiku and animation
is that after reading the poetry or seeing the films, we are likely to come across the same

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flowers, plants, birds, insects, mist, or rain in our everyday lives. The haiku help us to notice
them and set up an appreciative way of approaching them, opening up paths to participation
and enjoyment of nature that may not have been open before.

Conclusion
Aldo Leopold wrote that “It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist
without love, respect and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value” (Leopold 2001:
189). In this chapter I’ve been arguing for the benefits and importance of respecting and
admiring not just the land, but the wider Weatherworld in which we live.
This is how all the things I’ve been writing about come together: there is a story deeply
embedded within British culture that only bright, sunny weather is good. All other weathers
are an annoyance to be avoided by staying indoors watching TV, escaping to virtual worlds
where there is no weather, ducking into indoor shopping malls, or flying off on a sunshine
holiday. If we can overcome this story, we can appreciate the great diversity and variety of
the natural world around us, gaining a sense of health and wellbeing from being outside in all
weathers in the green spaces we can find around us. And more than that, we can reflect
philosophically on who we are, as beings who evolved within a green Weatherworld, and are
adapted physically and mentally to thrive in that world.
Ingold writes that in modern cities people attempt to banish the weather “to the exterior
of their air-conditioned, temperature regulated, artificially lit, and glass-enclosed buildings”
(2015: 72). I have described three tools that could help in the shift from hiding from the
Weatherworld to fully living in it and being a part of it.
The first tool is ecolinguistics, where we can use linguistic techniques to reveal the stories
we live by – the cognitive structures that are shared across the minds of individuals within a
society and influence how we think, talk and act (Stibbe 2015: 10). The story that ONLY
SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD is embedded deeply within UK culture and is such a part of the
fabric of the culture that it is rarely noticed. After revealing the stories we live by,
ecolinguistics questions those stories from an ecological perspective. The story ONLY SUNNY
WEATHER IS GOOD can be seen to be damaging because it encourages an indoor life entertained
by consumer gadgets, shopping in covered malls or flying off to the sun.
The second tool is ecocriticism (Garrard 2014), which can be used to interrogate local and
worldwide literature to search for new stories to live by – alternative perspectives which
encourage appreciation of, and participation in, the Weatherworld in all its faces and moods.
These new stories both encourage us to go outside and, once outside, give us ideas for how
to look, what to notice, and what to appreciate.
The third, and essential, tool is direct participation in the Weatherworld, because
language, no matter how vivid, can never fully capture the reality of being there. We need
to feel the wind on our cheeks, hear the leaves rustle, watch the clouds pass over the moon,
and smell the unmistakable earthy smell of autumn – all with our own senses, and all
simultaneously, not linearly as we read about them across a page. While ecolinguistics can
help us realise that there are deep problems with the stories we live by, and ecocriticism can
help us discover new stories to live by, it is the Weatherworld itself that can tell the most
authentic, vivid and engaging stories, if we just go outside and listen.

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Notes
1 This research is based on a European Union funded project MeWeWhole (http://mewewhole.com).
An earlier but fuller version of the material presented here, together with a photographic exploration
of the Weatherworld, diary extracts and teaching materials (in English, Italian, Slovenian and
Turkish), can be found at http://intheweatherworld.wordpress.com.
2 All quotations from weather forecasts are from a corpus of forecasts transcribed from BBC Points
West and BBC national weather forecasts.

Works cited
Addiss, Stephen, et al. A Haiku Garden: The Four Seasons in Poems and Prints. Weatherhill, 1996.
Addiss, Stephen, et al. Haiku People, Big and Small: In Poems and Prints. Weatherhill, 1998.
Addiss, Stephen, and F. Yamamoto. Haiku Landscapes: In Sun, Wind, Rain, and Snow. Weatherhill, 2002.
Diaconu, Mădălina. “Longing for Clouds – Does Beautiful Weather Have to Be Fine?” Contemporary
Aesthetics 13. (2015). www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=719.
Garrard, Greg. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Harrison, Melissa. Rain: Four Walks in English Weather. Faber & Faber, 2016. Open WorldCat. www.
overdrive.com/search?q=988CE82A-EB88-41B8-98EC-44049C317A21.
Ingold, Tim. “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing”. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 16.1 (2010): 121–39.
Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. Routledge, 2015.
Lanoue, David. The Haiku of Kobayashi Issa. http://haikuguy.com/issa/. Accessed 20 August 2018.
Leopold, A. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Macfarlane, Robert. The Wild Places. Granta Books, 2007.
Machin, David, et al. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. Sage, 2012.
Stibbe, Arran. Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. Routledge, 2015.
Sutton, Philip. The Environment: A Sociological Introduction. Polity, 2007.
Thomson Holidays. Sunshine Holidays. www.thomson.co.uk/editorial/features/sunshine-holidays.html.
Accessed 12 January 2015.
Yamamoto, Akira. A Haiku Menagerie: Living Creatures in Poems and Prints. Shambhala, 2006.
Yates, Christopher. Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature. Collins, 2012.

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 7
NARRATIVE
COMMUNICATION IN
ENVIRONMENTAL FICTION
Cognitive and rhetorical approaches
Markku Lehtimäki

Narrative is a means of communicating ideas, values, and possible states of mind to an

audience, and in order to accomplish its aims a narrative emphasizes experience and
emotion. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and discuss the ways in which narrative
theory and ecocriticism may be beneficial to each other, especially when it comes to
communicating ideas about nature and the environment in the mode of storytelling. While
classical structuralist narratology was ideologically disinterested in its technical orientation,
recent postclassical trends in narratology have turned their attention to real-world concerns.
This chapter will especially focus on: (1) ecocriticism, which concerns itself with the signs and
meanings that we humans give to non-human nature; (2) cognitive narratology, according to
which human perception and understanding are crucially bound in our biological circum-
stances and real-world experiences; and (3) the rhetorical theory of narrative, which is about the
ways that authors communicate to their audiences using available poetic and rhetorical
resources.
As it will be argued in this chapter, ecocriticism and narratology offer their respective and
differing views on the relationship between fiction and the natural environment. Ecocriticism
traditionally focuses on the presence of nature and the environment in poetry or environmental
writing, a presence that is reached through mimetic realism and referential aims. Cognitive studies
emphasize the capacities of the human mind to know the natural world through general frames,
scripts, and schemas, whereas narratology typically foregrounds literary devices and more or less
universal structures with which we can analyze practically any narrative. It is suggested here that a
new methodology bridging narratology and ecocriticism is needed, but that it cannot be done
without understanding and respecting their specific approaches and accomplishments. The
rhetorical theory of narrative, with its main focus on how authors design texts in particular ways
in order to affect their audiences both emotionally, ethically, and aesthetically, is one solid
approach among others, even though it pays insufficient attention to the non-human world. Still,
both the rhetorical theory of narrative and environmental literary studies see the importance of
ethics and rhetoric in literary communication, and this question—concerning the ideas and values

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in environmental fiction—is one that brings the practices and purposes of narratology and
ecocriticism together.
In this chapter, the principal aim is, first, to build a methodological combination of ecocriti-
cism and narratology, both cognitive and rhetorical, and, second, to demonstrate how an analysis
of some narrative fictions would benefit from taking into account both fictional minds and
natural environments. Environmental narrative studies are basically interested in questions
such as what is the relationship between stories and the natural environment and how do
literary representations affect the ways in which we see our environment. An environmentally
schooled narratology should recognize that nature informs our narrative practices but also that
natural phenomena and formations are given specific narrative structures and textual designs
in fiction. In traditional ecocritical notions, which foreground realism and referentiality—as
in Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995)—it is supposed that literary texts
somehow transform nature into the page, but at the same time this tradition is skeptical
towards the basic ingredients of literary and narrative theory, such as “plot,” “character,”
“viewpoint,” and other supposedly anthropomorphic concepts. Thus, while classical narra-
tology has been limited in its discussion of the extratextual natural world and while classical
ecocriticism has been regarded naïve in its non-employment of the narratological toolbox,
there have been recent attempts at bridging and “cross-pollinating” these two methodologies
(see Heise 2005; Easterlin 2010; Lehtimäki 2013; James 2015; von Mossner 2017). It is argued
in this chapter that recent narrative fiction often employs both mimetic action and didactic
teaching in order to communicate environmental values and risks to its audiences and that to
understand these forms and functions in fiction we need to combine the respective metho-
dological strengths of ecocriticism and narrative theory.

Ecocriticism and narratology: tensions and dialogues

Narratology and ecocriticism have traced different paths until recent years. As Cheryll
Glotfelty defines it in her seminal introductory article, “ecocriticism is the study of the
relationship between literature and the physical environment,” it “takes an earth-centered
approach to literary studies,” and it “takes as its subject the interconnections between nature
and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature” (1996: xviii, xix). It
has been a crucial part of ecocritical practice not only to analyze how the natural world is
represented in literary texts but also—and even more so—to advocate for environmental
awareness and social change. In Serpil Oppermann’s critical overview, many ecocritics “tend
to perceive environmental literature as a potential resource for examining the importance of
environmental values” and “at its best ecocriticism uses literature as a pretext to study
environmental issues and evaluates relevant texts according to their capacity to articulate
ecological contexts” (2006: 111). To put it bluntly, ecocriticism prefers reality to textuality.
Some ecocritics even go so far as to suggest that while nature poetry can make us see the
natural world around us in fresh ways and with new eyes, “at best, [Adrienne] Rich may
encourage us to put down her book and go out-of-doors into a real field” (Gilcrest 2002:
139). Or, in the words of another ecocritic, the primary function of “ecopoetry” is to “point
us outward, toward that infinitely less limited referential reality of nature” (Scigaj 1999: 38).
For a formalist, there is perhaps something slightly amiss about being advised by a literary
scholar to stop reading nature poetry and to enjoy real nature instead.
In its attempt to rethink the aims and purposes of literary studies, ecocriticism has therefore
chosen a different route and approach from narratology. For instance, when developing his
influential theory of an environmental imagination, Lawrence Buell suggests that we should

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readjust our thinking as regards the question of representation. He argues that the study of the
environmental imagination will ultimately bring about a change in what we consider to be
the basic tenets of literary theory (1995: 2, 3). It is symptomatic that Buell aims to downplay
precisely those concepts—character, plot, and point of view—which are regarded as
essential to the very nature of narrative. Buell’s stance seems to reflect a more widespread
suspicion of narrative concepts and theories among ecocritics. His ideal of “the relationship
between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmental
praxis” (430) clearly prefers non-fictional nature writing to narrative fiction. Posing a
fundamental question concerning the possibility of ecocriticism, Dominic Head also argues
that narrative fiction seems to be peculiarly resistant to the operations of ecocriticism (1998:
32). Obviously, this argument is also directed towards the limits of ecocriticism as a mode
of literary theory. The important test case, for Head, concerns whether or not the novel—
the most typical and popular form of narrative prose fiction—can be a useful vehicle for
generating “green” ideas. It is indeed difficult to imagine a novel without human action and
human consciousness, and in most novels the natural environment is linked to the questions
of human life and human society—or it is only present as “a framing device,” to quote
Buell’s critical observation (1995: 8).
Buell’s groundbreaking contribution can hardly be presented in simplistic or reductionist
terms. For example, one is easily haunted by his initial question: “Must literature always
lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?” (11). He wants to seek to recover a
sense of the experiential and referential aspects of literature, so that we can treat literary texts
not as detractions from but as contributions to our interaction with the natural world (36).
These are important questions, to be sure, and yet Buell’s project is somewhat compromised
by his strong prejudices against the “textual” theories of contemporary literary criticism.
Criticizing both structuralist and poststructuralist thinking, Buell writes that “all major
strains of contemporary literary theory have marginalized literature’s referential dimension
by privileging structure, (text)uality, ideology, or some other conceptual matrix that defines
the space discourse occupies apart from factical ‘reality’” (86). He expresses concern about
the fact that our educational background in literary studies leads us to insist on a firm
separation of text and referent and argues that “modern conventions of reading block out
the environmental dimension of literary texts” (14). This is a huge claim, especially as
“modern conventions of reading” are not really specified anywhere in Buell’s argument.
One could easily present a counter-argument and suggest how the textual theories of
postmodernism have, as a matter of fact, turned our attention to the materiality of the text
and the world. A recent branch called material ecocriticism also shows how environmental
literary studies could learn from these poststructuralistically oriented approaches and devel-
opments (see Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 1–2).
Commenting on Buell’s attempt to “refine” and “reevaluate” some of the basic analytical
and theoretical premises of contemporary literary studies, Dana Phillips suggests that Buell’s
project tries to “enable ecocritics to break through the force field of formalist self-containment
which for so long cut texts off from the world” (1999: 583). It is part of Buell’s way of reading
literature to seek for “adequate” representations of nature, so that there is no real barrier
between the word and the thing; as Phillips argues, however, “ecocriticism may benefit from a
strong dose of formalism” (589–90). As mentioned, Buell’s claim is that ecocriticism should
focus on recovering a sense of the experiential or referential aspects of literature. Yet his
theoretical approach as well as his reading of literary texts is based on a rather limited
conception of mimesis. Consequently, what Buell means by the experiential or referential
aspects of literature are—quite simply—its realistic aspects. Phillips, however, questions whether

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realism with regard to nature would be a solution to the problem: if ecocriticism limited itself
to reading “realistic texts realistically,” its critical vision would be reduced to contemplating
whether a particular description of a pond or a tree is well-made and lively (586). According
to criticisms like these, ecocritics often contend themselves with mimetic and thematic levels
of the narrative, leaving aside the synthetic level, that is, the self-conscious, artificial design of
the text. However, some explicitly environmental texts, Serpil Oppermann notes, “combine
ecological and textual diversity,” and while those texts “are fashioned to create a reality
effect,” they also contain “a multitude of fictional, cultural and ecological meanings” (2006:
109). We should therefore pay attention to an “ecological conception of textuality” in
environmental literature and see how, in given works, “textual diversity and biodiversity
[. . .] shake hands” (109). Scott Knickerbocker also argues that “because ecocriticism osten-
sibly has one eye on the page and one eye on the physical world, it needs to deepen thinking
about the relationship between language and nature” (2012: 8). Or, to quote Scott Slovic’s
influential definition, ecocriticism
means either the study of nature writing by way of any scholarly approach or,
conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human–nature relationships
in any literary text, even texts that seem (at first glance) oblivious of the nonhuman
world.
(2008: 27)
In this case, any text is potentially open to ecocritical readings, just as any text about nature
can be approached by a variety of methodologies, including narratology.
Narratology, informed by linguistics, formalism, and structuralism, has, however, often
been regarded as antagonistic to cultural and political literary theories such as ecocriticism.
Classical structuralist narratology especially aimed at classifying general structures and typical
genres which would explain all narratives; it preferred form to feeling and was infamously
devoid of ethical, emotional, and experiential considerations. Character and plot were only
seen as linguistic functions and actions, and ideological interpretations of the fictional world
and its relations to the actual world were an area that belonged to other, less “scientific” kinds
of literary criticism. It appears, then, that classical ecocriticism with its mimetic and political
readings of non-human nature was in a strict opposition to classical narratology with its
technical concepts and virtual worlds, its diegetic levels and modes of discourse. In his book
The Song of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Bate laments that in the age of various textual theories
an ecologically oriented literary theory, “with its affirmation of not only the existence, but
also the sacredness, of the-things-of-nature-in-themselves,” seems naive in comparison (247).
Indeed, in Gérard Genette’s classic formulation concerning narration and focalization—“who
speaks?” versus “who sees?” (1980: 186–87)—a focus is on the human mind and language. It
would be the task of a new approach, combining narratology and ecocriticism, to pay
attention to the thing that is seen or spoken of. As David Herman has it,
a number of postclassical approaches, including those concerned with the rhetoric of
narrative [. . .], the role of narrative in the formation of identity, and the relations
between narrative and gender or ideology, have challenged the structuralist emphasis
on description over interpretation and evaluation.
(2005: 575)
At this point in theory, the influence of non-human nature on narrative practice was not
yet emphasized, but the marginalized or silenced nature is gradually becoming a part of
narratological theories as well.

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Consequently, narratology has in recent years become a context-oriented, functional,

interpretative, evaluative, and dynamic mode of inquiry into narratives as part of human
(and non-human) life. At the same time, its focus has shifted from canonical literature to the
various “natural” modes of storytelling. Despite these recent developments, the narratological
mainstream still tends to foreground fictional minds and imaginary storyworlds. Monika
Fludernik’s influential book Towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996) is both interesting and
symptomatic in this regard. Fludernik emphasizes general cognitive frames which readers use
to “naturalize” peculiar storytelling situations—the natural environment as such does not
figure prominently in Fludernik’s theory. In addition to the idea of “natural narrative”
deriving from William Labov’s sociolinguistic studies on spontaneous conversational story-
telling, Fludernik’s notion of “naturalization” means the process of making sense of even
difficult, non-narrative, or non-natural texts (31–34). This means, in the original structuralist
definition of Jonathan Culler, that “the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order
and thus made to seem natural” (1975: 137). It is part of the idea of literature to allow the
reader to see the surrounding world in a new light, through the artistic process of de-
familiarization, as it was formulated in Russian Formalism a century ago. As if ironically,
“pure” descriptions of non-human nature in narrative fiction somehow de-naturalize and de-
familiarize natural frames of storytelling, which rely on human experientiality.
That which is “natural” should apparently be also discussed in relation to what is
“unnatural.” Fludernik reminds us that the idea of contrasting the natural or nature
(physis) with the artificial or culture has been there from the antiquity, but that especially
in our ecological age nature and its naturalness is contrasted positively to culture and its
artificiality (2012: 358). As the representatives of unnatural narratology have it in their joint
essay, “[t]he unnatural is everywhere, and it is about time for narrative theory to embrace
it” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen and Richardson 2010: 136). Their argument is that narrative
studies have, thus far, paid insufficient attention to various anti-mimetic, fabulous, experi-
mental, and difficult literary modes, but as Fludernik argues in her response, the term
“unnatural” is in many cases an unhappy and imprecise notion and that, as she suggests,
“perhaps impossible [. . .] narratology could work” (2012: 367). We can also—and even with
more conviction—claim that the natural is everywhere, and it is about time for narrative
theory to embrace it. Indeed, nature is always there, whether or not we recognize it, since
we ourselves are part of that nature. Speaking of “the natural” in this context it should not
be used in Fludernik’s sense only, but as a new and emerging way of thinking about
narrative theory in relation to environmental ethics.

Fictional minds in natural environments

Some 20 years ago, David Herman envisioned that “the whole landscape of narratological
inquiry now displays a different topography” than the one mapped by structuralism, and, as
he suggested, this reconfiguration and transformation can be described as a “shift from text-
centered or formal models to modes that are jointly formal and functional” (1999: 7–8). In his
manifesto of postclassical narratology, Herman clearly draws on metaphors taken from the
natural world. Indeed, it is a basic human way of seeing abstract things in relation to concrete
things deriving from our living environment, and narratives characteristically relate to the
concrete and the particular rather than to the abstract and the general. Therefore, concepts or
metaphors such as “natural,” “landscape,” “geography,” “topography,” and “space” are part
of the new vocabulary in narratology. Applying Gérard Genette’s (1980) classical narratology
with its taxonomic concepts and categories (duration, order, frequency, and so on), Herman

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rightly suggests that these can be explicated more productively if they are linked to the
broader issue of narrative worldmaking (2009: 130). There is, then, a move from classical
structuralist narratology to a postclassical, more context-oriented and interpretative narrative
theory, which is also willing to discuss with more politically oriented approaches in literary
theory such as feminism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. In Herman’s subsequent project,
published as Narratology beyond the Human (2018), the scope of narratology is expanded to
include non-human animals and natural environments. In his work, Herman therefore speaks
of mapping the relation between mind and world, and argues that the mind emerges through
our dynamic interdependencies with the social and natural environments.
This mind–world interaction is thematized in a variety of narrative fictions. For instance,
in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity (2015), one of the characters is forced to reflect on the
meaning and existence of the natural world in the age of digital media technology, a
thematics familiar to Franzen’s readers. Franzen, however, succeeds in presenting his environ-
mental thinking—also presented elsewhere and outside his fiction—through a characterized
action, in this case through a fictional mind of a character walking in the woods and reflecting
on the surrounding environment:
Down in the meadow by the river rapids, by the tumble of wet boulders, a large
woodpecker was drumming on a hollow tree. A buzzard eagle soared past the vertical
face of a red pinnacle. Warm late-morning air currents were stirring the woods along
the road, creating a tapestry of light and shadow so fine-grained and chaotic in its
shiftings that no computer on earth could have modeled it. Nature even on the most
local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech,
the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe. And yet
it ought to have felt good to have a brain and be walking on a sunny morning in
Bolivia. The woods were unfathomably complex, but they didn’t know it. Matter
was information, information matter, and only in the brain did matter organize
itself sufficiently be aware of itself; only in the brain could the information of
which the world consisted manipulate itself.
(Franzen 2016: 504)
In Purity, Franzen presents how the human mind operates in the midst of nature and how
the natural environment informs and influences a character’s thinking. While advocating
his ecocritical theory, Jonathan Bate maintains that “the business of literature is to work
on consciousness” (2000: 23). But as Cheryll Glotfelty argues—albeit very briefly—nature
has tended to be overlooked in theories of the human mind (1996: xxi). Still, the
relationship of the human mind to the physical environment is one of the concerns of
ecocritical literary studies. Nancy Easterlin thus points out that the concept of mind has
been troublesome for ecocriticism, which is suspicious of literary works that reflect mental
processes (2012: 36). She suggests accordingly that “because human minds stand behind all
human activity, including literary activity, knowledge of the mind is relevant to any
literary account of the environment” (2010: 257). She argues that human beings are “in
and of nature” and that “nonhuman nature, the environment, or whatever we wish to
call it, can never be known in an other-than-human sense” (259). Consequently, she does
not accept some of the most radical tenets of ecocriticism according to which “nature”
and “the environment” are pure realms of the non-human.1 One of the main issues,
therefore, is whether the natural world is only a reflection in human consciousness or
whether these texts suggest that there is nature also beyond the human mind, a notion
that seems to emerge in Franzen’s novel.

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Dana Phillips argues that “literary realism has always been oriented more towards the
human, the social, and the artificial than towards the natural world” (1999: 586). This may be
true. In her book Why We Read Fiction (2006), Lisa Zunshine argues that we like reading
fiction because it provides an access to imagined mental states, to the thoughts, intentions,
and feelings of other people. She goes on to suggest that pure descriptions of nature are
difficult for us to come to terms with, since they do not explicitly ascribe human thoughts
and feelings to natural events and objects. Therefore, she writes that
imagined landscapes, with their pathetic fallacies, personifications and anthropomor-
phizing, and with their tacit illuminations of human minds perceiving those land-
scapes, prompt us to exercise our Theory of Mind in a way very different from the
stories that contain no such landscapes.
(27)
In his book Social Minds in the Novel (2010), another cognitive narratologist, Alan Palmer,
suggests that “all serious students of literature are cognitivists,” since “we all study the workings
of fictional minds and think of novels in terms of the mental functioning of characters” (7). A
definition like this easily makes an ecocritic feel uncomfortable, as it does not pay attention
to the independent existence of non-human nature. What is needed is a kind of bridging of
these two poles, one focusing on fictional minds and the other emphasizing the natural
environment.
Apparently, there are also more nuanced negotiations among these cognitive narrative
theorists, bringing the interests of narratology and ecocriticism together. Indeed, cognitive
narratology sees literature as a specific form of everyday human experience that is grounded in
our general cognitive capacities of making sense of the world, so that our minds are embodied
and our metaphorical mappings are based on our physical experience of the natural environ-
ment (see e.g. von Mossner 2017: 3–10). As David Herman argues, both classical and
postclassical theories of fictional minds are based on dualistic (Cartesian) models in their
claim that “the representation of characters’ inner lives is [. . .] the touchstone that sets fiction
apart from reality,” as it is suggested in Dorrit Cohn’s influential book Transparent Minds
(1978: 7; see Herman 2011: 7). Accordingly, Herman speaks of the geography of mind, which
means that the “what” and “how” aspects of mind representation are taken into account (32).
In Herman’s view, envisioning that the mind is “inside” and the world “outside,” these
theories of consciousness representation consequently fail to take into account the mind’s
functioning in an environmental context as well as non-human experiences. Thus, for example
in his essay on non-human experiences in graphic narratives, Herman is interested in the
interplay between non-human agents and their surrounding environments. This represents a
move away from “Cartesian geographies of the mental as an interior, immaterial domain,”
that is, from dualisms that set up “a dichotomous relationship between the mind in here and
the world out there” (2012: 97). He suggests instead that human as well as non-human minds
are embedded in those natural and social environments in which they act and interact.
Experiments with narrative viewpoint may help readers to think about the natural world
in new ways and approach familiar situations from alien, including non-human, perspec-
tives. David Gilcrest asks whether we can seriously entertain “the notion that human beings
are capable of perceiving the world independent of the mediating influence of linguistic
structure” (2002: 126). As Ursula Heise, one of the few theorists who have brought
ecocriticism and narratology together, argues, one of the concerns of ecocriticism has been
whether literary fiction, as a pure product of human language, can reflect anything other
than anthropomorphic views of nature (2005: 130). Or, as Scott Knickerbocker has it,

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“because metaphor structures the very way we think and perceive, such figurative devices as
personification and apostrophe should not be dismissed as anthropocentric pathetic fallacies
with which we merely project the human onto the nonhuman” (2012: 5). The question of
anthropocentricism especially emerges in relation to the various consciousness-presenting or
point-of-view techniques extensively studied in narratology, with its strongly human-
centric vision.
The recent project of econarratology, coined and developed by Erin James, is as much
informed by ecocriticism’s referential and political interests as by narratology’s textual and
structural emphasis. Ecocriticism characteristically reads literature in relation to the physical
environment and typically deals with realistic or non-fictional texts which explicitly contain
environmental issues. This ecocritical emphasis, both ethical and political, still governs
econarratological practices, so that ideally we experience the natural world through our
immersion in the storyworld. In her book The Storyworld Accord (2015), James emphasizes the
reader’s experiential immersion in the fictional worlds which are understood in relation to
our experience of the natural world outside that fiction. Readings like these may sound too
mimetic from a narratological vantage point, but in any case James suggests, quite rightly, that
“[f]ocusing on structures—narrative structures in particular—opens up ecocritical discourse to
a set of texts that had previously been illegible to ecocritics” (14). When practicing
econarratology, we are supposed to do close textual analysis of voices and structures but also
enrich this analysis with a contextual and referential interpretation, which is informed by our
knowledge of the natural world.

A rhetorical view on environmental communication

The next section tries to suggest ways in which these two seemingly incompatible approaches
to fiction—narratology and ecocriticism—could fruitfully be brought together in the light of
the rhetorical theory of narrative. The context in which I wish to situate this inquiry is the
recent turn in narratology towards functionalism and contextual significance. Narratology in
its structuralist phase focused on fictional worlds as autonomous entities, thus severing their
links to the pragmatics of writing and reading literature in the real-world context. Richard
Walsh, one of the foremost advocates of a pragmatic view of fiction, captures the futility
inherent in the structuralist conception of narrative and interpretation when he writes that
readers cannot be content merely to construct fictional worlds, as if this in itself were
endlessly satisfying; they must also be concerned to evaluate them, to bring them into
relation with the larger context or their own experience and understanding.
(2007: 43)
Meir Sternberg has also criticized “objectivist paradigms” in narratology and proposed to replace
them with a functionalist approach. Sternberg suggests that the prevailing humanist and anthro-
pomorphic definitions of narrativity are too limited, and he consequently speaks of the “restrictive
anthropocentric bias” in recent narrative theories (2010: 646). Sternberg further argues that
the naturalness of narrativity, “ultimately grounded in the ongoing survival value of obser-
ving, plotting, telling, foretelling, inferring event lines,” should be seen in contrast to Monika
Fludernik’s “natural” narratology, “where ‘nature’ is itself already culture-bound” (646).
According to a useful definition, the rhetorical theory of narrative can be regarded as “an
important contextualizing venture that opens the text to the real-world interaction of author
and reader, and hence provides a perfect model for discussing the ethics of reading and the
treatment of ethical problems in narrative fiction” (Alber and Fludernik 2010: 11). Indeed, as

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Walsh suggests, “the contemporary critical environment provides fertile ground for a rhetorical
mode of criticism in which the values being negotiated by that rhetoric are of primary concern”
(2007: 5). In the recent narrative theory the concept of fictionality has also come to the
foreground; according to this new emphasis, “fictionality is, among other things, a vehicle for
negotiating values, weighing options, and informing beliefs and opinions” and “the use of
fictionality is not a turning away from the actual world but a specific communicative strategy
within some context in that world, a context which also informs an audience’s response to the
fictive act” (Nielsen, Phelan and Walsh 2015: 62–63). The representatives of the theory of
fictionality add that “fictive discourse is not ultimately a means of constructing scenarios that are
cut off from the actual world but rather a means for negotiating an engagement with that
world” and that “rhetoric is prevalent wherever and whenever someone wants to move
someone else to do or think or change something” (63). A conception of narrative and fiction
as rhetoric is the key to making narrative theory relevant to environmental literary studies. The
concepts of rhetorical theory are therefore valuable when we are delineating the communicative
designs and purposes of a fictional narrative. In other words, it may be argued that narrative as a
rhetorical form can say something worthwhile about environmental issues.
Also in the field of ecocritical literary studies there are scholars who see the relationship
between nature and literature as dialogical and as crucially negotiated by rhetoric. Bonnie
Costello suggests that “the ecocritical preference for referentiality over textuality, for real
world over rhetorical and aesthetic concerns, seems misguided” (2003: 14). Defending the
power of poetry, Costello argues that imagination and abstraction can draw us toward the
natural world rather than away from it—a contention she obviously shares with Lawrence
Buell. She adds from a rhetorical viewpoint that “certainly a rhetorically oriented criticism is
aware of the text (and indeed all mediating forms) less as a statement about reality than as a
series of motivated strategies and structures, which communicates something to an audience”
(14). Here, in the idea of rhetorical community and transaction, might be the missing link
between ecological and narrative poetics.
In his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, originally published in 1961, Wayne C. Booth initially
stated that his subject is “the art of communicating with readers—the rhetorical resources
available to the writer [. . .] as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional
world upon the reader” (1983: xiii). Seymour Chatman, for his part, suggests that rhetoric in
fiction should be seen as “end-oriented discourse,” by which he means the way in which the
novel “suades” its readers toward the investigation of some views of “how things are in the
real world” (1990: 203). In this regard, the rhetorical emphasis in narrative studies can also be
seen in the service of ecocritical or other politically oriented literary studies. According to
James Phelan, the foremost practitioner of the rhetorical theory of narrative, the approach
emphasizes “narrative as a distinctive and powerful means for an author to communicate
knowledge, feelings, values, and beliefs to an audience” (1996: 18), and assumes that “texts
are designed by authors in order to affect readers in particular ways” (2007: 4). One way to
speak of the design in narrative is to employ the much-debated concept of the implied author—
a concept which need (or should) not be collapsed with the idea of an authorial intention. As
Katherine Saunders Nash suggests in her Feminist Narrative Ethics (2014), poststructuralists are
keen to discuss “the notion of designedness without a designer” or language without agency;
but, she adds, “language without agency privileges indeterminacy, and ethically potent fiction
deserves to be explicated, not merely labeled indeterminate” (11). According to Nash, “to
decide that a text is constructed in one way rather than another way because someone
designed it that way provides powerful explanatory results” (11). It can be argued that in the
rhetorical theory of narrative as well as in feminist and ecocritical literary studies, the emphasis

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is on the author’s art and politics—her or his ways of communicating ideas to the audience
through specific textual designs.
The rhetorical approach seems relevant when fiction communicates ideas and values related
to climate change, for example. As Ursula Heise argues, perceptions of climate change and
other environmental risks are shaped by narrative modes and rhetorical tropes, which serve
as a means of “organizing information about risks into intelligible and meaningful stories”
(2008: 138). Consequently, classical figures, tropes, and allegorical story models, such as
pastoral, apocalypse, irony, tragedy, and comedy, retain their vitality when novelists and
other artists try to come to terms with climate change and communicate its various modes
of appearance to their audiences. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the space is open for
the politics and rhetoric of climate change:
Unlike the problem of the hole in the ozone layer, climate change is ultimately all
about politics. Hence its openness as much to science and technology as to rhetoric,
art, media, and arguments and conflicts conducted through a variety of means.
(2012: 9)
In the rhetoric of climate change and its competing narratives it is typical to give accounts that
are neither purely scientific nor purely poetic; yet, in order to bring the complex dimensions of
climate change within the grasp of human experience, we use language, narrative, and
metaphor to make sense of it. Climate change has therefore begun to make its way into the
cultural imagination. Yet popular fictions still utilize conventional, human-centered narrative
strategies in the face of something that both exceeds the human scale and presents a huge
challenge to the very future existence of the species (Heise 2008: 205–6). Indeed, Scott Slovic
wonders how one can use “narrative language for this purpose, to tell the story of something
as abstract and complicated as climate change?” (2008: 123). We should consider whether
some conventional narrative strategies may be an overly reassuring way of representing
environmental threats, as catastrophes are framed as familiar narratives with a firm closure
(see Kerridge 1998: 4). It may also be asked whether other media than literature are
rhetorically more powerful in conveying to us the message about climate change, such as
Al Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth (2006).
While a popular topic in science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, movies, and documen-
taries, climate change has been an issue rarely grappled with in the mode of a realist or
conventional novel. Yet, as Adam Trexler maintains, these other modes and media “lack the
novel’s capacity to interrogate the emotional, aesthetic, and living experience of the Anthro-
pocene” (2015: 6). However, following Trexler, we can ask what climate change does to
conventional literary forms and what may be those distortions and complications that occur to
generic structures until they are better able to explore the Anthropocene’s complexities and
implications. One of Trexler’s examples is Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior (2012),
which is arguably the best known climate change fiction to date together with Ian McEwan’s
novel Solar (2010). Kingsolver’s narrative follows the experiences of a sympathetic Appala-
chian woman, Dellarobia, whose world is filled with everyday needs, television shows, and
Biblical quotations—in other words, her world is not the world of scientists. “Flight
behavior” in the novel’s title not only refers to the migration of millions of orange Monarch
butterflies from Mexico to North America, because of climate change, but also to Dellaboria’s
own flight behavior in her love life, at least in the eyes of the conservative community she
lives in. As Axel Goodbody suggests, the title also alludes to the public’s flight for reality “in
denying the necessity to change patterns of production and consumption in response to
climate change-related environmental risks and hazards” (2014: 55). Kingsolver at least partly

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succeeds in bringing two different worlds—experiential and abstract, imaginative and theore-
tical—into a dialogical clash. More exactly, as Goodbody puts it, everyone in the narrative,
“from religious fundamentalists to environmentalists and the ratings-conscious media, frames
the phenomenon [the appearance of butterflies] to suit their own interests” (45). As it is
suggested in Flight Behavior, all parties also construct their own narratives about climate
change, ones that are best suited for their specific audience’s needs and expectations.
Kingsolver also wants to use narrative to communicate scientific theories to audiences who
have no knowledge of those theories. And while her partly mimetic and partly didactic
narrative practice is somewhat uneven, it is also part of her rhetorical purpose: how else can
the novelist communicate these theories about climate change, a phenomenon which goes
beyond the human scale and therefore cannot be represented through human characterization
and mimetic action alone? Here is an example of the communication between Dellarobia and
the entomologist Ovid Byron in Flight Behavior:
“The temperature at which a wet monarch will freeze to death,” he [Ovid Byron]
said very slowly, as in, Don’t make me repeat this, “is minus four degrees centigrade.”
“Okay,” she [Dellarobia] said. As in, I’m listening. [. . .]
“[. . .] this roosting colony is a significant proportion of the entire North American
monarch butterfly population. [. . .] In terms of genetic viability, reproductive viabi-
lity, what we have here is nearly the whole lot.” [. . .]
Like Job, in the Bible, she thought. [. . .] Of all sad stories, that parable was meant to
be the saddest, a loss to make a man fall down on the ash heap and meet his maker or else
run to the arms of darkness. She wondered if Ovid Byron knew the story of Job. [. . .]
“We are seeing a bizarre alteration of a previously stable pattern,” he said finally. “A
continental ecosystem breaking down. Most likely, this is due to climate change.
[. . .] Climate change has disrupted this system. For the scientific record, we want to
get to the bottom of that as best we can, before events of this winter destroy a
beautiful species and the chain of evidence we might use for tracking its demise. It’s
not a happy scenario.”
What came to her mind on the spot was one of Cub’s shows on Spike TV, 1000
Ways to Die. People thrived on unhappy scenarios.
(Kingsolver 2012: 311–15)
Byron’s scientific explanations about the earth’s fragile ecosystems are difficult to grasp for
Dellarobia. Therefore she employs cognitive scripts and frames that are more familiar to
her (and perhaps less familiar to Byron), such as Biblical stories. Here, as in elsewhere in the
narrative, Dellarobia, who represents the non-expert reader’s position, gradually learns
the reasons, effects, and consequences of climate change. In the process of the narrative,
she travels from ignorance to knowledge, even as the reader does.
In didactic, argumentative, or pedagogical works like these, the author is a teacher and the
reader is a student, but, especially in realist fiction of the mimetic kind, the communication
between author and reader is also reflected on a story level as a dialogue between characters.
It is as if some scientific notions about the natural environment could not be rendered
through mimetic action, but they seem to require extensive lecturing by one or several
characters. However, as the character lectures to his or her characterized audience, the reader
may sometimes feel that the author—who has probably read a lot of scientific stuff—is
lecturing to her or him, and because of that we may judge that the narrative effect is not
aesthetically satisfying. The problem is therefore a complex one: how to employ fiction’s
communicative resources for different purposes—teaching and entertaining—at the same

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time. While exploring the epistemological questions concerning the natural world, contem-
porary novelists also search for new forms of didactic narrative, a mode which typically has
pejorative connotations with authorial moralizing and teaching. As Martin Cortazzi has it, “[i]n
Western education, didactic narratives fell into disfavor in the 20th century because they were
seen as glib moralizing or as classroom preaching” (2005: 107). But, he adds, especially in
multicultural contexts didactic narrative can also be seen “as a source of multiple readings which
provide an opportunity for the open discussion of moral and philosophical issues” (107). In
addition, the rhetorical theory of narrative does not believe in the rigid distinction between the
“mimetic” and the “didactic” in narratives but understands them both as parts of the rhetoric of
fiction.
Narrative fiction typically emphasizes human experientiality or allegorical storytelling,
which often have a bad reputation within science (Dahlstrom 2014). Global phenomena,
such as climate change and its various environmental consequences, are difficult to make sense
of in human terms precisely because they radically exceed the human scale. While it may be
possible to imagine and represent the effects of climate change on human experience, the
phenomenon itself is likely to escape representation because of its complexity. It can be argued,
however, that it is through narratives—including metaphors, symbols, and allegories—that the
problem of climate change can be rhetorically offered to the larger public imagination.
Following Monika Fludernik (1996) or David Herman (2009), it may be concluded that
purely scientific accounts cannot give us a sense of experiencing things, since they do not
evoke human experientiality in the way that narratives do. Fictional narratives can obviously
also “teach” us values through their form, including complex characters, dialogic voices, many-
layered viewpoints, and difficult human situations. All this makes novels and other narrative
fictions a valuable means of communicating environmental themes deeply and persuasively to
those audiences who still have time to think.

Conclusion
It is obvious that various changes in the theoretical environment have had their profound
influence on narratology for some decades now, but it should be asked whether narratology
has had to redefine itself also because of the changes in the natural environment. This has to
do with another large question: what would the narratology of the 21st century be like? Even
before David Herman’s coinage of “postclassical” narratology in 1999, Monika Fludernik
launched her big-scale and influential project of “natural” narratology, which has been
followed by the less theoretically developed “unnatural” narratology. One may ask whether
narratology itself has become more natural or unnatural in recent years; or whether, actually,
it has been either natural or unnatural from its very beginning. One common answer would
be that classical narratology is basically an unnatural, artificial, and textual project, which has
cut its links to the extra-textual reality and bends inward, safely residing in its virtual reality
and employing its resourceful technical concepts from its narratological “toolbox,” as
recently scrutinized by Paul Dawson (2017). In conclusion, it can be proposed that we
can change our perspectives of reading and add new interpretative possibilities to narratives
without the need to abandon those tools and methods that classical narratology has taught
us. But what is happening is that from the global and universal claims of structuralism,
recent narrative theories, either cognitive or rhetorical, have moved on to discuss issues and
values that are close to the heart of ecocriticism, including the natural world, non-human
animals, environmental risks, and the reasons and consequences of climate change in the age
of the Anthropocene.2

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Notes
1 Compare: “Modern definitions of nature, despite the troubled survival of a concept like ‘human nature,’
begin from a point of difference, nature being designated as the nonhuman realm, the environment”
(Killingsworth 2004: 48).
2 This chapter is part of my research project The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representa-
tions and Uses of Water (SA 307840) funded by the Academy of Finland.

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 8
POSTCOLONIAL
DEVELOPMENT,
SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL
DEGRADATION, AND SLOW
VIOLENCE IN PAKISTANI
FICTION
Saba Pirzadeh

Pakistani authors have in recent years self-fashioned their own distinct cultural identities,
overcoming an earlier trend in cultural studies that subsumed Pakistani Anglophone authors
within broader South Asian trends alongside their peers from India, Bangladesh, and various
diasporic communities (Chambers 2011: 125). While earlier works (1940–1960s) grappled
with the social, political, and affective fallout of 1947 partition that led to the creation of
Pakistan (as seen in the works of Ahmad Ali and Atiya Hossein), contemporary fiction1 has
broadened its conceptual scope to investigate the shifting registers of Pakistani identity in the
wake of globalization, migration, communal tensions, rising religiosity, and the war on terror
(as seen in the works of Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Ali Sethi, Sorraya
Khan, Uzma Aslam Khan, Mohammad Hanif).2 This thematic expansion has in part been
enabled by linguistic innovation. Although English was introduced to the subcontinent as a
“language of the colonizing power,” it has evolved into an “indigenized Pakistani
language” with the result that “today Pakistan has a vibrant and fine body of writing in
English” (Hashmi 1990a: 48). This localization of English has also been made possible due
to the prevalence of English within the national context as “the language of education, law
and government—and more recently of trade, science, and technology as well” (Hashmi
1990a: 49). The historical and cultural capital of English, both home and abroad, has made
it an appropriate mode of communication.
In addition, factors like the acceleration of globalization, the increasing number of foreign-
educated writers and greater willingness on the part of international publishers to publish
non-American voices have contributed to the growth of Pakistani English literature (Osama
Siddique). This literary flourishing in turn has given way to increased visibility and apprecia-
tion of Pakistani English fiction:

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 Postcolonial development

Pakistani writers . . . currently feature prominently in the international literary scene

as award winners or nominees, best-selling authors, [and] festival speakers. The
success, borne out by multiple prize awards or nominations, of such novels as . . .
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohammad Hanif’s A Case of
Exploding Mangoes, and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows has led to bidding wars and
high advances for US-educated writers Ali Sethi and Daniyal Mueenuddin.
(Chambers 2011: 122–23)
Moreover, an ability to “live between East and West, literally or intellectually” (Shamsie
1997: xxiv), enables these writers to produce works that connect to local multi-lingual
traditions as well as the larger field of Anglophone literature (Cilano 2009: 185). While at a
transnational level these texts have dismantled the stereotype of Pakistan as a fundamentalist,
backward state (especially post-9/11), at the local level they have offered new paradigms of
thinking through issues of power, violence, subjectivity and agency in a country caught
between the competing demands of tradition and modernity.
Two such texts that offer new ways of thinking about the growing reach of modernity in
Pakistan are Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (2000) and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2004).
Using different social and geographical settings, the two novels explore the ramifications of
neoliberal development for individuals, communities, and the natural environments within the
Pakistani context. Moreover, these narratives highlight the vexed nature of neoliberal devel-
opment, which promises advancement but introduces more anxieties and crises in the process.
Extending this idea, I find that Hamid and Khan trace the problematic aspects of neoliberal
development by depicting the buildup of postcolonial ecological vulnerability, such as the state
of (indefinite) crisis that is generated when various processes and conditions inflict slow
violence on physical, social, and/or psychological integrity of people and the natural environ-
ment (Simatei 2005: 85). Slow violence here connotes “a violence that is neither spectacular
nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out
across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon 2011: 2). Focusing on the narrativization of slow
violence, this chapter highlights how Hamid and Khan use the genre of fiction to communicate
different forms of slow violence—namely as process (materiality) and praxis (visibility)—in
order to underscore its role in generating postcolonial ecological vulnerability for the human–
nature binary imbricated in this process.
The first half of this chapter looks at these authors’ use of the persuasive and critical power
of fiction to convey the presence and impact of slow violence respectively. The persuasiveness
of fiction is linked to its ability to immerse human beings in make-believe worlds through
“transportation and performance”—as defined by Richard Gerrig, a psychologist of fiction.
Gerrig explains these processes in the following manner: “A narrative serves to transport an
experiencer away from the here and now by extending what is called an invitation” (1998: 14).
Accepting the invitation provides an illusion of transportation since the reader starts to imagine the
alternative world of the text. This process then results in readers’ active participation in the
process of reading whereby they “use their own experiences of the world to bridge gaps in
texts . . . bring both facts and emotions to bear on the construction of the world of the
text” and “give substance to the psychological lives of characters” (Gerrig 1998: 17). In
doing so, readers draw upon their real-life experiences to simultaneously inhabit the real
and narrative worlds thereby leading to their active “performance” of storyworlds (Gerrig
1998: 22). Building upon these ideas, it can be argued that Hamid and Khan’s texts tap
into the creative power of fiction by using “transportation and performance” to familiar-
ize readers with the different forms of Pakistani landscapes—namely urban ecosystems

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 Saba Pirzadeh

(Moth Smoke) and coast lines (Trespassing). This textual immersion also allows readers to
re-align their perceptions of these natural spaces and to recognize how various processes
shape the socioecological dynamics of these spaces.
This creative power of fiction then also becomes a segue to its critical power—namely
the ability of fiction to engage readers cognitively and explore “the complex feedback
relationship of prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations of human and
nonhuman ‘nature’ in order to break up ossified social structures and ideologies” (Zapf
2010: 138). In doing so, fiction acquires its critical potential and acts “as a cultural-critical
metadiscourse, an imaginative counterdiscourse, and a reintegrative interdiscourse” (Zapf
2010: 138). Extending these ideas to the chosen texts, it can be argued that Hamid and
Khan harness the creative power of fiction to draw attention to the neoliberal assault on the
environment, trace the slow violence that unfolds, and generate cultural-critical discourses
about postcolonial ecological vulnerability.
This cultural-critical dimension of the genre of fiction is also inextricably twined with its
thematic dimensions. In this context, the chapter explores the textual depiction of the causes
and repercussions of slow violence in Moth Smoke and Trespassing. Mohsin Hamid’s Moth
Smoke is based in Lahore of the 1990s and focuses on the regression of its protagonist, Daru
Shezad, a junior banker who supplements his meagre income by selling drugs to the super
wealthy. Already struggling in his life, Daru’s insecurity becomes even more heightened with
the return of his childhood friend and rival Ozi and his beautiful wife, Mumtaz. Daru starts
having an affair with Mumtaz, which leads to obsession and ultimately his downfall. Daru’s
cycle of self-destruction is also set against the background of the Pakistan’s nuclear conflict
with India, thereby heightening the dramatic tension within the novel. Amongst the many
themes in the novel, one that stands out is the huge socioeconomic gap between the haves
(Ozi and Mumtaz) and the have-nots (Daru).
To understand the slow violence of pollution represented in Moth Smoke, I will first
examine the various causes of this phenomenon—namely increasing energy consumption and
urban growth. These phenomena also become examples of neoliberal development whereby
there is an increase in consumer preferences and lifestyles of conspicuous consumption (as
reflected in the lifestyles of the super-elite). After establishing the everydayness of pollution,
the chapter then explores the materiality of slow violence (of pollution), which highlights the
“viscous porosity between human flesh and more-than-human world, mediated by social,
religious and economic structures” (Bell 2016: 389).
One needs to identify and analyze the various factors that generate pollution on a continual
basis in order appreciate the everydayness of pollution. In this regard, the novel indicates how
increasing energy consumption of the city’s residents increases the demand for power produc-
tion, which is enabled by “privatization and the boom of guaranteed-profit, project-financed,
imported oil-fired electricity projects” (Hamid 2000: 87). The reference to privatization and
imported projects indicates the growth of neoliberal economy within Pakistan. However, it also
becomes important to consider that the mushrooming of these oil-powered plants means an
increase in the amount of aerial toxic emissions, which would then degrade the overall air
quality. Another major contributor to aerial emissions is the widespread use of air conditioners.
This can be seen in Daru’s re-framing of social disparities in terms of the classes with the air
conditioners and those without them:
There are two social classes in Pakistan . . . the first group, large and sweaty, contains
those referred to as the masses. The second group is much smaller, but its members
exercise vastly greater control over their immediate environment and are collectively

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termed the elite. The distinction between members of those two groups is made on
the basis of control of an important resource: air conditioning.
(Hamid 2000: 126)
Daru goes on to explain that the elite re-create the living standards of the first world: they
wake up in air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices, grab
lunch in air-conditioned restaurants and eventually go home to their air-conditioned lounges
(126).
This description of extensive air conditioner use gives us a sense of the acute social disparities
in the country whereby the masses suffer in the scorching heat, whereas the elites are able to
effectively maintain their comfort, health and mobility. Moreover, these elites are kept at a safe
distance from the otherwise toxic air that the masses are exposed to on a daily basis as seen in
Daru’s account: “I walk the half-kilometer or so to the station . . . I jog back, inhaling the dark
smoke buses spit in my direction . . . stinging . . . my eyes” (19). This differential exposure to
climatic extremities also becomes an instance of environmental racism whereby “the experience
of polluted air is . . . restricted to the less wealthy classes who cannot afford rarified environments
in their homes, vehicles or offices [with the result that] social exclusion leads to environmental
exclusion” (Nayar 2009: 247). Moreover, the excessive use of air conditioners leads to frequent
breakdown of existing infrastructure with the result that entire neighborhoods are plunged into
darkness and their residents suffer the intense heat (Hamid 2000: 132). This is yet another instance
of environmental racism whereby wealthy people’s instrumentalization of the environment causes
immense physical suffering of the masses. Thus, the extended metaphor of the air conditioner
becomes an effective means of highlighting the causality between disproportionate energy
consumption, social discrimination and ecological degradation.
Another factor for pollution is intensified urban growth (due to population explosion,
urban migration, and mindless consumption), which usurps natural spaces, introduces artificial
elements in the environs and creates an ecological imbalance as seen in the novel’s depiction
of widespread prevalence of dust and dust storms in Lahore. Daru recounts the overpowering
presence of dust in his immediate surroundings—from the ground “where everything else is
dulled by a layer of dust” (Hamid 2000: 116) to the sky where “there are no clouds . . . no
wind, and . . . no stars because of the dust” (15). The dust is not just a passive presence but
also an elemental force that can overpower humans, as seen in Daru’s vulnerability when
caught in a dust storm:
I shut my eyes as the wind picks up, whipping through the branches with a rising
howl . . . The andhi builds, pushing me back a step, screaming in my ears, bending
my outstretched arms . . . My eyes are tearing and I open them, blinking to flush the
dust out. I have a small cut on my chest, probably from a broken branch of the
banyan tree
(122)
These multiple visuals end up re-casting Lahore as a dust-scape. This visual re-signification
is an important narrative move on Hamid’s part since the disproportionate amount of dust
becomes a strong indicator of an atmospheric imbalance, thereby prompting us to think of
the reasons behind this phenomenon. In this regard, it becomes important to pay attention
to Hamid’s use of juxtaposition and retrospective narration to identify the factors behind this
phenomenon. The dust imagery is juxtaposed with various elements of the built environment,
such as “boundary wall, grey cement block [and] column-sporting mini monstrosities” (19),
“mansion with brick driveways” (81), “vacation palace” (97), and luxury cars such as Pajeros and

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 Saba Pirzadeh

Land Crusiers (81), in order to draw attention to the link between anthropogenic urban
drives and environmental appropriation. In this regard, the massive removal of natural
vegetation creates ecological imbalance by removing the trees and plants, which would have
been highly effective deterrents against widespread dust dispersal. The novel’s dust-scape
emphasizes an environment that is harmful to the well-being of humans and animals.
Similarly, the use of retrospection gives readers an idea of the natural vitality of Lahore in
the past:
A dusty smell . . . reminds me of the storms of my childhood, when the lawn had
been green and lush and I hid behind the banyan tree . . . hid even as the storm
broke, because the banyan tree sheltered me from the wind and dust until the rain
began to fall, and I ran dancing in it while it soaked me and washed away the heat,
leaving everything cool and clean, it seemed, for days.
(121)
The retrospection is important in not just giving us an insight into Daru’s carefree childhood
but also in recounting the natural vitality of Lahore pre-urbanization—as relayed through the
verdant description of the lawn and the intensity of the rain which leaves everything “cool and
clean [for] days.” This plentiful rain now becomes a thing of the past, as seen in Daru’s despair
at the pitiful amount of rain that he witnesses as an adult: “The andhi dies unexpectedly,
without much rain. Around me everything is coated with dust, damp in patches from the spray.
The sun is already burning a hole through the rusty clouds” (122). Thus, through the dual
techniques of visual re-signification, juxtaposition, and retrospection, the narrative allows us to
think through dust (Sullivan 2012: 516). From a material ecocritical perspective, this use of dust
imagery entails a recognition of dust as a part of the local, material environmental element
(529), thereby helping us see the connection between urban growth and dust diffusion, and
drawing attention to another aspect of pollution.
A discussion of the origins of pollution establishes its intensity and pervasiveness and in
turn raises questions about the implications of this pollution for the denizens of Lahore—
which this chapter argues fall under the category of slow violence. In this regard the text
employs the metaphor of viscous porosity to highlight the buildup of slow violence.
Viscous porosity indicates the porosity between the boundaries of our flesh and the flesh
of the world, and while this porosity allows us to flourish (through the intake of oxygen
and metabolization of nutrients), this porosity also does not discriminate against that which
can kill us (Tuana 2008: 194). In the context of Moth Smoke, it can be argued that
continual anthropogenic activities generate pollution, which means an unnatural increase in
the temperature, contaminants and artificial elements in the “flesh of the world” which
permeate porous human and animal flesh and wreak destruction—thereby becoming an
example of the incremental and accretive aspects of slow violence (Nixon 2011: 2). The
metaphor of viscous porosity also becomes an important means of recognizing slow
violence as a concatenative phenomenon whereby structural violence inflicted upon the
environment in turn generates and inflicts more violence—in the form of decay and death
—on both human and non-human life.
The narrative presents multiple images of decay, and one noticeable example is Daru’s
misery while coping with the blistering Lahore heat and power outages:
The food in my house spoils overnight, consumed by colored molds that spread
like cancer. Overripe fruit bursts open, unhealthy flesh oozing out of ruptures in
sickly skin. And the larva already wiggling . . . will soon erupt into swarms of

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mosquitoes . . . And the city waits for thunder’s echo, for a wall of heat that burns
Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers . . . it is after all our first nuclear
monsoon.
(Hamid 2000: 265)
Using graphic imagery and minute details, this passage effectively portrays the buildup of
decay in Daru’s house. Phrases such as “colored molds that spread like cancer,” “overripe
fruit bursts open,” and “larva wiggling out” refer to the rapid growth of undesirable micro-
organisms (such as mold and larva), thereby signaling an ecological disruption that subverts
concepts of natural growth processes. Moreover, this image of the rotting food is juxtaposed
with the oppressive stillness of the summers, which is attributed to the nuclear tests that
have recently taken place in the country (to establish its military prowess as part of its long-
standing enmity with India). The juxtaposition of the rotting food with the nuclear
monsoon then gives a strong sense of the ecological imbalance that gives rise to slow
violence.
The narrative then indicates how decay gives way to death—as seen in the multiple instances
of death interspersed within Daru’s story. Daru mentions the increasingly common sight and
news about the death of stray dogs—such as the dead dog in the driveway covered with gorged
ticks (Hamid 2000: 18), the emaciated bitch with paper-thin skin that looks like it will dissolve in
the heat (116), and the news of multiple dogs dying because of the heat (18). These instances
become important examples of the ways that the most marginalized creatures—i.e., stray dogs—
are exterminated because of the slow violence of degraded environmental conditions. The close
attention to the wasting and wasted bodies of these dogs within the text highlights the ways in
which these animals become de-realized casualties of the slow violence of human activities and
lifestyles. Thus, Hamid also draws attention to the ways “that human communities marginalize
animal communities due to misguided notions of progress, and in marginalizing them . . . drive
them toward extinction” (Fortuny 2014: 289).
The text expands conceptions of decay by highlighting the socio-moral degeneracy among the
human population as a result of living amidst a degraded environment. This degeneracy is
exemplified through the characters of Daru and his friend Ozi. The text marks Daru’s social
decline as he gets fired from his job: “Daru felt an insecurity, a disease that gnawed at him day and
night . . . He needed money to have his power and air-conditioning and security restored, and he
swore that nothing would stand in his way” (Hamid 2000: 134). As a consequence of this
insecurity Daru turns to crimes like drug-selling and robbery to support himself. Similarly, Ozi is
depicted to be an apathetic and inhumane character who runs over a poor child on the street, and
when confronted by Daru (the sole witness) he does not exhibit any guilt and instead blithely
states that he will compensate the boy’s family (97). In these examples, the depravity of these
characters’ psyches and actions can also be attributed to the long-term exposure to a degraded
environment. The causality between moral decay and material decay shows slow violence as a
penetrative phenomenon, which infiltrates “skin and flesh, prejudgments and symbolic imagin-
aries, habits and embodiments” (Tuana 2008: 200).
Thus, an overall attention to the slow violence of pollution in Moth Smoke shows that there
is no sharp ontological divide between nature and culture, and instead there is a viscous porosity
between humans, non-humans and the environment, between social practices and natural
phenomena (Tuana 2008: 191). Additionally, the analysis pinpoints the ways in which the
spatial and temporal diffusion of slow violence affects the way people perceive and respond to
their immediate surroundings (Nixon 2011: 3), which in the case of the novel manifests as
degenerate behavior given the degraded environs that the characters inhabit.

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Another work of fiction that looks at issues of development, environmental degradation,

and violence within the Pakistani context is Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing. The novel is set
in Karachi in the 1990s and interweaves narratives of various characters to explore themes of
tradition, modernity, family, love and identity. It juxtaposes the love story of people from the
upper strata of society (Dia, an independent-minded woman, and Danish, a foreign-educated
young man) with the coming-of-age tale of Salaamat, a poor fisherman in Sind (the province
in which Karachi is located).
Khan’s novel critiques the neoliberal model of development adopted by developing
countries (such as Pakistan), since this development works through the colonization and
capitalization of nature (Banerjee 2003: 143). In this regard, Salaamat’s story represents how
the foreign trawlers—the metonym for neoliberalism—arrive unaccounted at the sea and start
usurping the supply of fish. In doing so, these trawlers deplete local fish populations, hinder
the local fishermen’s livelihood, and force them to migrate to the city to look for jobs. In
tracing Salaamat’s migration from Sind to Karachi, the narrative also provides an acute insight
into the discrimination, deprivation and violence that he faces as an “outsider” in Karachi.
The chapter focuses on Salaamat’s narrative to explore the politics and violent ramifica-
tions of neoliberal growth in a postcolonial country like Pakistan. Khan’s narrativization of
the decline of the fishermen community becomes a suggestive metonym for the instability
and inconsistency of the postcolonial nation-state, and thereby allows her to effectively
diagnose and critique the causes of the disparate living conditions of Sindi (and by extension
other Pakistani) indigenous communities (Harrison 2012: 97). Building upon this idea, the
chapter explores how Khan first brings into visibility the communities whose erasure is a
necessary pre-requisite of neoliberal growth. Moreover, the chapter looks at how Salaamat’s
narrative highlights the ways in which corporate encroachment inflicts slow violence on the
lives and habitats of local fishermen.
The concept of visibility is an important one, especially given its imbrication in the politics
of the neoliberal order. It is important to note that “visibility is a technology of power and
that the neoliberal order depends on the visual metaphor of ‘exclusion’ or ‘obscurity’ for the
maintenance and reproduction of relations of domination” (Medina and Breña 2011: 88).
Extending this concept to Khan’s narrative, the very first passage of Trespassing becomes a
powerful means of exposing and engaging with the politics of visibility:
The fishing boats dock before the dawn, while the turtle digs her nest. She watches
with one eye seaward, the other on the many huts dotting the shore. The nearest is
just thirty feet away. She burrows fiercely, kicking up telltale showers of sand,
recalling how much safer it had been when the coastline belonged to the fishermen.
(Khan 2004: 1)
The passage serves as the first introduction to the coastal community in Sind, and from the
outset readers are made to recognize that there is an ecological imbalance at work which is
relayed through the interiority of indigenous species—i.e., a turtle. An original inhabitant of the
coastline, the turtle witnesses and processes the changes being wrought on the coastline. Her
keen observation (watching the boats seaward), frenzied behavior (burrowing fiercely) and prior
memory (recalling the safety of the coastline under the fishermen) becomes powerful indicators
of the insecurity and uncertainty being wrought with the arrival of the (foreign) fishing boats.
By re-presenting the coastline through the interiority of the turtle, Khan brings into visibility
one form of indigenous life that is “obscured” and ultimately erased with the intensification of
neoliberal order (as hinted in the text by the turtle’s fearful apprehension about the boat’s
increasing spatial intrusion onto its hatching area).

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Extending this concept of visibility, the text also draws attention to the ways that the
foreign ships have usurped local natural spaces:
[Salaamat’s] locks billow and his mood is suddenly ruffled by thoughts of his fathers
and uncles, who did not go out tonight. They say the foreign trawlers have stolen
their sea. They trespass. Fish once abundant close to shore are now disappearing
even in the deep. And the fishermen’s boats cannot go out that far, even for the fish
still left to catch.
(2)
This passage brings into visibility another indigenous community whose lives are drastically
changed and disrupted by the arrival of the foreign trawlers. By choosing to focus on the
fishermen community, Khan brings into focus the people who are often recast as surplus people
within narratives of resource development (Nixon 2011: 151). Moreover, this passage empha-
sizes how the fishermen are ecosystem people, dependent for their survival on a web of
ecosystems (Nixon 2011: 151), which in this case is the presence and proximity of an abundant
supply of fish. And it is this very ecosystem which is destroyed with the arrival of the foreign
trawlers. The passage then goes on to show us the scale of this crisis by indicating that “fish
once abundant . . . are now disappearing even in the deep. And the fishermen’s boats cannot go
out that far, even for the fish still left to catch” (Khan 2004: 2). In doing so, the text uses the
concept of “negative presence” of fish to establish the absence created by the trawlers’
exploitation of the sea (Adams 2015: 588). An analysis of the passage reveals how the visibility
of the fishermen also acts as a counter to the development rhetoric by “exposing the relations of
exploitation that characterize neoliberal capitalism” (Medina and Breña 2011: 93).
In addition to using visibility as a counter-discourse to neoliberalism, Khan also high-
lights its resultant to draw attention to the oft-ignored casualties of neoliberal development.
In this regard, the text traces the ways in which corporate encroachment (as represented by
the foreign trawlers) on the Sind coastline inflicts slow violence on the lives and commu-
nities of local fishermen. Slow violence here is demarcated both as a process of decline and
rupture. The decline of the fish and the community’s livelihood becomes an example of
slow violence: unspectacular, gradual, and difficult to reverse (Adams 2015: 583). The
various manifestations of slow violence are seen in the miniscule details of the gradual yet
irreversible decline in indigenous people’s lives—examples include fishermen who despe-
rately search for fish in the stolen sea space (Khan 2004: 122), men who are killed for trying
to fight the trawlers’ presence (446), to the fishermen’s wives who are put under increasing
socio-economic pressures due to the termination of their husbands’ livelihoods (124).
According to Nixon, the delayed and unseen effects of slow violence also “require
creative ways of drawing attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but
high in long-term effects” (10). Extrapolating the delayed and long-term effects of slow
violence of neoliberal growth, Khan also depicts the rupture in gender roles and
traditional lifestyle. Salaamat’s grandmother recounts how fishing had been an ancestral
vocation but has now been violently disrupted due to the arrival of the ships: “The fish
are gone. Your spiritless father lies in the darkness of his room, willing the current to turn
back to the days of his forefathers. It will not. The ships are here to stay” (Khan 2004:
124). This vocational rupture also gives way to rupture in gender roles, whereby men are
no longer able to assume the traditional roles of bread earners and instead the burden falls
on the women, who are forced to work outside the homes, as seen in the case of
Salaamat’s mother:

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[Salaamat] thought angrily of his father, who mourned uselessly at home, while his
mother labored at a shrimp-peeling factory set up by the foreigners . . . She gave
her life to the enemy. They gave back five rupees for every kilo of stolen shrimp
she cleaned.
(124)
In addition to showing the psycho-emotive breakdown of Salaamat’s family due to corporate
encroachment, this passage also informs readers of how Salaamat’s mother is paid a mere
pittance to clean the stolen shrimp, which will be later sold at a high price to generate profits.
Expanding this idea of rupture on the communal level, Khan’s novel shows how most men of
the community, including Salaamat, are ultimately forced to leave their homes and migrate to the
city in search of new jobs. This phenomenon of urban migration proves to be a risky, unknown
and dangerous undertaking for the fishermen, who are not emotionally or physically fit for the
city (122) and have no resources or support systems once they move to the city. Moreover, by
depicting the phenomenon of rural to urban migration through Salaamat’s story, the narrative also
highlights the discrimination, deprivation, and violence that he faces as an “outsider” in Karachi.
In doing so, the novel shows how the victims of slow violence are the unseen poor whose
“poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their
lives” (Nixon 2011: 4). A discussion of the politics and ramifications of corporate encroachment
in Trespassing highlights the slow violence of neoliberal order as it destroys indigenous people’s
health, families, and communities, and causes the loss of habitats of animals and people in rural
areas (Zhou 2017: 277).
In using the creative power of fiction to generate critical discourses about neoliberal
growth and socio-ecological disintegration, Hamid and Khan draw attention to slow violence
which otherwise remains “invisible, discounted, and underrepresented in human memory”
(Zhou 2017: 288). Moreover, by tracing the repercussions of slow violence, these writers also
make readers recognize how postcolonial ecological vulnerability engenders a state of
(indefinite) crisis for humans, non-humans and natural spaces. In doing so, Hamid and Khan
communicate the embeddedness of slow violence within the Pakistani context to raise critical
awareness about its everyday impact, and in doing so, counter the human tendency of being
“anesthetized to ecological destruction” (Shiva 2015: 183).

Notes
1 This chapter focuses on the novel genre within the Pakistani context.
2 For a comprehensive summary of Pakistani writing, se Dr. Tariq Rahman’s work, A History of
Pakistani Literature in English (Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22.3 (2015): 582–601.
Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. “Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the
Reinvention of Nature.” Organization Studies 24.1 (2003): 143–180.
Bell, Lucy. “Viscous Porosity: Interactions between Human and Environment in Juan Rulfo’s El llano en
llamas.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 21.3 (2016): 389–404.
Chambers, Claire. “A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in English.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing
47.2 (2011): 122–134.
Cilano, Cara. “Writing from Extreme Edges: Pakistani English-Language Fiction.” ARIEL 40.2–3 (2009):
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Fortuny, Kim. “Islam, Westernization, and Posthumanist Place: The Case of the Istanbul Street Dog.”
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.2 (2014): 271–97.
Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Westview
Press, 1998.
Hamid, Mohsin. Moth Smoke. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Harrison, Sarah K. “‘Suspended City’: Personal, Urban, and National Development in Chris Abani’s
Graceland.” Research in African Literatures 43.2 (2012): 95–114.
Hashmi, Alamgir. “Pakistani Literature in English: Past, Present, and Future.” Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 10.2 (1990a): 48–53.
Khan, Uzma Aslam. Trespassing. Metropolitan Books, 2004.
Medina, Paula Abal, and Mariana Ortega Breña. “Thoughts on the Visual Aspect of the Neoliberal Order
and the Piquetero Movement in Argentina.” Latin American Perspectives 38.1 (2011): 88–101.
Nayar, Pramod K. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Ecocriticism. Longman,
2009, pp. 241–54.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Shamsie, Muneeza. A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English. Oxford University
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Shiva, Vandana. “Countering the ‘Anesthesia of Destruction’: An Interview with Vandana Shiva.”
Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data, edited by Scott Slovic and
Paul Slovic. Oregon State University Press, 2015, pp. 182–91.
Siddique, Osama. “Exploring the World of Pakistani English Fiction.” https://thewire.in/books/four-
pakistani-origin-writers-answers-questions-long-lost-on-the-minds-of-critics. Accessed 25 May 2018.
Simatei, Tirop. “Colonial Violence, Postcolonial Violations: Violence, Landscape, and Memory in Kenyan
Fiction.” Research in African Literatures 36.2 (2005): 85–94.
Sullivan, Heather I. “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
the Environment 19.3 (2012): 515–31.
Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and
Susan J. Hekman. Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 188–213.
Zapf, Hubert. “Ecocriticism, Cultural Ecology, and Literary Studies.” Ecozon@ 1.1 (2010): 136–47.
Zhou, Xiaojing. “‘Slow Violence’ in Migrant Landscapes: ‘Hollow Villages’ and Tourist River Towns in
China.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24.2 (2017): 274–91.

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 9
HOW THE MATERIAL
WORLD COMMUNICATES
Insights from material ecocriticism

Serpil Oppermann

In his highly acclaimed book Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (2010), the
guru of the environmental communication movement Robert Cox writes that “the way we
communicate with one another about the environment powerfully affects how we perceive
both it and ourselves and, therefore, how we define our relationship with the natural world”
(2). Cox’s critical focus is on developing persuasive ways for speaking on behalf of the
damaged world to raise more public concern about its waterways gradually poisoned with
industrial refuse, its carbon-dioxide-filled atmosphere, and soils infected with pesticides, and
thereby affect political decisions about an overall environment that is physically in despair. He
defines environmental communication as “a study of the ways in which we communicate
about the environment” (9). According to this argument, if we can communicate compel-
lingly, we can provoke nation-states, industry, corporations, and other social and political
actors to invest in, for example, clean energy, and thus influence “the workings of the profit
motive” (Malm 2018: 61).
In this discourse, communication is essential to solve complex environmental issues, such
as global warming, and thus to make the world more hospitable not only for humans but also
for all life forms that co-evolved here. Quite obviously, the underlying idea of effective
environmental communication is the particular efficacy of human languages with their wealth
of emotional registers, rich symbolism, rhetorical possibilities, and the alleged representational
veracity to give accurate voice to nature. Because nature here is thought to be “silent,” it
must need a human interlocutor to speak for its interests, telling politicians and business
leaders how it is breaking and tearing under the burden of ongoing acts of exploitation. In
Cox’s words:
Although in one sense, nature is silent, others—politicians, business leaders, envir-
onmentalists, the media—claim the right to speak for nature or for their own
interests in the use of natural resources. Hence, the dilemma: if nature cannot speak,
who has the right to speak on nature’s behalf? Who should define the interests of society
in relation to the natural world? Is it appropriate, for example, to drill for oil
offshore or along fragile coastlines? Who should bear the cost of cleaning up
abandoned toxic waste sites—the businesses responsible for the contamination or

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taxpayers? These questions illustrate the rhetorical nature of environmental commu-

nication. Only in a society that allows public debate can the public mediate among
the differing voices and ways of understanding the environment-society relationship.
(Cox 2010: 4–5, emphasis added)
As it is clearly expressed in this paragraph and further emphasized by the author, environmental
communication is all about “the importance of human communication in shaping our
perceptions of the environment and our relationships with it” (6). So, the solutions are sought
in the ways in which humans verbally communicate with other humans about changing their
relationships to the natural world. This is a narrowly understood definition of environmental
communication confined within the parameters of human signifying systems, disregarding the
“communicative capacities of nonhuman others” (Gagliano 2017: 87), hence maintaining
human exceptionalism in communication practices. Such an approach, to use the words of
evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano, takes “human language as the diagnostic reference
point” (87) and perpetuates “our narcissistic way of thinking about the world” (85). To contest
this understanding of communication, we first need to understand that all life is semiotic, as
proposed by the biosemiotic underpinnings of biological processes that involve “countless
organisms that are constantly interpreting and remaking the world they inhabit” (Maran 2017:
n.p.). Biosemiotics is the driving force behind this view, focusing on biotic systems engaged in
sign relations and their “interpretations” (Wheeler 2011: 271).
There are many signs through which the natural world communicates its mind. If we
consider the structural relations between organisms and the environment, we find commu-
nication everywhere, from flora to fauna, from genes to cells. The communication between
animals and humans, which Donna Haraway outlines as the “flow of entangled meaningful
bodies in time” (2008: 26), is an obvious example of this process. From this perspective, the
assertion that only humans can make sense of the world through language and nonhuman
species are devoid of this capacity is simply wrong. Human language, as Wendy Wheeler
argues, “is just the most recent evolutionary part of a vast global web of semiosis encompass-
ing all living things” (2014: 71). Wheeler specifically stresses this point in The Whole Creature,
claiming that “[a]ll living forms have communication systems of a kind” (16) and elsewhere
that “all life—from the cell all the way up to us—is characterized by communication, or
semiosis” (Wheeler 2011: 270). Eduardo Kohn (2013) also writes that signs exist beyond the
human and that semiosis “[the creation and interpretation of signs] permeates and constitutes
the living world, and it is through our partially shared semiotic propensities that multispecies
relations are possible, and also analytically comprehensible” (9).
Another way to contest the reductionist, anthropocentric approach to environmental
communication is to reconfigure our understanding of the world by taking into account
agentic creativity, performative enactments, and innate meanings produced by nonhuman
species, as well as inorganic matter itself. This approach is proposed by the new materialist
theorists such as Diane Coole and Samantha Frost (2010), who contend that “foregrounding
material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are prerequisites for any
plausible account of coexistence and its conditions in the twenty-first century” (2). What is
challenged here is the traditional worldview based on the assumption that the material world—a
world that includes inanimate matter as well as nonhuman forms of life—is passive, inert, and
unable to convey any meaningful expression. Such a worldview could only produce a very
partial vision of reality grounded in ontological divisions between agentic humans with
language skills and everything else beyond the human that lack agency and thus any

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communicative skill to express themselves. This worldview has also determined a whole series
of intersectional oppressions concerning species, race, gender, class, and identity.
Overthrowing dualisms of all kinds that have informed Western thought for centuries, the
new materialisms radically reconfigured conceptualizations of materiality, claiming that matter
in every form is agentic and capable of producing meanings. Agency here is not circum-
scribed by the prerogatives of human cognitive faculties that generate agentic capacity, such as
intentionality, personhood, responsibility, and conscious action. As suggested by the British
sociologist Anthony Giddens (1985), “we have to separate out the question of what an agent
‘does’ from what is ‘intended’ or the intentional aspects of what is done. Agency refers to
doing” (10). This is congruent with the new materialist understanding that when intention-
ality is conceptually separated from the consequences of action, agency can be redefined in
terms of its “transformative capacity” (Giddens 1985: 15), or in Jane Bennett’s (2010) terms
(borrowed from Latour) as an “actant,” “which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient
coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (viii). Molecular
biologist Stuart Kauffman (2000) would agree, since agency in his definition is the ability he
discovered in micro-organisms to “reach out and manipulate the universe on their own
behalf” (x). He finds it “utterly remarkable that agency has arisen in the universe—systems that
are able to act on their own behalf. Systems that modify the universe on their own behalf”
(Kaufmann 2006).1 But Jane Bennett goes further than that, claiming that agency is not the
attribute of a single entity but has a distributive quality:
What this suggests for the concept of agency is that the efficacy or effectivity to
which that term has traditionally referred becomes distributed across an ontologically
heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a
collective produced (only) by human efforts.
(Bennett 2010: 23)
According to Karen Barad (2007), too, agency “is not an attribute but the ongoing configura-
tion of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming” (141).
The new materialist paradigm asserts that all earthly beings and things are agentic, vibrant, and
have “emergent generative powers (or agentic capacities)” (Coole and Frost 2010: 9). The new
materialists, in other words, perceive matter as equipped with a capacity of self-organization,
intrinsic vitality, effectivity, and productive agency which is “differentially distributed across a
wider range of ontological types” (Bennett 2010: 9). Situated in this conceptual framework,
material ecocriticism takes a step further and declares that all agentic entities are expressive and have
the ability to communicate intelligibly with other entities around them and with their immediate
environments. All earthly agencies can produce meaning-filled encounters with everything else in
an ongoing process of communications, making “multispecies livability possible” (Gan et al.
2017: G5). Communication in this vision is a pointer to what Donna Haraway perceptively calls
becoming with each other in When Species Meet (2008), rather than an act ensconced in the linguistic
and literary skills of human scribes; nor can it be reductively confined within the barriers of
human perception and cognition. As Haraway explains with regards to multispecies relationships,
communication should be seen as “material-semiotic means of relating” (2008: 26) in which
“becoming is always becoming with” (244). In fact, whoever we are, we are always engaged in
communicative acts of becoming with whatever or whoever we encounter. Haraway is correct in
stating that “we think, act, narrate, metabolize and come into and out of existence through each
other” (2015: vii). Becoming with is a performance, a cultivation of interconnections, and an act of
resistance against the threats of extinction which inevitably involves how “we tell stories through
and with other stories” (Haraway 2015: vii). Becoming with is an enactment of environmental

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communication whereby all terrestrial life forms and matter itself in all its forms convey
intertwined stories of multiple subjects, including the human subject. In a way, becoming with is
the relational medium for all agencies to express their sense of being in the world. As a
multispecies event, becoming with demands an affirmation of semiotic relations in which both
humans and everything beyond the human participate. Nature is, therefore, subsequently defined
as natura loquens and matter as materia loquens. As Vicki Kirby (2011) puts it: “Nature is articulate,
communicative, and in a very real sense—intentional” (82).
Environmental communication is here reformulated on the basis of “the social complexity,
ciphering skills, and evolutionary innovation” (Kirby 2011: 87) of all planetary entities filled
with a plenitude of expressive possibilities. It is in this sense that material ecocriticism takes
into account how all material agencies possess narrative potentialities and emerge as narrative
agencies combining matter and meaning to reveal astonishing storied articulations of the
physical environments. Wherever we turn, we find expressive creativity encoded in every
form of agentic matter, an “expressive, telluric power” (Abram 2010: 171), which is “steadily
bodying forth its own active creativity and sentience” (170). David Abram uses the word
“telluric” to refer to the animate earth which, he argues, expresses itself with each creature
enacting “this expressive magic in its own manner” (171). We are quite literally surrounded,
Abram claims, with “a community of expressive presences” (173) where all beings “have the
ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings” (172). In the material
ecocritical perspective, not only biological organisms but also all material forms exhibit
meaningful signs, making meaning “an ongoing performance of the world in its differential
intelligibility” (Barad 2007: 335), and intelligibility emerges when “part of the world becomes
differentially intelligible to another part of the world” (342). How, then, can communication
be seen as a specific human capacity when it manifests in many different ways across biotic as
well as non-biotic realms, such as metals and minerals? If we heed their stories that unfold in
the intertwined zones of biology, geology, chemistry, and human cultures, we can perhaps
change “the politics of our relationship with non-humans” (Birke 2012: 152). After all, to
quote Wheeler again, “life is made of stories” (2014: 77). This is crucial in understanding the
material ecocritical vision, which posits that materiality is never semiotically inert and there-
fore inseparable from the general field of signification.
Material ecocriticism has emerged from the new materialist paradigm, co-opting its funda-
mental conceptualization of matter and agency, and more generally, its intellectual horizon.
But, reformulating the concept of agentic matter in terms of its expressive potential, material
ecocriticism has developed its own interpretive practice, which takes into account agentic
matter as a narrative agency producing its own stories, as well as the representations of agentic
matter’s expressive power in literary, cultural, and visual texts.2 As the most obvious and the
most self-evident narrative sites, literary texts, for example, open up the vitality inherent in
matter and extend it over time, endlessly producing a performative mirror that does not just
reflect the world, but creates worlds. Like the stories of matter, literary stories shed light on the
intra-action of human creativity and the creative expressions of material agencies. In this co-
emergence, literature can be said to amplify reality, also affecting our cognitive response to this
reality as embodied creatures of both the world and the word. Literature, as Serenella Iovino
(2016) suggests, “is helping reality to perform itself and its interconnectedness via the story, the
stage, and the audience” (75). One of the implications of this view is that our stories are never
disconnected from the stories of matter.
The expressive power inherent in material agencies, however, is much more than a literary
subject matter. Material ecocritcism’s main argument is that, if matter is agentic, it must also be
capable of expressing itself, and if it can express itself, then it is capable of producing narratives.

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It must have a storied dimension. Accordingly, meaningful communications cannot be limited

to living organisms, like bacteria for example, communicating within and between species using
“quorum sensing language” (signaling molecules used for communication) “to communicate
within and between species” (Schauder and Bassler 2001: 1468). Chemical substances circulat-
ing in the biosphere, or plastic bags invading the oceans, are as expressive as bacteria and more
complex organisms like plants and animals. Even “lifeless” entities like electrons can be said to
have a certain degree of creative expression when they communicate non-locally. For material
ecocriticism, all agencies, biotic or not, are storied subjects of an ever-unfolding earthly tale,
and matter in every form is a meaning-producing embodiment of the world. Again, meaning, as
Karen Barad defines it, is “an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility”
(335) in which our cognitive practices also participate. Intelligibility, Barad also claims, “is an
ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation. [. . .]” (149). This idea is what
enables us to conceptualize matter as storied; for a story to exist it must always be framed by some
sort of articulation, performance and/or intelligibility.
Talking of storied matter means to recognize patterns of signification in the agency of
things, in material phenomena. It means to analyze the things around us and in us as parts of a
dense tissue of stories. It means to see the network of agencies as expressive forces and to see
our story as co-evolving with the stories of matter found across all material forms. It also
means to see the world as a storehouse of inexhaustible records of evolutionary histories in
which everything is an extension of matter’s creative expressions. All matter, in other words,
is like a library of Earth’s evolution, which is deeply interlaced with human mindscapes and
imagination. As Serenella Iovino and I have explained in the “Introduction: Stories Come to
Matter” for our co-edited volume Material Ecocriticism (2014): “every living creature, from
humans to fungi, tells evolutionary stories of coexistence, interdependence, adaptation and
hybridization, extinctions and survivals” (7), which is the reason why material ecocriticism
insists on the significance of matter’s storied dimension. If matter is storied, then all things
must “have the capacity of speech” (Abram 2010: 172) with an incipient tendency to be a
narrative agency. Narrative agencies are the building blocks of storied matter with “undeniable
signifying forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2). In fact, we dwell in a world “crisscrossed
by nonhuman agencies, which combine and collide with the agentic field of our species”
(Oppermann 2013: 66). Whether they are geological, biological, organic, inorganic, or
social, all entities are embodiments of signification processes rooted in “complex webs of
dynamic articulations” (Haraway 1997: 145). Put differently, matter is encoded with mean-
ingful signs through which the world becomes eloquent. We then interpret the configura-
tions of material signs and meanings, sounds and colors as stories. Let me repeat here the
examples we always use, such as volcanoes, which tell stories of the earth’s turbulent past,
glaciers, which tell poignant stories of changing ecosystems and global warming, fossils,
which yield stories of extinct beings captured in time epitomizing bio-geological evolution,
and stones, which “yield tales of life’s ubiquity” (Cohen 2015: 35). These stories come to
matter in the form of evolutionary histories, climatic narratives, biological memories,
geological records, species tragedies, and DNA poetics. They all provide inexhaustible
archives of life as terrestrial tales of resilience, creativities, uncertainties, evolution and
dissolution, and extinctions and survivals, even if they may not always be legible, or easily
identifiable. The planet is teeming with communicative material forms enacting “a dynamic
expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming” (Barad 2007: 392). This
display of semiotic materiality in the vast spectrum of expressive earth communities constitutes
sites of narrativity where agentic matter emerges as storied matter. Material ecocriticism
conceptualizes the world of dynamic expressions as storied matter made up of narrative agencies

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that debunk our habit of worlding as if we are the only storied beings, as if “storytelling is an
exclusively human practice and that humans are the only species able to spin yarns and to make
history” (Oppermann 2016: 89).
Narrative agencies, like bodies, stones, mountains, tornadoes, toxins, butterflies, bacteria,
plastic bags, garbage, spiders—to name some of them—do not spill out of some vicarious
poetic fancy, nor are they metaphoric embodiments of literary imagination even though they
magnetically engage our imaginative attention. A material ecocritic would read a narrative
agency, such as a toxic body, for example, as a material text that transmits stories of harmful
social practices, environmental toxicity, and political decisions. Bodies in the material
ecocritical perspective are “living texts that recount naturalcultural stories” (Iovino and
Oppermann 2014: 6). Toxic bodies are inscribed with intermeshed toxic substances and
social decisions that often manifest through the signs of illness. The body tells a sad story of its
own metabolism interacting with the xenobiotic substances that are daily consumed through
manufactured food. All bodies hold memories of everything they encounter and ingest,
becoming interesting archives of the storied world and challenging our ways of thinking and
acting as if bodily natures are separate from environmental realities. A material ecocritic
would then conclude that the body’s stories are closely linked to disrupted metabolic
processes of the natural world revealing the porosity of the material and the biological. Such
stories change the way we perceive the world by making us attentive to the ways in which
narrative agencies transmit their stories through specific ways—signs, colors, gestures—to
render themselves meaningful. The significance of the narrative agency is thus in its meaning-
making encounters with other material agencies, creating a storied experience sedimented in
mineral, vegetal, animal, and human worlds. What is important here is that
[w]hether perceived or interpreted by the human mind or not, these stories shape
trajectories that have a formative, enactive power. Think of our planet: the
transformative stories built by telluric powers, magnetic forces, clashing and melting
elements, and dawning forms of life extend the past of the earth into our present,
determining the way all beings articulate their relationships to the world.
(Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 7)
Understanding such sites of narrativity means understanding the true nature of environmental
communications in a living world traversed with manifold narrative agencies, which are always
“framed by a communicative process” (Oppermann 2013: 68), rendering language as “a
property of animate earth itself” (Abram 2010: 171). Against the conceit of communication as
a unique human skill, narrative agencies highlight narrative sites where we can see the enfolding
of species within species, and matter within matter, in ongoing processes of communication to
unsettle human exceptionalism. Central to this understanding is the fact that the real dimension
of the living world lies in “the concrete links between life and language, mind and sensorial
perception” (Iovino 2012: 55), allowing the human mind to merge with the world to recognize
the fact that matter is always “semiotically active” (Haraway 2008: 250) with an expressive force
that endures longer than our stories, or in Jeffrey J. Cohen’s eloquent rendering, “long after we
become earth again” (2015: 21).
Apparently, the stories of matter emerge through humans, but as Jane Bennett reminds us,
not entirely because of them (17). Jeffrey J. Cohen also argues that matter’s stories come to
life through humans but at the same time “humans themselves emerge through ‘material
agencies’ that leave their traces in lives as well as stories” (36). For Cohen, story is “a living
thing and does not necessarily depend upon language to be conveyed” and, more impor-
tantly, “narratives are always animated by multifarious vectors and heterogeneous possibilities

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not reducible to mere anthropomorphism” (36). Storied matter, then, whether deciphered by
the human mind or not, “is thick with surprising narratives, some vivid, some barely legible,
others impossible to translate” (275). Cohen’s lithic model, stone, for example, just like a
fossil fragment impressed with the memories of times immemorial, bears witness to the
primordial past of this planet. It is carved with memories of geological evolution that are not
emplaced there by any human agency, but its transformative meanings can be as cultural as
they are geological. Not surprisingly, geologists often talk about rock records holding stories
of dynamic fusions with animals, plants, and humans. In fact, everything we can see and
touch, and interact with, is storied, and our story always comingles with the stories of
geological forces, atmospheric patterns, disappearing species, and toxic substances. We all
share a space that is as much a semiotic sphere as it is material in producing meanings and
narratives that may be compellingly affirmative but also unexpectedly disruptive.
Today the stories of matter are profoundly troubling, like the traumatic tales of plastic-choked
albatross on Midway Island in the North Pacific Ocean. The plastic objects here yield stories of the
slow death of so many marine species. Among other countless stories in the oceans, squids also tell
tragic stories of their diminished ability to survive amid increasing ocean acidity. There are similar
distressing stories embodied in the contaminated soil with “excess amounts of nitrous oxides
dripping into underground aquifers and reaching up to the clouds, accelerating the erosion of the
ozone layer” (Oppermann 2016: 95). Such stories—the stories of different subjects—can actually
help us better understand fragile ecosystems, polluted landscapes, acidifying oceans, changing
climate, species extinctions, and consequently social crises. Through these stories we come to
know “the often unheard voices” of the Earth itself (Iovino 2016: 48), which has today become
quite disenchanted with catastrophic human practices. Storied matter in a disenchanted world urges
us to think seriously about how our invasive economic practices produce planetary cycles of
pollution, how our political decisions and cultural meanings are enmeshed in their production, and
how they all enfold into one indissoluble process. Therefore, as Serenella Iovino puts it, to read the
world as a text “is . . . a necessary way to create social forms of cognitive justice, and hence practices
of political liberation and environmental responsiveness” (2016: 75). However, she continues,
“whenever the ‘text’ of the world is misread, uncontrollable consequences ensue,” which occurs
whenever “we set up an alienated relationship to reality” (75). Explained scientifically, in the words
of quantum physicist David Bohm (1987): “our action towards the whole universe is a result of
what it means to us,” and that “the rest of the universe acts signa-somatically to us according to what
we mean to it” (98). Although matter, nature, or anything that is other-than-human, does not need
a human interpreter to disclose its stories, it is evidently influenced by our interpretations and reacts
accordingly. That means, as environmental communication studies scholars James G. Cantrill and
Christine L. Oravec (1996) have also made clear, “[t]he environment that we experience and affect
is largely the product of how we come to talk about the world” (2). It should not be surprising then
that the environmental problems are indeed produced by our fragmentary thinking and talking
about the world. And the meanings we create this way “fundamentally affect our actions toward
nature, and thus indirectly, the action of nature back on us is affected” (Bohm 1987: 79)—a
boomerang effect. As Eduardo Kohn (2013) reminds us, “what we share with . . . other living selves
—whether bacterial, floral, fungal, or animal—is the fact that how we represent the world around us
is in some way or another constitutive of our being” (6).
Let me pause here to signal a note of hope, because not all narrative agencies are equally
disheartening and display a dismal image of a damaged planet made utterly vulnerable to
terrifying human exploitation, “a world haunted with the threat of extinction” (Gan et al.
2017: G6). They can also come forth as the primary authors of environmental sustainability
and ecological sensibility, offering a better image of the living world. Take for example David

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Abram’s charming examples: “tumbling waterfalls,” “dry riverbeds,” “gusts of wind,”

“cumulous clouds,” “granitic cliffs,” “diamonds,” and “grains of sand” (2010: 272). All
these examples show that the “stories of matter are everywhere: in the air we breathe, the
food we eat, in the things and beings of the world, within and beyond the human realm”
(Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 1).
Thus understood, storied matter is not a mere conceptualization; rather, it represents a new
ecology of understanding a meaningfully articulate planet. If we read the world this way, as
storied materiality that binds all beings, forces, and substances with interconnected stories, we
can impart new ideas and insights about our experiences and perceptions of the planet. This is
what material ecocriticism specially espouses. It invites us to imagine the world differently, to
heed the stories of narrative agencies that draw us to be attentive to the often troubled
multispecies and material relations and how they are communicated to the human reality.
Material ecocriticism wants us to slow down “to listen to the world—empirically and
imaginatively,” which may be “our only hope in a moment of crisis and urgency” (Swanson
et al. 2017: M8). In this spirit, material ecocriticism encourages us to embrace life, language,
mind, matter, and nature in non-dualistic perspectives, and invites us to recognize the vitality
of things and their creative expressions in the storied world. Engaging in disanthropocentric
conversations with the nonhuman realities also entails a critical self-reflection on our part as
humans, on our moral accountability, because entangled relations are as conflictual as they are
constitutive in producing social facts that always overlap with environmental processes
(geological, biological, and ecological). Material ecocriticism sees all these entangled relations
as texts bearing material stories, stories of creativity as well as destruction that are both cultural
and ecological. Anyone who reads these stories will find how intimately linked here are flows
of food, money, energy, toxicity, health, power relations, political intentions, species extinc-
tions, climate change, the planet’s wounds, bodies, symbols, imagination, and physical forces.
More importantly, considering agency as an expressive property of matter in its material–
semiotic relations, material ecocriticism opens an interpretive horizon to make storied matter
part of our storytelling culture. Hence,
giving matter access to articulation by way of stories that co-emerge with the human is
not only a way to emancipate matter from silence and passivity, but also to liberate
ourselves from the images, discourses, and practices of our own Cartesian dreamworlds.
(Oppermann 2018: 414)
This proposed shift in interpretive practices also suggests that we are all joined together with
every part of the storied world in complex negotiations, exchanges, and circulating meanings.
What better way for the promise of a new understanding of environmental communication?
If we discard all the received ideas about environmental communication being all too human,
and pay attention to expressive nonhuman species and material agencies, we can move
beyond the ghosts of anthropocentricism and bring back becoming with each other, telling
stories through and with each other, to our cultural horizon. This may be the answer to the
request Robert Cox (2010) articulates in the Epilogue of his important book:
the ability to imagine a different future and the values and principles that can help us
design pathways to it, the ability to envision other possible ways of living and doing
business. Many believe that this requires new cognitive maps, new ways of thinking.
(367)
Storied matter as an intimation of how the material world communicates may be the new
cognitive map, the new compelling narrative for a better future.

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Notes
1 Kauffman continues this argument in Reinventing the Sacred: “My purpose in attributing actions (or
perhaps better, proto-actions) to a bacterium is to try to trace the origin of action, value, and
meaning as close as I can to the origin of life itself” (2008: 78).
2 This point has been extensively treated in “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of
Narrativity” (2012), co-authored by Serenella Iovino and myself.

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 10
SCALE IN ECOLOGICAL
SCIENCE WRITING
Derek Woods

Howard T. Odum (1971) coined the term macroscope to clarify his interest in the study of
wholes rather than individual parts. For him, we can think of the macroscope by analogy with
the microscope. Microscopes use lenses to concentrate light reflected by things too small for
the eye to see. They reveal an invisible world swarming beneath the appearances of seemingly
solid, unitary objects. Macroscopes help us observe things too large for the naked eye. They
reveal wholes which exist at much larger scales than those of seemingly solid, unitary objects.
But the analogy between microscope and macroscope doesn’t quite hold. After all,
microscopes exist, but “macroscopes” do not. Macroscopes are not telescopes. Not even
satellite images and climate models necessarily fit Odum’s goal of seeing larger-scale wholes,
“the great clanking wheels of the machinery in which man is such a small component” (11).
A large proportion of discourse on scale in ecological science writing grapples with this
precise problem. It tries to represent something too large and distributed to be observed
directly: the order that seems to persist at scales larger than those of individual organisms.
Often referred to as the ecosystem, this order can’t be observed in the same way that I can
observe a bacterium through a microscope. Given this tension between visible and invisible
objects of study, ecological science writing often relies on figurative language to represent the
ecosystem as a whole.
As historians and literary critics reflecting on the natural sciences have argued for decades,
metaphor always plays a role in the communication of scientific observations and concepts.
While this is by no means a new argument, it remains controversial just what role figurative
language plays in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
But in ecocriticism and the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, this
question has seen less attention in recent years. Many scholars have turned to materiality and
scientific practice, eschewing the study of metaphor as a holdover from the linguistic
constructivism against which new materialisms made their founding theoretical moves.
But the study of “metaphor” does not necessarily distract attention from the material
reality to which science refers. Nor does it imply that there are no discrete objects outside
what language slices up and presents on its a priori platter. For two reasons, this is the wrong
way to think about the role of figurative language in ecological science writing. The first
reason explains why the word metaphor is in scare quotes above: the term and concept of
metaphor obscure the wider field of figurative language, in which metaphor is only one trope

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among many—one trope in the technical sense of substituting words into contexts that change
their literal meaning. The second reason is that the relationship between tropes and reality,
including their value in environmental communication, might vary depending on the scales
of the scientific objects in question.
What follows is an overview of tropes and figures of scale in Anglophone ecological
science writing. This topic is located at the intersection of ecocriticism, with its interest in
close reading and literary language, and communication studies, with its interest in non-
literary discourses such as science writing. Since even this topic could include a very large
body of work, I constrain it further. Writing as a scholar of scientific communication, I mark
the difference between the subfields of population ecology and ecosystem ecology and focus
only on the latter.
Writing as a literary critic, I constrain this topic still further by reading selectively and
hermeneutically. While any form of writing about writing inevitably selects only certain
aspects of the archive it proposes to study, my chapter values a specific pattern of figurative
language which describes what we now call ecosystems and the “Earth system.” This pattern
includes the “superorganism,” the chain, the wheel, the terrarium or aquarium, and the
computer or digital network.
Ecosystem ecology is more metaphorically intricate than other branches of the field. Dana
Phillips (2003) and others have argued that this symptom of ecology’s effort to describe large-scale
complexity is a problem, since it means critics are often drawn to the less “rigorous” side of ecology
(45). As a counterpoint, I argue that ecosystem ecology is an essential site for the study of scientific
communication. In a moment when so many scholars and theorists concern themselves with the
relationship between the Earth’s mutating climate and our techniques of mediation, there is good
reason to study figurations of the ecosystem. They are ultimately, as Niklas Luhmann (1989) puts it
in Ecological Communication, a “reintroduction of the systems unity within the system itself” (20). The
study of tropes in science writing contributes to continuing efforts to shape ecological consciousness
for cultures waking up inside a biosphere they can’t control.

Superorganism as synecdoche
I begin with the “superorganism,” or the ecosystem described as an organism at a larger scale
than any life form we can observe directly. For Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rainker (2010), the
superorganism has precursors in many mythological traditions, from ancient Greece to India,
Mexico, and the Middle East (5). It is the earliest figure of the ecosystem, appearing well before
Arthur Tansley coins the latter term in 1935. The ecologist most often associated with the
superorganism is Frederic Clements, who was influential in the early twentieth century. Many
scholars have discussed the history of this concept and critiques thereof. Instead of lingering on
the superorganism as an ecological idea, I use it to set the stage for a discussion of tropes.
If we embrace the notion that organisms like crows and maples are the only true
organisms, then the superorganism is figurative. The trope is synecdoche. As Richard A.
Lanham (1968) puts it, synecdoche substitutes “part for whole, genus for species, or vice
versa” (148). In the case of the ecosystem, organisms are parts of the larger whole.
Synecdoche makes this whole like an organism, or an organism in its own right. Considerable
debate around the time Tansley coined ecosystem hinged on whether larger-scale ecological
organisms are figurative or literal. At least in part, Tansley coined the term so that he and
other writers of specialist ecological texts could avoid mistaking synecdoche for substance.
Ecosystem emerged from a critique of the superorganism.

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In The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), Kenneth Burke argues that synecdoche might be
the “‘basic’ figure of speech, and that it occurs in many modes beside that of the formal
trope” (45). For Richard Lanham, this insight means that “at the center of figuration stands
scale change. To define A, equate it to a part of B, derived by magnification. Experience is
described in terms of other experience,” but at a different scale (148). Affirming Burke for the
post-WWII period, Lanham goes on to say that “the putative centrality of synecdoche is
receiving at least a fair trial in the current sensorium” (148).
This claim about the history of a trope may be accurate in many contexts. But it misses the
mark in the case of ecosystem ecology. In this particular field, science writing begins to
abandon synecdoche. This change in how ecological science writing tropes the ecosystem
entails a move away from the use of parts to characterize wholes, one that continues the
impulse contained in Tansley’s critique of the superorganism. What do ecologists use instead
of parts? What replaces the organism? What replaces the fundamental cultural work of
synecdoche?
Answering these questions requires names for two new tropes, which substitute x for y in
the way that synecdoche substitutes part for whole. In influential works of ecological science
writing, two tropes are prevalent: scala, which I define elsewhere as the substitution of “one
object for another across at least a degree of magnitude,” usually starting with an object
perceivable by our senses; and technomorphism, which substitutes a technological object for a
natural one (63). The figures of the chain, the wheel, the terrarium or aquarium, and the
computer or digital network are all examples of at least one of these tropes.
But synecdoche and the superorganism continue to play a role in writing ecology’s object
of study, even after the ecosystem and its attendant tropes take center stage. In fact, in a way
that recalls Freud’s account of the return of the repressed, they reappear continuously in the
literature. Thus, while the following sections focus on scala and technomorphism, they also
show examples of how synecdoche and the superorganism persist in the rhetorical caves and
fissures of Anglophone ecological discourse.

Chains
One precursor to the ecosystem concept appears in the work of Gilbert White, in his letters
collected as The Natural History of Selborne (1788–89). White was an eighteenth-century
English naturalist who communicated his observations of animals and plants to urban
professors. For him, there is an “economy of nature” in which all species participate.
Writing before the appearance of terms such as superorganism or ecosystem in English, scala
and technomorphism are the tropes White uses to convey this large-scale order. He writes the
relations among species in terms of technology, and thus in terms of function. The
technology he chooses is the chain. For example, in a passage about earthworms, he writes
that “earth-worms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature,
yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm” (196). While this language may now seem
intuitive—so intuitive as to seem almost literal—it marks an important new way of under-
standing relations among life forms.
By giving worms a function in a chain, White performs a re-valuation or “transvaluation”
of life forms often considered low, disgusting, and weird. Transvaluation is the term Friedrich
Nietzsche (1887) uses to describe dramatic changes in how societies value a given phenom-
enon, for example from seeing it as evil to seeing it as good. Nietzsche considers the Jewish
and Christian notion that “the meek will inherit the Earth” to be a transvaluation of the
worship of strength in Greek and Roman mythology (17). In White’s case, we could call this

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operation a transvaluation of weird life. Instead of re-describing what was good as evil or what
was strength as weakness, White values what had been low and disgusting as functional: a link
in a chain that has no clear beginning or end.
It would go beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the chain figure’s trajectory after
the eighteenth century. But one example from the years following the institutionalization of
ecosystem ecology can show that this version of my trope persists in ecological science
writing. In Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the ecosystem is a chain precisely when she
moves from discussing concrete organisms to write a large-scale system:
water must also be thought of in terms of the chains of life it supports—from the
small-as-dust green cells of the drifting plant plankton, through the minute water
fleas to the fishes that strain plankton from the water and are in turn eaten by other
fishes or by birds, mink, raccoons—in an endless cyclic transfer of material from life
to life. We know that the necessary minerals in the water are so passed from link to
link in the food chains. Can we suppose that the poisons we introduce into water
will also enter the cycles of nature?
(46)
Carson shows us a local picture of an ecosystem that extends far beyond this particular chain.
In the first sentence, thinking “chains of life” passes on to a parenthetical list of literal nouns,
each describing a creature larger than the one that came before. We pass up the food “chain,”
from plankton that take their energy from the sun to fish that eat fish, birds that eat them, and
so on. But the parenthetical list is a nested example of the larger-scale ecosystem itself. The
force of Carson’s passage is not to make readers think of plankton, fish, and birds. The force
of the passage is to take these creatures synecdochically: as examples of parts (links) in a larger-
scale chain. So synecdoche returns inside the technomorph that frames this passage. After the
closing dash, the concrete life forms seem to blur into the chain, as the number of links
becomes too great to list.
As is often the case for technomorphism, the logic of the chain figure is a logic of
function. After all, literal links combine to create a strong, flexible, metal chain, which has
functions for humans such as pulling heavy loads. By making organisms links in a chain,
technomorphism suggests that there is a larger-scale functioning to which organisms con-
tribute, but which transcends them as well. For Carson, this function is to cycle minerals and
other elements. But this systemic order has been controversial in the life sciences since at least
the late nineteenth century. Many of the debates hinge on philosophical questions about
“teleology”—discourse on what does and does not have a function or purpose—which are
intimately related to technomorphism.

Wheels
Carson uses language of rotary motion: “the cyclical transfer of material from life to life”
and “the cycles of nature” (46). It brings me to another example of both scala and
technomorphism: the wheel. The wheel and other rotary figures repeat often in ecological
science writing.
In H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G.P. Wells’s The Science of Life, Volume Three (1931),
the figure of the wheel is explicit. In an effort to describe the fact that “the whole of life
considered chemically is one cyclic process from green plant to bacteria and so again to green
plant,” they name it “the chemical wheel of life,” the “rotating wheel of life,” and the
“fundamental Wheel of Life” (962; 966). Writing four years before Tansley coined ecosystem,

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the authors seem to prefer this technomorphism to the superorganism. They substitute a
technological object for a natural one and an object from our scale of experience for one
outside of it: the invisible chemical processes that bring matter full circle. The figure of the
wheel is not synecdoche. Unlike organisms, wheels are not recognizable as literal parts of
ecosystems.
But the most striking use of the wheel as a figure of the ecosystem appears six years earlier,
in Alfred Lotka’s The Elements of Physical Biology (1925). Lotka describes large-scale order as
“the millwheel of life.” Like Wells et al., he is interested in the circular movement of matter,
and the millwheel encapsulates the more physical, non-organic model that replaces the
superorganism in the decades preceding the Second World War. Sunlight drives the wheel
like a flow of water. The wheel itself represents (planetary) cycles of chemical elements. As
we know from thermodynamics, the flow of energy must be constant, because the transfor-
mation of potential to kinetic is irreversible. To extend Lotka’s metaphor, the mill pond
represents the higher entropy of dispersed energy. The water can’t flow back up the hill, nor
run through the mill a second time. By contrast, Earth’s matter cycles continuously.
Retaining their form, chemical elements rotate from plants to animals, then to decomposers
like fungi, then back again to plants.
But Lotka extends his figure further. It begins to fold in on itself recursively, become self-
critical, and even take on a life of its own. This happens when the ecologist notes the scalar
limits of his technomorphism. As he writes, the millwheel of life is actually “infinitely
complex, and contains within itself a maze of subsidiary cycles” (334). The figure becomes
increasingly baroque. Instead of one wheel driven by water, we have wheels within wheels—
a well-documented image of providence and mysterious self-organizing complexity. Wheels
within wheels is recursive because the figure repeats within its own boundaries. Indeed,
Lotka’s references to “infinite” complexity suggest that we can picture wheels all the way
down, as in the regress of a mise en abyme. He writes self-similarity across scales, a pattern of
sameness from the large to the small that many ecologists come to question toward the end of
the twentieth century. In this sense, technomorphism takes on a life of its own through
Lotka’s self-critical approach to the trope, which demurs from the idea that the ecosystem is
really like a machine. Instead, the millwheel takes on a quality of organic complexity. The
notion that the millwheel has “infinite” “subsidiary cycles” means we are approaching the limits
of technomorphism, in which the ecosystem begins to seem organic because the labyrinthine
connection of these innumerable wheels will never resolve into a fully predictable set of
mechanical elements and relations.

Terraria and aquaria

Ecologists use a third technomorph of the ecosystem, which also departs from synecdoche:
the terrarium or aquarium. These artificially enclosed ecologies exist at multiple scales along a
continuum of closure—from a loose arrangement of plants in glass cases to efforts at absolute
closure such as the five-acre Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona. Ever since the inception of
terrarium and aquarium design, hobbyists, ecologists, and engineers have taken an interest in
making these systems perfectly balanced. Through the logic of closure and balance more than
the logic of function and purpose, ecologists use the terrarium and aquarium to figure the
ecosystem as an idealized unit.
As figures rather than a materialized object, the terrarium and aquarium are at work in
Raymond Lindemann’s “The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology” (1942). Lindemann was
a student of G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who later advised the well-known philosopher of science

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Donna Haraway. Lindemann’s paper was controversial: the journal Ecology only published it
after a long period of review. During the same period, Lindemann died at the age of 27,
which raised the profile of an essay Donald Worster (1999) has called an “event that may
serve to mark the full blown arrival of the New Ecology” (306). For my purposes here, it is
enough to say that the terrarium/aquarium plays the role of both technomorph and scala in
one of the most influential papers in the history of ecosystem ecology.
Thinking smoothly across ecosystemic scales, Lindemann draws an analogy between the
closed artificial ecosystem and the biosphere. As he writes:
The theoretically ideal state of trophic equilibrium . . . may be defined as the dynamic
state of continuous, complete utilization and regeneration of chemical nutrients in
an ecosystem, without loss or gain from the outside, under a periodically constant
energy source—such as might be found in a perfectly balanced aquarium or
terrarium. Natural ecosystems may be said to approach a state of tropic equilibrium
under certain conditions, but it is doubtful that they are sufficiently autochthonous
to attain, or maintain, trophic equilibrium for any length of time. The biosphere as a
whole, however . . . may exhibit a high degree of trophic equilibrium.
(1942: 410–411; author’s emphasis)
Lindemann creates an idealized picture of the ecosystem at two scalar poles: the small and
technological and the large and natural. His argument is that most ecosystems—the ones that
fall between these poles, the ones that he calls “natural ecosystems”—are not actually ideal in
this way. They don’t have perfect trophic equilibrium or perfect material closure, which is one
way to gloss Lindemann’s point about complete “utilization and regeneration of chemical
nutrients . . . without loss or gain from the outside.” Because they don’t, he searches for an
example that does: the “perfectly balanced” aquarium or terrarium. But there is no such thing
as a perfectly balanced terrarium. All such technologies depart from “autochthony,” or radical
self-sufficiency. They require material inputs and produce material wastes. They evolve
dynamically from dominance by one life form to dominance by another. Often described as
the most rigorous effort to achieve both closure and equilibrium, the Biosphere 2 experiment
failed to do so.
This impossibility makes the terrarium figurative. Lindemann’s technomorphism writes
something difficult to picture: an ideal version of what “natural ecosystems” do in much more
partial, leaky, and open-ended ways. The terrarium/aquarium becomes an ideal ecosystem in
the same way that the perpetual motion machine is an ideal, but empirically unreachable,
vision of mechanical efficiency.
More strange and telling is how Lindemann goes on to compare this ideal ecosystem with
“the biosphere as a whole.” It’s at this point that the figure becomes scala as well as
technomorphism, because he uses the terrarium and aquarium to represent the largest
ecological scale we know, or what Vladimir Vernadsky described as the biosphere (a term
now often used synonymously with Earth system, planetary ecosystem, and Gaia). Lindemann
takes the biosphere to be the only natural ecosystem that might exhibit the kind of material
closure and equilibrium that he attributes to the terrarium.
This kind of thinking about self-balancing equilibrium has been called into question by
ecologists and critics alike. But for ecocritics and scholars of environmental communication,
the interest of this passage lies in the work of our central, non-synecdochic tropes in a paper
central to creating the ecosystem concept in the first place. In Lindemann’s paper, these
tropes are inseparable from his effort to think of the ecosystem as a unit and define it as a new
object of study in the life sciences.

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In the case of Lindemann’s equation of the terrarium and the biosphere, however, I read
another return of synecdoche. When the terrarium and biosphere become equivalent in
Lindemann’s ideal state, the two are equated, this means is that the direction of substitution
can be reversed, as it is when terraria are renamed “biospheres.” Synecdoche returns because
the terrarium is ostensibly a part of the biosphere’s whole, but the latter can now equally
characterize the former. This time, the whole substitutes for the part.
The terrarium and aquarium play an almost literal role in the work of Lynn Margulis and
her son and co-author Dorion Sagan (2007). In their work, we find a partial return of the
superorganism and thus a slip back into synecdoche. As a microbiologist, Margulis was one of
the architects of Gaia theory, or the notion that the biosphere is an organism-like entity in
which the metabolisms of small-scale organisms regulate the climate, keeping it within
boundaries conducive to life. For Margulis and her co-author James Lovelock (1975), who
has received the lion’s share of credit and reprobation for this idea, life thus shapes the same
environment to which it adapts.
Sagan’s Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth (1990) is a work of speculative science
writing. His title refers to terraria and aquaria. For Sagan, though we think of the
“terraquarium” as artificial, it is “ultimately ‘natural’—a planetary phenomenon that is part
of the reproductive antics of life as a whole” (9). He sees the artificial ecosystem as a
reproductive organ of the Earth system: humans and our technologies are just as natural as
anything else. But these technologies, especially complex examples such as Biosphere 2 and
the Russian BIOS projects, have a particular function. In Biospheres, Earth is once again “a
giant organism,” only this time it is “on the verge of reproduction” and terraquaria will be its
cosmic offspring (3–4). Gaia doesn’t reproduce through “a gene or an organism but planetary
life as a unified ecological system” (9).
With the return of synecdoche in this book, we see a kind of technomorphism of the
ecosystem, but one that goes hand in hand with a naturalization of technology. It’s not so
much that the terrarium figures the (organic) ecosystem as that it copies and disseminates one.
Its function is different from that of the chain or the wheel. It’s not an object with a function
for humans that is then used to characterize more-than-human ecosystems. Its function is
only for itself: to reproduce the very ecological conditions that terraria often figure.

Computers, networks
Technomorphism may seem to depend on the idea that ecosystems are natural and
technologies are artificial, produced by humans for explicit purposes. The trope is figurative
because using a wheel to describe an ecosystem can hardly be a literal use of language. But
some ecological science writing argues for a more capacious definition of technology, one
that includes the structures and symbiotic relations established by nonhuman life forms.
Samuel Butler puts this possibility forward in Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872), and
Margulis and Sagan continue the argument in Dazzle Gradually: Essays on the Nature of
Nature (2007). Perhaps they are right that technology goes all the way down, as it were, in
the history of life. Or it could be that only the more obvious examples, such as beaver
dams, really count as nonhuman technology. But the point is that arguments like these
complicate technomorphism. When ecologists use it to characterize ecosystems, they may
be substituting something technological for something natural—but this doesn’t mean that
technology is strictly human.
Between the Second World War and the present, I find many examples of ecosystems
described as computers and information networks. If this seems strange, it is less so if we take

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into account the increasingly well-known fact that cybernetics and information theory shaped
many natural and human sciences during this period. Concepts such as self-regulation,
feedback, and information spread through many fields. They were applied well outside their
original reference to machines. From this influence, for example, comes the notion that
biological growth and heredity work through the processing and transmission of information.
It is in this context that we should understand Margulis and Sagan’s (2007) readiness to
write about things like bacterial communication networks, arguing that many human
technologies have a much deeper evolutionary history than we know (81–82). True or not,
cybernetics pushed many scientists to see technological mechanisms in nature, whether they
continued to see them as technological or “naturalized” them by letting technomorphism slip
into literal description. That ecosystems have also been described in computational and digital
terms speaks to the power of this influence.
Indeed, the technomorphism and scala “ecosystem as computer” is at work on both sides
of ecosystem ecology’s definitive late-twentieth-century conflict. As Heather Houser (2017)
puts it, early ecosystem ecologists emphasized the “closed circularity and stability of the
system” (265). Using the cybernetic concept of negative feedback, ecologists such as Eugene
Odum—author of The Fundamentals of Ecology (1953), a major textbook which went through
five editions—argued that the ecosystem was “a natural unit that includes living and non-
living parts interacting to produce a stable system in which the exchange of materials between
living and non-living parts follows circular paths” (9). With its emphasis on equilibrium, if
not closure, this argument is closer to Lindemann’s idealized ecosystem than to what he calls
“natural ecosystems.”
But for many ecologists in the late twentieth century, the ecosystem is instead “dynamic,”
“metastable,” and “far from equilibrium.” For Robert V. O’Neill writing in 2001, the new
ecosystem is “disequilibrial, open, hierarchical, spatially patterned, and scaled” (3276). If one
thing was definitively stripped from the concept as ecology entered the twenty-first century,
it was the assumption that ecosystems tend toward equilibrium, balance, or harmony.
I see the ecosystem figured as a computer and digital network on both sides of the debate,
which suggests the attraction of this technomorphism for ecologists. Perhaps, as Jedediah
Purdy (2017) argues in a recent article, I should not be surprised to find them writing about
“a networked information system under the leaves and humus,” given that nature answers
“faithfully to the imaginative imperatives and limitations of its observers,” and we have
already seen ecosystems described as houses and factories. Even so, many readers might find
jarring the transition from a matter-and-energy-centered model to one focused on informa-
tion. Because of the popularity of conceptualizations of the genome as language or code, it’s
easy to picture information flowing around inside organisms. But it seems counterintuitive to
see ecosystems as communication systems.
Nevertheless, this is precisely what a range of ecological science writers have done. One
good starting point is Environment, Power, and Society (1971), written by Eugene Odum’s
brother Howard T. Odum. Like Lindemann and Donna Haraway, Odum was a student of G.
Evelyn Hutchinson, an ecologist who attended the Macy Conferences on cybernetics (1941–
1960).
For Howard T. Odum, ecosystems are computers. Not only is “an ecological system a
network of food and mineral flows in which the major pathways are populations of animals,
plants, and microorganisms,” but also “this network is comparable to complex electrical
circuits” (1971: 60; 97). Not only is the ecosystem an electrical circuit, but it’s capable of
information processing: “the eccentric behavior of birds, bats, and blooms is really the outer
manifestation of preprogrammed computer units that control the timing of the whole

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ecological system” (95). Odum is not alone in this view. Gregory Bateson and the Spanish
ecologist Ramón Margalef both argued that the ecosystem is, in the words of the latter, a
“channel for information”—even if they didn’t go so far as to figure it as a computer (17).
Computer or not, precisely this programmed timing, this systemic control through the flow
of information, is what leads to ecosystem stability.
One oft-cited text of post-equilibrium ecology, which Worster (1999) calls the “ecology
of chaos,” is Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century
(1990). Botkin provides a review of ecological literature and adds speculations about possible
new myths and metaphors of nature, ones that might help humans avoid destroying our
conditions of existence. He points to the “machine age” and to “machine metaphors” of the
ecosystem as causes of an unwarranted focus on the balance of nature. From the perspective
of environmentalist politics, he is interested in how we can integrate ourselves and our
technologies with a nature in constant change, giving up the search for model states to use as
political goals.
As an alternative, Botkin points out that we are (or were, in 1990), entering the age of the
computer. Once again, “technology is changing our perception of nature” (114). His chapter
title “The Forest in the Computer: New Metaphors for Nature” points to more than just the
use of computer modelling in ecology (though Botkin does discuss simulation). Like Odum,
and this argues against his title’s claim to newness, Botkin considers the ecosystem to be like a
computer. Citing Margulis and others on bacteria that exchange genetic information “‘like a
large communications network,’” he writes that these bacteria resemble “nothing more than
memory bytes in a computer that operates at the planetary level” (114). In this way,
computers are revealing “the metaphor of many events considered simultaneously in a
connected network” (129).
The writing of ecologists such as Odum and Botkin may have prepared the ground for
more recent speculations. As science writer Dawn Field puts it in a 2015 article for Aeon, “if
all life has DNA and it is interlinked on our planet, then the entire planetary ecology can be
likened to a giant computer”. Instead of scaling up the organism, she too scales up the
computer. Because of the ability of organisms to process information, the Earth may have a
computing power “1022 times” faster than the fastest literal supercomputer. The super-
organism is out; the supercomputer is in.
Even so, for Botkin (1990), this dynamic, informatic view of the ecosystem and the Earth
system is also more organic. After all, the influence of cybernetics and information theory
make life seem saturated with “technology”: “While computers have made machines seem
lifelike, other fields that rely on modern technology are blending the mechanistic and the
organic from the opposite direction” (130). Resonating with more recent Anthropocene
discourse, Botkin then closes with the idea that we are arriving at a “new organic view of the
Earth . . . in which we are part of a living and changing system whose changes we can accept,
use, and control” (189). Despite the fact that both cybernetic and organicist ecologists have
argued that ecosystems tend toward stability, he associates this logic only with the “machine
age.” He argues that the information age brings with it a new organicism, without reference
to any stable, natural state of Earth.
I close with two things about synecdoche and scale in Botkin’s approach. The first and the
clearest is the return of the superorganism in cybernetic form, which means that synecdoche
returns too. As in Sagan’s argument about Gaian reproduction, the superorganism comes back
into play after a detour through technomorphism. The second is that, while both the computer
and the information network count as technomorphism, only the computer is an example of
scala as I’ve defined it. Computers are relatively discrete objects, much smaller than the

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planetary ecosystem. But the spatial scale of information networks has a much wider range. The
existence of communication satellites and spacecraft make it arguably greater, at the upper limit,
than the biosphere itself. When ecological science writing evokes the network, it moves away
not only from synecdoche but from figuration that works across scales. It departs from what
both synecdoche and scala have in common: the use of something smaller and more familiar to
figure something larger; a schema that begins by setting up a gap between scales, then works to
cross it.

***

Discussing synecdoche, as I wrote above, Lanham associates it with scale change and
magnification. To return to his argument about Burke and the role of this trope in the
“current sensorium,” Lanham (1968) continues by saying that “scaling has certainly formed a
central part of postmodern aesthetics . . . And similarity of part to whole, self-similarity as it is
called, is a central characteristic of the fractal geometry introduced into modern thinking by
chaos theory” (148).
In this chapter, I tested his claim against an archive of ecological science writing and found
that it applies only in a limited way. Following early-twentieth-century interest in the
superorganism, the trope fades as ecology seeks to move beyond it by way of scala and
technomorphism. But these efforts, bound up with the coining of ecosystem in the first place,
are shadowed by the earlier trope. Perhaps Burke’s and Lanham’s point about scale is an
explanation for this pattern. Despite the critiques and alternatives, writers keep reinventing
the wheel of the larger-scale organism, pulled in by the gravitational force of synecdoche.
By distinguishing between synecdoche and scala, I meant to separate tropes that work with
the logic of part and whole from those that simply substitute an object from one scale for an
object from another. This distinction is useful because it acknowledges, in a way that
synecdoche does not, that the scales of the part and the whole might not be “self-similar”
after all. Rather, smooth scaling of this kind hides what in ecosystems is not analogous to
smaller-scale entities—what might be counterintuitive about their scale domain, which is only
indirectly available to sensory experience.
In Alice in Wonderland, as in many texts about growing and shrinking, Alice changes her
size but not her form, and the superorganism figure has a similar effect. But if there is no way
to avoid figurative language in describing these large-scale orders, perhaps the advantage of
scala is that it avoids this smooth analogy. Substituting improbable objects like the wheel or
the computer for the ecosystem tends to expose the machinery of figuration. I become aware
that crucial differences emerge when thinking and writing across very different scales. Alice
mutates as she grows. Beyond a certain threshold, she doesn’t look like an organism at all.
In any case, these alternating views through the macroscope will not give us evidence to
decide whether scala and technomorphism, or any other trope at work in ecological science
writing, are more accurate than the superorganism. What this second-order approach to the
literature can do is emphasize the disjunctures that produce scale effects—what Timothy Clark
(2015) defines as “phenomena that are invisible at normal scales of perception but only
emerge as one changes the spatial or temporal scale at which the issues are framed” (22).
Reading the history of science in order to keep this procession of transcalar substitutions in
view is a form of ecological awareness in itself. But this work on the part of ecocritics and
scholars of environmental communication does not suggest that ecosystems or the Earth
system are reducible to metaphor. Rather, this work contributes to the formation of new
cultures and pedagogies able to make these alien scales present in the collective life of politics.

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Works cited
Botkin, Daniel. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press,
1990.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Louisiana State University Press, 1941.
Butler, Samuel. Erewhon: Or, Over the Range. 1917. Dutton, 1872.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Crist, Eileen and H. Bruce Rainker. “One Grand Organic Whole.” Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change,
Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rainker. MIT Press,
2010.
Field, Dawn. “Perfect Genetic Knowledge.” Aeon. 11 September 2015. https://aeon.co/essays/what-
might-we-do-with-the-genomics-of-the-entire-planet
Houser, Heather. “Ecosystem.” American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000, edited by Stephen J. Burn.
Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. University of California Press, 1968.
Lindemann, Raymond. “The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology.” Ecology 23.4(1942): 399–417.
Lotka, Alfred. The Elements of Physical Biology. Williams and Wilkins, 1925.
Luhmann, Niklas. Ecological Communication. 1986. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Margulis, Lynn and James E. Lovelock. “The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere—The
Gaia Hypothesis.” CoEvolution Quarterly 6(1975): 31–40.
Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature. Chelsea Green
Publishing, 2007.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Dover Thrift Editions, 2012.
O’Neill, Robert V. “Is it Time to Bury the Ecosystem Concept? (With Full Military Honors, Of
Course!).” Ecology 82.12(2001): 3275–84.
Odum, Eugene. Fundamentals of Ecology. W.B. Saunders Company, 1953.
Odum, Howard T. Environment, Power, and Society. Wiley-Interscience, 1971.
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Purdy, Jedediah. “Thinking Like a Mountain: On Nature Writing.” n+1 29 (Fall 2017). https://nplusone
mag.com/issue-29/reviews/thinking-like-a-mountain/
Sagan, Dorion. Biosphere: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth. McGraw Hill, 1990.
Wells, H.G. et al. The Science of Life, Vol. 3. Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1931.
White, Gilbert. The Natural History of Selbourne. 1788–89. Penguin, 1987.
Woods, Derek. “Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten.” Scale in Literature and
Culture, edited by David Wittenberg and Michael Tavel Clarke. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Worster, Donald. “The Ecology of Order and Chaos.” Readings in Ecology, edited by Stanley I. Dodson
et al. Oxford University Press, 1999.

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 11
THE LITERAL AND
LITERARY CONFLICTS OF
CLIMATE CHANGE
The climate migrant and the unending
war against emergence

Shane Hall

Within the post-9/11 security state threats of terrorism, pandemics, and climate change all
share similarities in their discursive construction, and the logics by which these threats are
enacted as threats are also similar (Cooper 2008, Anderson 2010: 779). Each threat constitutes
“systemic interruptions” that, while low in probability, are catastrophic in effect (Anderson
2010: 779). Each is difficult to detect and isolate, as they emerge from within the population
itself, and are not imposed on a population from without. The post-9/11 security state
conceives of terrorism, pandemics, insurgencies, and climate change as threats precisely in
their potential to suddenly rise up and catastrophically emerge from an environment. Within
the broader cultural fears of “emergence”—fears of insurgency, outbreak, and disaster—climate
change threatens to exacerbate or incite these other threats. It is small wonder, then, that
climate change is increasingly depicted across discursive communities as a threat to human—
and national—security. Confining this analysis to the United States, people from different
professional and political affiliations depict climate change as a “threat multiplier,” something
that will exacerbate existing threats to security.
If the kinds of threats that climate change enhances share the common discursive attributes
of emergencies and insurgencies, scholars must attend to the political, ethical, and ecological
implications of counter-insurgency theory and operations. The now-widespread understanding
of climate change as a “threat multiplier” comes from Sheri Goodman, who in 2006–2007
coined the term working with the CNA Corp. while consulting with the US military. Since
2007, the phrase “threat multiplier” and “climate change” appear frequently in military,
political, and popular publications on climate change. The term’s ascendance coincides with
the rise of counterinsurgency doctrine and within an era of security institutions militarizing
in the United States. The US Army and Marine Field Manual to Counterinsurgency was also
published to considerable public fanfare in 2006 under the direction of General David
Petreaus. The US Army and Marine Field Manual to Counterinsurgency constituted a shift in
Army doctrine about how to wage the protracted fight against insurgencies in Iraq and

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Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency operations use military (or militarized) force to manage

populations and environments in such a way as to monitor and prevent insurgence and
emergence of destabilizing forces. Counterinsurgency operations attack “the fabric of
society” in order to control environments and prevent destabilizing emergence (Parenti
2011: 22). Thus, as scholars such as Robert Marzec (2015), Christian Parenti, and Nick
Buxton and Ben Haye (2016) argue, counterinsurgency is a form of militarized adaptation
to climate change that may do more damage to human and environmental security and
worsen social and environmental injustice than the devastating physical impacts of climate
change itself. The invisible ubiquity of climate change, and its influence on other emergent
threats (terrorism, insurgency, pandemics, hunger), lends itself to being met through the
logics of “anticipatory action” (Anderson 2010, 2011, Cooper 2008). In this chapter I
unpack how the logics of emergent and insurgent threats are attributed to anthropogenic
climate change through identification with the figure of the forced climate migrant. I offer
a close reading of Junot Díaz’s short story, “Monstro,” as an exemplar text depicting the
forced climate migrant as synecdoche of emergent global risk, and as an assertion of the
folly of the ecological security state’s attempts to guarantee security while fomenting
insecurity (Marzec 2015: 9).
It may seem odd to approach militarized adaptation to climate change through close
reading of literature, and even odder to center the figure of the forced climate migrant
within such studies. War, in its long and bloody history, has never been a solely material
endeavor. The need for war, the art of war, and the making of peace after war are all
simultaneously narrated, social, and ethical affairs. These endeavors are as important to the
fighting and outcome of battle as are blades, bombs, and bullets. Discourse analysis
recognizes that form not only reflects power, but investigates how knowledge and form
are effects of power (Baldwin 2013: 1476). Knowledge is enmeshed with power precisely
through form, and to analyze form and representation allows scholars to attend to the
relationships between the subjects and objects of discourses (Foucault 1978). This approach
allows for both the study of how environments and environmental inequalities are imbri-
cated in armed conflict and also allows scholars to engage in the study of how militaristic
thinking ties conflict to environmental change through ostensibly environmentalist ratio-
nales. What discourses support and sustain war and militarism’s use of environmental
military violence? How do these values and beliefs limit public imaginaries to envision a
future of resource wars and resurgent imperialism rather than democratic, dialogic solutions
to socio-environmental problems? By attending to the narratives, tropes, and images
throughout climate change discourse, we may begin to answer these questions.

Introducing the climate migrant

The construct of the forced climate migrant, and the closely-affiliated notion of the “climate
refugee,” is a paradigmatic figure within the militarized climate discourses. Nowhere is the
insurgent threat of climate change more concretized than in the discursive construction of climate
migrants. Such a claim requires a few terminological caveats in the service of clarity and concision
before I proceed to describe what paradigms the figure of climate migrants instantiate. Strictly
speaking, there are no climate refugees. A refugee is someone with or seeking a legal protection
governed by the 1951 Geneva Convention. Under the UN’s definition, a refugee is “some-
one who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence”
(“What is a Refugee?”). Someone who flees their country of origin due to changing climate
conditions in that country (or less commented on, conditions within the country being

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migrated to) are not currently recognized as refugees. As the one report of the UN Secretary
General on the security implications of climate change unequivocally states: “Although terms
such as ‘environmental refugee’ or ‘climate change refugee’ are commonly used, they have no
legal basis” (2009). Beyond legalistic ambiguity, there is wide uncertainty within academic
literature regarding the actual number of climate migrants, and even the ontology of climate
migrants and refugees. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report estimates anywhere between 50 and
350 million people may be displaced by climate change in 2050, while Richard Black (2001), an
analyst for the UNHCR, published a report on the 51st anniversary of the 1951 Geneva
Convention lambasting the focus of policymakers on environmental refugees as a category of
migrants in need of additional legal protections. Regarding the existence of climate migrants,
Black writes, “despite the breadth of examples provided in the literature, the strength of the
academic case put forward is often depressingly weak” (2). There are so many complex forces
that cause people to move, it is perhaps too difficult or too reductive to single out
environmental change as the dominant cause of mass migrations. Black’s analysis, however,
is confined to studies of more contemporary cases of mass migrations; Brenda Baker and
Takeyyuki Tsuda (2015) synthesize numerous studies in archeology and bioarcheology to
argue that environmental disruptions have powered human migration for millennia, and that
contemporary migrations are also motivated or hindered by environmental change, a position
endorsed by the UN Secretary General (2009: 297–298).
Andrew Baldwin separates the academic literature of climate migrants into the “max-
imalists” and the “minimalists,” two camps that take generally opposing positions on the
phenomenon of climate migration. In general, the maximalists see climate change or other
environmental changes as major contributors or direct catalysts of international migration
and the creation of internally displaced peoples (IDPs), while the minimalists see climate
change as a relatively minor contributor within a larger collection of “push” and “pull”
factors governing migration in and between nation states (Baldwin et al. 2014: 121–122).
Like these authors, I place myself in the minimalist camp, yet nonetheless argue that
climate migrants as constructs, as figures in climate narratives, carry forward major weight
not only in UN refugee policy circles, but also in climate discourse and security discourse
more broadly.1 In other words, whether there are five climate migrants or 50 million
climate migrants, the cultural representation of this figure traffics cultural power in climate
discourse today.
Who is the climate migrant? The figure of the climate migrant is always future-oriented,
looking back and bearing down on the present because they do not yet exist. Andrew Baldwin
describes the climate migrant as a “destabilizing figure bearing down on the present”
(2012a: 627). In considering the climate migrant as a discursive construct one must, to use
Omi and Winant’s (2014) apt phrase, be “compelled to think racially, to use the racial
categories and meaning systems into which we have been socialized” in order to conduct
anti-racist analyses and interventions into racist discourses (159). This is to say, the social
construction and representation of climate migrants and climate refugees is a racial project
that offers “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial
dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial
lines” (Omi and Winant 2014: 56). In Life Adrift (2017), a recent anthology dedicated to
uncovering the “political subsurface” of the intersections of migration and climate change,
editors Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini argue that the effects of climate change on
migration—who will migrate, and for whom migration is a problem or solution—is always
racialized (14–15). Nikhil Singh (2012) argues that in the US context, “concrete institutio-
nalizations of militarized-carceral regimes” define the “principal background condition to

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contemporary theorization of race.” Thus I read the figure of the climate migrant and
increased international migration in the 21st century as central to anxieties of both more
liberal and conservative movements vis-à-vis climate change, and this broad resonance
across “discursive families” of climate change discussions indicates why a thorough study of
this figure is important to understanding both climate discourse, racial projects post-9/11
and Hurricane Katrina, and the discursive links between conflict and environmental change
(Bettini 2012).
The climate migrant is figured as both victim of and threat from climate change. The
figure holds this paradoxical subject position in security discourse through the logics of
precaution, prevention, and preparedness, or in other words, the logics that underpin
counterinsurgency theory (Anderson 2010, 2011, Bettini 2012, Baldwin 2013). One won’t
find explicit reference to “race” within counterinsurgency theory or US military doctrine.
However, this mode of full-spectrum biopolitical warfare relies on colorblind racial forma-
tions and enacts its own kind of racial projects. Robert Marzec (2015) calls the kinds of
thinking that underpin counterinsurgency’s embrace of environmental control “environmen-
tality” in the US security state, a form of “environmentalism as a policing action” that creates
insecurity in the name of security (4). From its roots in European and American imperial
policing, modern counterinsurgency continues to militarize police action, and criminalize
unauthorized use of violence. Enemies are delegitimized and depicted as illogical or irrational
criminal elements and terrorists (Genova 2012: 183–184). In an age of permanent anti-terror
and counterinsurgency small wars, the “disenfranchised felon, enemy combatant, and illegal
immigrant, each enact a violent and exclusive social relation through a discursive and
institutional process of criminalization without the requirement of a racial prerequisite,”
writes Nikhil Singh. And yet each figure is indelibly marked by racial othering, and they
stand in as colorblind shibboleths that rearticulate racist ideology and continue to (re)
distribute power, voting rights, citizenship, and economic and political power along racial
lines domestically and vis-à-vis US foreign policy.
Apocalyptic narratives featuring “waves” of climate migrants from the Global South
eroding the social fabric of the Global North abound in popular culture and policymaking
circles (Bettini 2012: 63). Yet the way in which the climate migrant is articulated within such
narratives is often to play “the barbarian at the gates,” and this frequent orientalist threat
signals the strong degree to which white affect motivates present anxieties around climate
migrants (Baldwin 2012b). The climate migrant’s dual nature of threat and victim is not only
a product of the orientalist othering of the migrant (via racial projects and other discursive
formations), as Andrew Baldwin maintains, but also and relatedly a product of what Ben
Anderson (2010) terms “anticipatory geographies” enacted through kinds of environmental-
ities to control emergent and insurgent threats. Within the larger militarized discourses of
resource enclosure and “environmentalism as police action,” the climate migrant constitutes a
“destabilizing figure” that, by virtue of their terroristic insurgent potentialities or the
seemingly inexorable dissolving power, the societal erosion, envisioned by the rising
“human tide” of mass migration, threatens the white social order that has erected violent
environmentalities to manage both the migrant and the white citizenry of the Global North. I
extend this basic argument to a piece of speculative fiction, “Monstro,” that foregrounds
racial formations in a menacing portrayal of climate migrants as a decolonizing force
unleashed upon an imperialist neoliberal world order. The racialization of migrants in
“Monstro” dovetails with other modes of climate security discourse that render the figure of
the climate migrant as a destabilizing force, as a threat to be confronted or a humanitarian
crisis to be ameliorated and managed.

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“Monstro” and the apocalyptic insecurity of the security state

Junot Díaz2 centers climate refugees and migrants in an apocalyptic climate justice short story
called “Monstro.” Díaz’s 2012 story, set in the Dominican Republic and Haiti sometime in the
near future, reflects the shared logics of anticipatory action that undergird US security discourse in
the 21st century by crafting a speculative short story that combines aspects of mysterious
pandemic, climate change, migrant uprisings, and fierce militarization defending corporate
geopolitical interests. Not only does “Monstro” reflect the logics of anticipatory military
action as a means of managing emergent environmental threats, the story does so while also
representing a means by which this anticipatory action constructs threats as racial projects. In
doing so “Monstro” demonstrates how the climate migrant is articulated within a number of
discourses that condition publics to accept the hegemony of militarized responses to these threats
and militarization of social institutions. If militarized hegemony “gerrymanders the boundary of
perception,” Díaz’s short story is an example of artistic cultural production that “highlight(s) those
places that are most unseen and unknown and at risk of climate disaster” through a sustained
emphasis on migration and displacement (Sze 2015: 103). “Monstro” appeared in the New Yorker’s
June 2012 special “Science Fiction Summer Issue,” and was originally intended to be an excerpt of
a larger novel. In 2015 Díaz admitted that he was abandoning his Monstro project (June 7, 2015),
nearly three years to the day “Monstro” appeared in the New Yorker.
Told by an unnamed Dominican-American narrator who is a journalism student at Brown,
the story interweaves the narrator’s personal recounting of the bizarre outbreak of a new disease—
colloquially dubbed la Negrura (the Darkness)—with a tale of the narrator’s “chasing a girl”
throughout a summer he spends in the Dominican Republic. The mysterious disease begins in
Haiti, and after a number of unsettling and mysterious epidemiological developments, fuses
the infected together into an army of “forty foot tall cannibal motherfuckers” who bring
about the end of the world as we (the readers) know it (Díaz 2012). By the end of the story
the narrator’s shallow personal ambitions and the epoch-defining events of the outbreak come
to a head, as he and his two friends hop into a car and drive towards the Haitian border to
witness a DR-backed military force meet waves of “invader” refugees “with maximum
force.” Like Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film, Children of Men, the dystopian features of “Mon-
stro” reside at the figurative edges of visibility within the text, flickering in and out of the
story as the narrator almost pathologically directs his gaze away from the enormity of what is
happening around him. Sketched through these brief narrative glimpses, the end of the world
is constructed through suggestion and interpretation of the descriptions of the quotidian
world that the narrator relates without intentionally singling out as relevant or important to
understanding the mysterious outbreak that leads to the apocalypse. For the narrator and his
companions the disappearing beaches, the “one hundred straight days over 105 F,” the
climate-controlled New Colonial zone that the rich inhabit, the militarized borders and
inhumane conditions of refugees in Haitian “relocation camps” aren’t spectacular within the
story; they’re just part of the normal landscape that the narrator has to relate in order to tell his
story about hanging out with his friends during a summer break from college.
Reading “Monstro” as climate justice fiction, the monstrous pertains first and foremost to
the human systems that give rise to climate and social injustice. Placing the story on the island
of Hispaniola fingers the imperial formations of colonialism, slavery, and global capitalist
extractivism at the heart of the monstrous story (Quesada 2016: 292). The speculative collapse
of civilization at the hands of monsters in the story serves to indict these systemic injustices
while also indexing the deepest anxieties of those who benefited most from the structures that
produce their own undoing. The representation and effects of La Negrura within “Monstro”

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combine aspects of epidemic disease, insurgency theory, and the ever-racialized discourse of
zombification. Following Jefferey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) method of “reading cultures
through the monsters they engender,” and his understanding that monsters serve as gate-
keepers of social boundaries, I interpret La Negrura as an expression of counterinsurgency-
invested fear of emergence and insurgence out of a wild, perilous environment of neoliberal
capitalism’s own creation (Cohen 1996: 4).
La Negrura is associated from the start with displaced people and climate change. The
disease is traced to a small boy in a “relocation camp” near Port-au-Prince “in the hottest
March in recorded history.” La Negrura causes the boy’s arm to swell to an enormous size of
black, rugose “mold-fungus-blast” (2). The new disease is unique, but not outside the
ordinary ecology of this near-future Antilles:
Everybody blamed the heat. Blamed the Calientazo. Shit, a hundred straight days
over 105 degrees F. in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chili and down to
its last five trees—something berserk was bound to happen. All sorts of bizarre
outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound.
(Díaz 2012)
The narrator has internalized the logic of climate change producing new diseases, a position
that remains at the margins of climate discourse even as the IPCC consistently reports that
diseases may spread farther and faster in a warming climate. New life forms emerge from the
bare life of the relocation camps, “zoonotics by the pound” rising up and out of precarious
life suffering the effects of climate injustice. This particular “blast” begins “epidermically and
then worked its way up and in,” slowly paralyzing the infected over the spread of a few
months (2). The infection indeed “makes a Haitian blacker,” as “black rotting rugose masses”
fruit from the infected epidermis. To describe what this looks like, the narrator wryly notes
that “coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on
the arms and backs and heads of the infected” (3). This particular wordplay associates the
victims of La Negrura with climate change by comparing the symptoms of La Negrura to an
early casualty of warmer, more acidic oceans. Despite the grotesque effects of the disease, the
narrator explains that “this [disease] didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only
the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them” (2). In other words,
La Negrura seems marginal to “everybody” because it affects only those who are already
marginalized and materially suffering from political, economic, and social marginalization and
thus excluded from “everybody.” By “making a Haitian blacker” and making the victims
look like coral reefs, La Negrura’s appearance underscores its emergence within racial and
spatial terrains. La Negrura is a form of climate injustice that is layered onto ongoing social
and environmental injustice wrought by ongoing imperial formations working prior to the
extreme heat of a changed climate.
The position of the refugees exemplify Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the homo sacer;
they who live under the ban of sovereign power at the outskirts of political life. The homo
sacer is not properly a subject of normal political life, but is reduced to “bare life” that is not
targeted for death, but is dispensed with nonetheless in this peculiar state of exemption
through “violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways”
(Agamben 1998: 144). For Agamben, the technology of “the camp” is a means of making
homo sacri of masses of people and is paradigmatic of the links between biopolitics and
sovereign power in the 20th and 21st century. The technology of the camp and Haiti’s long
history at both the center of world history and the periphery of world power helps explain
the geographic pathology of Díaz’s mysterious disease. The reader does not know why the

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camp residents have been relocated to the camps. Published two years after the 2010
earthquake in Haiti when dozens of refugee camps were (and are) still operating in Haiti
and the D.R., “Monstro” implies the camps may contain “refugees” of both economic and
environmental catastrophes. La Negrura emerges from the normalized state of exemption
established by relocation camps where they are contained and managed as a potential threat
to those outside the camp. As such, the force of La Negrura challenges the passivity with
which Agamben’s rendering of “bare life” generally implies. While the disease seems to
justify the exclusion of the homo sacri from the polis of Port au Prince and beyond, it also
signals the inability of camps to truly banish homo sacri from the biotic and political webs
they are a part of. As the narrator admonishes the reader, the diseases “respected no
boundaries,” and boundaries of the camp seem only to foster the coalescing threat of La
Negrura towards those outside of the camp. La Negrura asserts the agency of those human
and nonhuman living in the sovereign ban of global biopolitical regimes.
La Negrura “respects no boundaries,” and this perhaps more than any other aspect of this
fictitious disease maps onto the fears that animate the threats of climate change, pandemics,
terrorism, and insurgent threats more generally (Díaz 2012). The fears La Negrura embodies are
fears of a body’s integrity within a rapidly changing and radically connected world, even though
those connections are often occluded, distanced, and uneven; a far cry from the harmonious
“web of nature” tropes that marked environmental writings of the 19th and 20th century (Buell
1995: 284). Climate change, pandemics, and terrorism all disrupt dominant social, economic,
and political relations, and call into question the taken-for-granted boundaries that discipline
populations to comply with the hegemonic power of the neoliberal state. While La Negrura
emerges from a shadowed point of origin within the normalized state of exception (the
metaphoric and literal camp), its danger to the social order is bound up in its possibility of
spreading and fusing as well as its unpredictability and inscrutability. It is unpredictable because it
evolves, and through the narration of “Monstro,” the pathology of the epidemic is revealed as
mysterious and unsettling turn by turn. “The blast seemed to have a boner for fusion, respected
no boundaries,” the narrator explains (Díaz 2012). The narrator is disgusted by the images of
“naked trembling Haitian brothers sharing a single stained cot, knotted together by horrible
model, their heads slurred into one” (Díaz 2012). The coral-like growths not only tunnel
through the infected, but the arborescence sticks to other infected, “slurring” them into a
ghastly whole. La Negrura signifies the fear of multiplicity within aggregates, obliterating the
taken-for-granted integrity of individual bodies and social relations by fusing together the
immiserated Haitian individuals. Infections always constitute a threat to the purity and integrity
not only of society but also of the autonomous self. This “fusion” is replicated and elaborated as
the disease evolves and continues to confound the scientific attempts to diagnose its cause,
effects, or cure. Notable for this study, the narrator avers that not even “the military enhancers
could crack it.” He describes the disease as “a slow leprous spread” of “mold-fungus-blast” that
“didn’t turn out to be a mold-fungus blast” but instead “something different . . . something
new” (Díaz 2012). Even after the facts of the story the narrator is unable to describe the
ontology of the disease.
In addition to the literal fusion, the infected patients strongly desire to be close to one
another in the main quarantine zone of Champ de Mars, the largest relocation camp (Díaz
2012). Individuals separated from each other or removed from the relocation camps react by
getting violent and irrational, breaking their restraints and ignoring sedatives or physical
discomfort by trying to return to the infected zone. Growing stalks of coral-like, fungus-like,
mold-like bodies on their own bodies, and drawing together spatially and physically within
the camps shows the dissolution of individual human bodies even as they are taken up, with

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nonhuman-like features, into a geographic and multi-species black body. Once gathered in
the quarantine zone the infected stop speaking, an event the narrator terms “the Silence”
(Díaz 2012). Their literal silence echoes their loss of agency and subaltern status as camp
refugees. While the subaltern voices of the infected are silenced, the disease claims the proper
location “suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life” in
the quarantine camps themselves (Agamben 1998: 140). Violently resisting the attempts to
separate the infected from each other and the quarantine zone, those infected by La Negrura
reclaim agency by asserting their determination to live literally in solidarity with one another.
The infected are not separated from the general population through the mechanism of the
quarantine, but instead withdraw themselves.
After “the Silence” La Negrura begins “the Chorus.” Two or three times a day “the entire
infected population simultaneously let out a bizarre shriek” (Díaz 2012). Despite blocking the
literal fusion of the rugose fruiting bodies between human bodies, the infected are somehow
in perfect synchronization with each other despite a lack of physical contact, emitting “eerie
siren shit” in thirty-second intervals all together. Opposite Spivak’s subaltern silence, figura-
tively performed by “the Silence” in the quarantine zone, is this literary enactment of Enrique
Dussel’s “originary interpellation” (Dussel and Mendieta 1999: 80). For Dussel and Mendieta,
the “radical origin” of ethical responsibility in Philosophy of Liberation—a moment within
Latin American philosophy to rupture oppressive and colonial relationships—comes from
hearing the cry of another:
The oppressed, tortured, destroyed, in her suffering corporeality, simply cries out,
clamoring for justice: I am hungry! Don’t kill me! Have compassion for me!
(Dussel and Mendieta 1999: 80)
While Agamben defines bare life as that which is always outside the political, Dussel maintains
bare life’s inclusion within the political because of its capacity to express suffering. Bare life
indicts the polis to acknowledge and respond to its plight:
The radical origin is not the affirmation of one’s self (the soi-même), for that one must
be able to first reflect, assume oneself as possessing value, that is, discover oneself as a
person. We are before all of that. We are before the slave who was born slave and who
therefore does not know he is a person. He simply cries out. The cry, as noise, as
clamor, as exclamation, proto-word still not articulated, which is interpreted in its sense
and meaning by those “who have ears to hear,” indicates simply that someone suffers,
and that from out of their suffering they emit a wail, a howl, a supplication. This is the
originary “interpellation.”
(Dussel and Mendieta 1999: 111)
The “wail” of the silenced patients can be read as simultaneously a collective protest and
interpellation from the global shadows of the quarantine camps as well as a more-than-human
indictment from the disease itself. “Those with ears to hear,” the narrator relates again and
again, fail to acknowledge or heed the warning signs each new mutation or progression of the
outbreak brings.
All monsters “escape the epistemological nets of the erudite” and signal the limits of
dominant ways of knowing and thus ways of controlling aspects of the world. La Negrura’s
monstrousness is partially a product of the narrator and world powers’ ability to hear the
summons of its lamentation (Cohen 1996: 12). This willful deafness is “[unfortunate] for just
about everybody on the planet” as managers pay heed to “more immediate problems” like
the patients’ family members attempting to burn the patients for being devils instead of

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digging deeper into the diagnoses and potential outcomes of the outbreak. Díaz’s narrator
justifies why the broader Dominican public, and a cosmopolitan global elite, stopped paying
attention to La Negrura early in its epidemic:
When the experts determined that [La Negrura] wasn’t communicable in the
standard ways, and that normal immune systems appeared to be at no kind of risk,
the renminbi and the attention and savvy went elsewhere. Any since it was just poor
Haitian types getting fucked up—no real margin in that.
(Díaz 2012)
As a monster, La Negrura operates outside of the “standard ways,” and thus challenges the
efficacy of medicalized risk management. The infected “Haitian types,” excluded from the polis
but still a population to be managed in relation to their impacts on the health and economy of
the “normal immune systems” of non-Haitians, are in and of themselves unworthy of resource
expenditure to diagnose or cure the disease. Without a strong incentive for gaining profit from
describing the pathology of the disease, both “renminbi and the attention and savvy” are
directed to other sources. The narrator notes the ubiquity of new outbreaks, and obliquely
references one called “KRIMEA” that appears to be worse than La Negrura several times
during his narration.
And yet local Haitian doctors do make progress in learning of the disease, most notably
one epidemiologist named Noni DeGraff. While the medical examiners and military scientists
cannot find the mode of transmission between patients via standard medicine, DeGraff finds
that in addition to the more obvious and grotesque symptoms, the patients’ temperatures
rapidly fluctuate up and down out of line with normal human levels. Using a thermal image
scanning gun, DeGraff finds that infected patients “flicker blue” in the eye of the scanner,
while the uninfected read as a solid red color. Pointing the gun onto the street, DeGraff and
her colleagues are alarmed that one in eight of the supposedly uninfected pedestrians with no
signs of La Negrura flickered blue. The self-described challenge of counterinsurgency
operations is to identify insurgent and potentially insurgent elements within a population
and isolate these from the population (US Army & Marine Corps 41). The image of one in
eight people, to the naked eye just “pedestrians,” harboring an apocalyptic infection, proffers
a hallmark example of both the horror and fantasy of counterinsurgency operations. The
flickering blue pedestrians exemplify insurgencies themselves, hidden threats simmering below
detection until they will erupt in revolutionary violence (as indeed the infected do shortly
after DeGraff uncovers the extent of the epidemic). The ability of DeGraff to use military
technology—a “gun” pointed to survey the population in a panoramic sweep from afar—
embodies the idealized vantage of the counterinsurgent, apprehending the true threats to a
population in a glance so that they can be targeted with the appropriate levers of “aligned”
military and civilian force.
As the “signs of the apocalypse” creep in and around the narrator and the world at large,
the attention of experts, military scientists, and other global managers is directed elsewhere.
This inability or unwillingness to deal with a creeping disaster is a prominent feature of
environmentalist critique. Rob Nixon (2011) refers to this as the failure to “apprehend—to
arrest, or at least mitigate—often imperceptible threats,” which echoes the preoccupation of
counterinsurgency planners (14). How to align social movement energy, or indeed military
energy, to tackle a target that is imperceptible or seemingly peripheral to more pressing,
immediate challenges? “Monstro” gives no indication of what “KRIMEA” is, other than to
imply it is another bizarre outbreak that initially appeared worse than La Negrura. The failure
to recognize and preempt the emergence and spread of La Negrura is a cardinal sin in the

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world of “catastrophe risk” preparation (Cooper 2008: 82). Biotic emergence, like terrorism,
market crashes, and extreme weather events, are all threats that, this discourse maintains, can
be managed only through Nixon’s concept of apprehension and both probabilistic and
possiblistic risk assessment (Cooper 2008: 83, Amoore 2013: 23). It is only when the disease
turns infected patients into “possessed” killers who lay waste to several battalions of troops
and seize control of 22 camps that “High Command pull their head out of their ass.” By this
time, the intermittent wails are replaced by a constant unified song sung by the infected.
Considering its mysterious lead-up, the outbreak’s turn to military conflict turns into a
relatively conventional zombie narrative—once again relegated to the figurative margins of the
page but nonetheless legible because Díaz employs tropes that are immediately recognizable in
this moment of zombie renaissance in popular culture (Quesada 2016: 291). The idea of
existential threat born from infected individuals swarming, assaulting social orders via relentless
waves of attack, is key to the modern Western zombie. La Negrura’s “Possessed” phase and its
more apocalyptic “forty-foot-tall cannibal” children are interesting, but easily recognizable,
specimens within the broader genealogy of zombies3 in popular culture. There are many forms
of zombies in this milieu, including slow, shambling undead and fast, bloodthirsty monsters.
Díaz’s “Possessed” are the latter, and their appearance in the story is heralded by the infected
letting out a choral wail for 28 minutes straight, a nod to Danny Boyle’s fast-zombie cult classic,
28 Days Later (2003). The infected in “Monstro” take on many recognizable tropes of the
modern zombie apocalypse, including their grotesque, rotting physiognomy, their single-
minded cannibalism, and their penchant to swarm and “flood” urban spaces and militarized
fortifications, including national borders (Stratton 2011: 267).
Of course, a zombie apocalypse set in Haiti takes on other significations as well, namely
those moments of political and genocidal massacre that mark the history of Hispaniola. The
zombie, as infected, ravenous, insatiable consumer of flesh, doesn’t really evidence a fear of the
Global North with the Global South sending waves of insatiable poor and hungry to their
shores to deplete welfare and natural resources. Instead, the zombie manifests the rapacious
overconsumption by the Global North itself—a mindless, ghoulish hunger that is seldom visible
to the full-bellied “omnivores” capturing resources and dumping the effects of pollution and
ecosystem degradation onto the rural poor “ecosystem people” within the Global South (Guha
and Martinez-Alier 1997: 12, 16). The swarm of Haitians who, in the narrator’s terms, “go
Rwanda,” and the literal fusion of the infected patients into giant cannibal monsters, alludes to
narratives of Marxian revolution by the proletariat and also the successful revolt of enslaved
peoples that birthed the nation of Haiti itself. The ravenous swarm is a kind of doubling and
representation of the Global North’s own hunger back on itself. Just as Jean-Jacques Dessalines
boldly declared “We have repaid these true cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for
outrage” after killing thousands of French families at the end of the Haitian war of indepen-
dence, Díaz’s cannibals are a simple balancing of imperialist and ecological accounts (quoted in
Dubois 2005: 301)—a monstrous eye for an eye. The figure of the zombie is inured to
reasonable appeal, as it is of a single motivation; while the US has traded enslaved Africans with
Saint Domingue and militarily occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the early 20th
century, and sent ill-prepared and poorly-coordinated disaster and humanitarian aid to Haiti
along with World Bank and International Monetary Fund-sponsored structural adjustment
programs in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the US mass media and K-12 education seldom
mentions its close neighbors in the Caribbean. Indeed, most raised in the US have no idea of
the Antilles’ history in any meaningful sense.
Like zombies, the US and Europe have lurched forward and ravaged the island of
Hispaniola and its peoples, without hearing or caring. “Monstro” turns the tables, centering

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the most marginalized of marginalized subject positions as a force of apocalypse, or revelation

(to readers) and revolution (to the narrator’s world). The giant black cannibals, the physical
embodiment of the global shadows, assert an unstoppable agency swiftly revenging a
larger and longer combination of cannibalism, war, and outrage (Ferguson 2006: 18). The
assemblage of elements that these climate zombies embody—their zombie tropes, their
blackness, their displaced status, their poverty, their Haitian origins, their unknowable
infection and power and fusion with one another—is indeed terrifying to the imperial and
colonial world order that has produced them. As it becomes clear that military intervention
and technological surveillance have limited efficacy in dealing with the outbreak, the
revolutionary status of this insurgency is put into relief. But more, the failure of a bombing
bombardment to quell the threat again resonates a tenet of modern counterinsurgency
theory. One of the “paradoxes” identified in the US Army & Marine Corps Counterinsurgency
Field Manual is that “sometimes the more force used, the less effective it is” (38). The High
Command carpet bombs the 22 camps held by the Possessed La Negrura patients, only to
trigger an 8.3 magnitude preternatural earthquake that knocks out all electronic devices
(including satellites!) in a 600-square-mile radius, and presumably catalyzes the transforma-
tion of the Possessed into “forty-foot-tall cannibal motherfuckers.” The application of force
compounds the insurgent threat, and compromises the safety of those who will undoubtedly
be sent in to combat the redoubled revolutionary threat. It is as if Díaz’s monstrous Others,
the present absence of bare life on the margins of the world, have appeared and declared
“that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble” (Marx and Engels 2012: 102)! Once the outbreak
goes “Rwanda”—the narrator’s colorful idiom for relating the outpouring of homicidal
violence the disease instigates at the end of the story—and the electronic surveillance of Haiti
goes dark, the tragedy of the disease and its apocalyptic effects become known through a
series of “iconic Polaroids.” One such Polaroid, showing a “Class 2 in the process of putting
a slender broken girl in its mouth,” is captioned “Numbers 11:18. Who shall give us flesh to
eat?” (Díaz 2012).
La Negrura in “Monstro” is closer to truly destabilizing current social systems; the word
“monster,” Cohen reminds us, comes from “Monstrum”—that which shows, and that which
warns (Quesada 2016: 292, Cohen 1996: 4). Apocalyptic monsters are doubly revelatory, as
they overtly tear down world order as a means of showing a different world of possibility. La
Negrura is the bogeymen of anticipatory counterinsurgency logics embodied and emboldened
by histories of colonialism and neocolonialism in a warming world. The monstrous disease
emerges from the global shadows at the margins of the world to violently overthrow the social
conditions of the present. It is a monster created by and resistant to the logics and outrages of
modernity, and its horror-story arises from other representations (such as zombie stories in
general) that mobilize subtle fears and anxieties born within the public. If Dr. DeGraff could
find a fear-imaging gun and point it on “Monstro’s” audience from within the pages of the
New Yorker, she may well find bodies flickering a deep blue color, indicating patterns of fear
infecting the 21st-century American populace. The monster violates taken-for-granted modes
of regarding the separation of bodies, space, and time within a globalized world economy that
often occludes our shared yet uneven vulnerabilities and risks.
Tropes of apocalypse have long been cornerstones of environmental(ist) rhetoric and
cultural productions (L. Buell 1995: 294, F. Buell 2003: 7). Like the monstrous, the
apocalyptic always acts as a form of social revelation—the tropes signal a disruption of
time and the status quo. The apocalypse serves as a cautionary tale, but also a rallying cry
towards a new world. Frederick Buell notes that apocalyptic rhetoric in environmentalist

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communication has both “been debunked” and “resisted debunking,” as the world-ending
crises posed by the depletion of wildlife habitat, rising populations, or depletion of the
ozone have both failed to materialize but also may have been avoided through different
policy actions (F. Buell 2003: 7, 49). Yet the specific vocabulary of environmental
apocalypse are not mere rhetorical claxons sounding a warning knell, drawing attention to
the threats of environmental decline. The evolving symbols of apocalypse contain social
histories, and these histories are contiguous with broader cultural anxieties and desires than
mere environmental concerns. To the grim visions of silent springs, mushroom clouds, three-
eyed fish, and hungry mobs comes the figure of the forced climate migrant. Climate migrants
are not wholly new, they emerge out of a complex 21st-century discursive interplay of
racialization, criminality, and global inequality.
This leaves advocates of climate mitigation and adaptation with a dilemma: evoking rising
tides of migrants may motivate both political liberals and conservatives to care about climate
change, but the dominant tropes that make up the climate migrant are fundamentally racist
and thus the concern these tropes elicit likewise arises from racist fear, condescension, or
animus (Bettini 2012: 63–64). Configured as the proverbial “barbarians at the gate,” climate
migrants are configured as the crisis of climate change incarnate, and exploit the same racist
animus as present-day conservative demagogues (65). Alternatively, more liberal depictions of
climate migrants often render them as miserable human detritus unmoored by the ravages of
extreme weather or failing crops in need of white salvation. Both versions of the climate
migrant are dehumanizing to real migrants and occlude the possibility that the stories,
experiences, and expertise of migrants and migrant-rights communities could help in adapting
to climate change. “Monstro” leans into the racialized rhetoric of climate migrants, but in
such a way that shows climate change as a product and expression of the colonization, slavery,
and neoliberal economics. Literature is not a substitution for clear, compelling communica-
tion strategies. But in cases such as “Monstro,” literature does allow readers to confront the
political subsurface of debates roiling around climate change and migration. Climate migrants
are more than just cultural signifiers, and publics’ abilities to think creatively and compassio-
nately about political and economic responses to migration are already a crucially needed
capacity in this still-young century.

Notes
1 To step back from the issue at hand, which is the discursive construction of the climate migrant and
refugee, we may reconsider the philosophical distinction between displaced people pushed by political or
religious persecution compared with climate change. If the spirit of the 1951 Convention is to give
asylum to the persecuted, it would seem those displaced through “natural” disasters are not persecuted
by anyone, per se. But, to follow Bruno Latour’s injunction that phenomena like climate change are
geophysical processes that are nonetheless “too social and too narrated to be truly natural,” then we may
reconsider the agencies that may well persecute the climate IDP or international migrant (6). If someone’s
farm was burned to the ground by a political regime, that person would have grounds to seek asylum. If
the emissions of extractivist economies produce such effect, and those producing emissions know the
effects of that economic activity, may we not say this is a kind of calculated persecution, or at least callous
indifference to the destructive byproducts of fossil-fuel-driven economic growth and militarism?
2 While I was editing this chapter for publication, allegations of Díaz forcibly kissing writer Zinzi
Clemmons and verbally abusing other women came to light and were framed within the #MeToo
movement. The #MeToo movement is a crucial means for people to protect themselves and fight
against patriarchal sexism, and scholars are debating how to treat the art of artists facing allegations of
misconduct. I take seriously the argument that by focusing on or teaching texts by these artists, one is
supporting the artist’s professional work and indirectly condoning their alleged actions. My analysis of
“Monstro” infers no statement on Díaz’s guilt or innocence, nor does it condone or dismiss any of his

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actions. I believe that “Monstro” is a piece of climate justice speculative fiction, and posits the climate
refugee as a revolutionary figure that critiques and upends colonizing forces exploiting society
through counterinsurgency logics and operations.
3 Before the infected walking dead overtook American popular culture in the 21st century, the zombie
originated in the dawn of modernity through the slave trade in the Antilles, and in Haiti more
particularly, through the syncretic religious practices of Vodou. Founded by a wide range of enslaved
West Africans, Vodou traditions draw together many stories of different kinds of African monsters—
fairy creatures, shape-shifters, and disembodied souls of dead humans—into the category of “zombie”
(Moremon and Rushton 2011: 2–3). These “zombie astral” have not translated to the Western
imagination, but the Haitian variant of the reanimated corpse has indeed captured global fascination
across numerous vernacular modernities of the West and the rest (see Eric Hamako 2011, Castillo et al.
2016, for these transglobal walking dead). The idea of “subjugated agency” undergirds these disparate
conceptualizations of zombies, and the original Haitian zombies were reanimated by sorcerers to labor
as slaves even after death in the sugar cane fields (Inglis 2011: 42–43).

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 12
RECONCEPTUALIZING THE
INDIVIDUAL AS A SOCIAL
ACTOR IN
ENVIRONMENTAL
COMMUNICATION
Julia B. Corbett

Environmental communication research over the last several decades has focused a great
deal on individuals: measuring their opinions and behaviors, and identifying a panoply of
variables (demographic factors, ideology, awareness, efficacy, risk perception, place, poli-
tics, identity) that potentially influence communication with them. From survey work on
attitudes to ecocritical analyses of individual texts, individuals are the unit of analysis for a
broad range of research (Norgaard 2011: 209). Current research also focuses on how
discrete messages influence individuals: “framing” analyses and “media effects” studies, the
strength or nature of rhetorical arguments, use of visualization and metaphors, and the
credibility of sources.
In part because much environmental communication research relies on individual self-
reports (which can involve a significant social desirability response1 regarding the environ-
ment), what we have learned about individuals is often limited. We know generally current
attitudes and opinions (Hornsey et al. 2016), and reports of their past behavior and/or
intentions for future behavior. For example, research has evaluated the effectiveness of
frames about biofuels (Raymond and Delshad 2016: 508) and wind energy (Hooff et al.
2017: 700), concern about climate change (Leiserowitz et al. 2008, Swim and Geiger 2017:
568), the effect of ad type on green purchase intention (Schmuck et al. 2018: 414), and
predictions of knowledge about climate change (Kahlor and Rosenthal 2009: 380). Individual
cognitions and emotions about environmental issues often are presented simply and unpro-
blematically, as though they are solely a person’s autonomous conclusions, free from influence
by the larger world beyond.
In a time when environmental communication is viewed as a crisis discipline (Cox 2007)
replete with urgency, it is prudent to reexamine how environmental communicators and
scholars think about, research, and communicate with individuals. Many of us conceptualize
and operationalize individuals as psychological micro-units, even though they are profoundly
shaped by social environments and political and economic cultures that can render the

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 Julia B. Corbett

strongest of individual behavioral intentions impotent. A larger field of vision is crucial;

virtually all environmental issues are “collective action problems” (Kinzig et al. 2013: 170),
therefore actions by isolated individuals are decidedly not the key to addressing environmental
problems. Individual personal change—even on a large scale—should not be confused with
the social change required to address these problems.
Here, I discuss the numerous limitations of an “autonomous individual” approach, and I
make a case for reconceptualizing individuals as products of a wide variety of interactions,
institutions, and experiences at the meso and macro levels. Next, I embed individuals in a
more holistic view of social change. Finally, I discuss considerations for environmental
communication and research that embody this broader, cross-cutting approach.

Limitations of the “autonomous individual”

The first limitation is the long-standing tradition of conceptualizing individuals as vessels to
be filled with the “right” communication. This focus on individuals seems based on the belief
that more or better information, frames, metaphors, credible sources, and so on will move
people to understand and act on environmental problems (Brulle 2010: 82). This supposes
that (certain) individuals need only receive the information—about toxics or water quality or
climate change—to address these issues. “Information deficit” thinking treats communication
as one-way and uncomplicated and audiences as passive and unconnected to larger society.
Even though research has largely dispelled the information deficit model (Nisbet and
Scheufele 2009: 1768, Sturgis and Allum 2004: 55), and concluded that information and
knowledge alone are not powerful enough to engage the public and/or produce action, much
research continues to perceive individuals as sovereign, appropriate targets of environmental
messages (such as ever-popular framing studies).
In our highly individualistic Western culture, we believe strongly in autonomous and
powerful individuals with boundless free will: “I can think and do exactly as I want.” In an
individual-centric culture, it makes sense that marketers, politicians, and communication
researchers believe that reaching and influencing individuals is efficacious and valuable.
However, all of us face considerable barriers and constraints in our actions as individuals,
be they economic, ideological, physical, or normative. Those with less social and economic
power, for example, face greater environmental harm and often have less of a voice. Cultural
pressure about climate science is exerted in churches, workplaces, and at dinner tables. An
individual might have no mass transit options or normative social support for using it (even
though she may voice strong intentions to take the bus when answering survey questions).
Another limitation of the individual focus is the tendency to conflate personal change with
social change. In my city, I receive environmental messages to “Slow the Flow, Save H20”
and to curtail driving on air pollution days. Environmental communication messages tell us to
turn down the thermostat, recycle, eat less meat, and buy “green.”
These messages call upon individuals to undertake small, voluntary, consumer-oriented,
“pro-environmental” behaviors. Voluntary personal change, a “green” lifestyle, and “simple
living” are indeed commendable. Such actions may make us feel better and believe we are
contributing to a “solution,” when in fact individuals’ home-based consumption constitutes
an extremely small portion of resource use. One source puts individual consumption at just
10 percent of the total water usage, 25 percent of the energy, and 3 percent of municipal
waste (Jensen 2009: 18). (Of course, the resources used by industries to produce food, make
laptops, and manufacture bath towels don’t get put in the individual’s energy-use column,

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 Reconceptualizing the individual

though our collective consumption drives these processes. But those topics—and consump-
tion generally—are rarely the focus of behavior campaigns.)
Yet, much environmental communication research tests messages and campaigns that
position individual action as the “solution.” “It’s good for the environment” might be the
communicated motivation for reducing energy, but normatively, using ever-more energy is
what Americans do. One campaign to reduce home energy use (Corbett 2018: 192)
discovered that when people learned their neighbors used more energy than they did, their
own usage increased. This is not to say that individual action is not important and significant,
but personal and voluntary action does not come close to the scale of change required
(Capstick et al. 2015: 49). Even if all the people on all the blocks in my city did indeed turn
down the heat and turn off lights, it would not nudge the dial on total energy use (nor
attendant air emissions and climate change).
Placing the burden of action on the individual for reducing energy use ignores numerous,
significant barriers and constraints not under individual control: the utility’s energy source,
state building standards for insulation and construction, electronic appliance design, or the
glowing lights built into electronics and outlets. As noted, significant normative influence
affects others’ energy consumption, including leaving lights on and doors and windows open.
Nowadays in the U.S., more people recycle than vote. Recycling is an easy, voluntary,
personal action that makes people feel better, even though on some levels it perpetuates ever-
increasing consumption and linear disposal (Corbett 2018: 33). Despite all the people reporting
that they recycle, only 1 in 10 plastic bottles is recycled and oceans are choked by plastic trash.
Plastic is a forever product that never fully degrades and whose quality decreases when recycled.
Even so, if you don’t recycle, you might feel guilty (regardless of whether you have access to
recycling facilities). With the exception of a few states requiring deposits on aluminum, the
entire burden for an item’s disposal is placed solely in the individual’s lap, not in the lap of
product producers (that pass along disposal costs to municipalities). Even for the “easy”
behavior of recycling, targeting individual actions assigns blame to people who may lack
options and doesn’t address the significant social change needed beyond the individual.
Thus, another limitation of individual action is relying on the collective (and voluntary)
cooperation of all individuals to protect earth elements we humans hold in common: air,
water, land, plants, minerals, and so on. Environmental issues are classic “collective action
problems,” where sufficient collective action benefits everyone, but some individuals will not
comply, thinking the action too “costly,” not in their self-interest, or physically impossible.
For example, if I take the bus to campus on a bad-air day, I have helped protect the air we
hold in common, though I receive no immediate, tangible benefit for my action (other than
my conscience). Meanwhile, my neighbor receives no immediate harm for his driving, even
though he benefits from those who didn’t drive, the classic “free rider” effect. And, my
neighbor’s free-riding may be beyond his personal control, the result of the car-architecture
of cities and the industrial economy.
Environmental problems (from air pollution and climate change to littering) cannot be
“solved” by voluntary individual actions, and instead require various forms of “coercion”
(regulations, fines and enforcement, changes in technology or the physical environment)
along with communication (Janssen et al. 2010) to move the collective to action that benefits
all. There is a crucial need here for communication beyond the individual level, such as the
larger cultural and institutional changes needed to protect the common good. If a workplace
adjusts its policies about commuting and mass transit, communication at the level of the
organization is crucial, and it would contribute to a shift of social norms about workplace
travel and telecommuting.

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A final limitation of action at the individual level is the lack of power and authority
possessed by most individuals. While it’s true that one person can change the world (a Gandhi
or a Martin Luther King), and that activist movements can effect change from particular
targets, most individuals lead much quieter, “normal” lives.
Let’s say “Samantha” does her part and recycles newspapers and cans, tries not to waste
food, and conserves water inside and outside her house. She feels guilty that she drives so
much, but she doesn’t live near any mass transit. And climate change makes her feel even
worse; it’s frightening and insurmountable. She says she’s not the type to join an environ-
mental group.
The burden and blame placed on individual Samanthas is enormous. There are very real
limitations of the power of isolated individuals undertaking personal changes. Facing weighty
issues like air pollution, drought, and climate change by yourself is intimidating and
paralyzing. There is a tendency to “blame the individual” for not taking the “correct”
action, even when the barriers are embedded deep in the social-structural and economic
environments. The resulting guilt and shame are not motivating. The most efficacious thing
for Samantha (and the communication researchers who study her) is to reconceptualize her as
a social actor instead of an isolated individual.

Individuals as social actors

Thinking of individuals as social actors involves the power of social norms of behavior, the
political economy and physical environment, how “facts” are given life and meaning
communally, and how individual behavior is indeed socially organized. To illustrate how
individuals are products of their larger interactions, I’ll begin with an anecdote.
In 2007, the Utah Division of Air Quality began a campaign against idling to help Salt
Lake City meet air pollution targets. Soon, “Turn the Key, Be Idle-Free” stickers appeared
on some cars and public locations, notably schools. In 2011, Salt Lake City passed a no-idling
ordinance (though it exempted cars on private property); after a handful of news stories,
publicity largely ceased. Today, many residents idle their cars, and many don’t know the
ordinance exists (in part because it is rarely if ever enforced).
I see idling cars when I walk my neighborhood—sometimes four or five cars on a cold
morning idling in driveways. I see cars idling (sometimes sans drivers) in front of stores,
restaurants, and offices. People idle cars while waiting to pick someone up. I’ve seen people at
city parks eating lunch inside their cars with the engine running. I’ve watched people have
long conversations in front of their respective idling cars. Even city buses idle at the end of
their route on campus, right in front of “No Idling” signs. Idling your vehicle is a common,
observable behavior.
If communication researchers investigated why the idling campaign (and ordinance) has
not changed behavior, a typical approach would be to survey individual car owners about
their campaign message exposure, knowledge about the law, idling behavior, and a host of
individual attributes. The results might be used to get “better information” to residents so that
they understand the problem and promise to comply. After all, turning the key is a pretty
easy, pro-environmental behavior. Instead, research designed to understand individuals as
social actors would look at individual idling behavior in the context of social interactions,
social norms, cultural conventions, and contradictory messages of the political economy.
Drivers do not randomly decide one day to leave the car running. An individual’s
environmental sentiments or actions—about pesticides, nuclear waste, plastics, or climate
change—are the product of her social and cultural interactions and influences. Deciding what

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to pay attention to or what to ignore—and, what to do or not do—is a social process that we
learn in interaction with the people around us (Zerubavel 2006: 47). In other words, our
assessment of the world and our actions in it are socially constructed (Norgaard 2011: 5); the
larger social structure shapes our lives and our relationships to each other and to the environment.
If you’re attuning to what social others tell you is noteworthy or of no value, you are a social
actor, not a wholly autonomous individual. It’s how you decide that plastic straws are a no-no,
but that idling is okay; at the macro level, both concern how fossil fuel is valued (or not).
Individuals are strongly influenced by their social referent groups: family of origin, peers
and friends, fellow employees, church members, and social and recreational groups. Some
scholars maintain that our belief systems are formed to a large extent by the referent groups to
which we belong (Hoffman 2015: 16). We generally endorse a position that most directly
reinforces our connection with others in our referent groups, which also strengthens our
definition of self.
Some social media “friends” may be socially distant from you, but they represent your cultural
community and are important keys as to what is relevant day to day. These social referents also
affect an individual’s preferred information sources—newspapers or Facebook posts, Fox News or
public television. This confirmation bias—giving greater weight to information that supports pre-
existing beliefs—is often measured as an individual attribute, though its roots are socially derived.
Ideological filters are powerfully shaped by social group identification, so much so that “facts”
become less important than ideological affiliation for polarized issues (Hindman 2009: 790), such
as climate change (McCright and Dunlap 2011: 155).
As a social actor, an individual is in constant interaction with three levels: micro, meso,
and macro (Norgaard 2011: 12). The micro level involves individual emotions and reactions
to experiences and interactions with the meso and macro levels. The meso level concerns
norms of social behavior resulting from conversations, others’ feelings, and attention, which
culturally shape (and constantly reinvent) what is considered “normal” to think about, talk
about, and feel (Norgaard 2011: 210). Both the micro and meso are connected to the macro
level of political economic relations (in the idling example, inexpensive gas, domination of
auto transport, city architecture designed around cars, and energy ordinances and policies).
Because the micro, meso, and macro levels are in constant interaction, the “causal” arrows go
both directions, upstream and downstream.
Sociologist Kari Norgaard (2011: 210) explains the contradictions experienced in these
intertwined interactions as they relate to climate change. The individual may hold feelings of
concern, powerlessness, and guilt in the context of social pressure to fit in, but perceives no
space for emotional or conversational expression. Another contradiction is between present-
day behaviors that are antithetical to reduced emissions but are presented as “normal” in
everyday life. The interactions among these levels have thus constructed idling as irrelevant:
“everyone does it,” the largely unknown ordinance is not enforced, and the connection is not
made between individual action and the quality of the air “commons.”
In this complex realm, it’s not surprising that individual appeals often are not effective. As
Norgaard concludes, the links between social structure and political economy shape indivi-
dual sentiments and experience; the individual becomes part of the reproduction of the status
quo. A “social fact” (whether idling or the larger car-dependent culture) is “the way in which
individuals’ seemingly rational actions are in fact merely reflections of permissible patterns of
behavior within a particular social structure” (210). Environmental communicators are very
familiar with the numerous contradictions between stated environmental values and political
economy, and between knowledge, values, and everyday practice.

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A social norm is a “rule” of conduct that influences an individual’s behavior because

“social others” and peers have made clear what is considered socially acceptable behavior.
Social norms are “enforced” by perceived sanctions or ostracization, or by rewards from those
social others. You don’t litter because you don’t want others to think you are the kind of
person who would do that (Kinzig et al. 2013: 166). Social norms are powerful; they influence
our attention, conversations, and actions. They may be guided by invisible social forces, but
they can shape what we think and talk about and feel. Not surprisingly, people tend to
underestimate the influence of social norms on their own behaviors (Cialdini 2007: 263).
Social norms can be either “descriptive” (a belief about what others are presently doing) or
“injunctive” (a belief about what others should be doing or what most people approve of
others doing). Idling a vehicle is an example of a descriptive social norm: people observe that
this behavior is what others are frequently doing, and it essentially gives them social
permission to behave likewise. Broadcasting an injunctive norm message to individuals telling
them not to idle is a tough sell if “everyone does it.”
Because of the constant observation and interaction of the three levels, social norms can
appear to change rapidly. Suddenly, an injunctive norm appears that you ought not to use a
straw; earlier, you ought to bring your own shopping bag (Thomas et al. 2016). But norms
rarely emerge spontaneously, rather they are a reflection of underlying material (or consumer)
interests (Miyashita 2007: 99) and political economy struggles. Even if the state intervened
and attempted to change the social norm of idling, the contradiction with the macro level
would need to be addressed: gas is cheap, it’s a car-dominant culture, the ordinance is not
enforced, and idling is not connected to anything larger (such as its contribution to common
air pollution and a changing climate). If “ought not idle” emerged as a norm and individuals
felt shamed for idling, but the contradictions with the macro level remained, over time the
new injunctive norm likely would be subverted.
A large part of why social groups are important to you is the common values you share.
You hold personal values that were molded through communal life and social interactions.
These values might include what nature is good for, what is considered good and just in
society, and what is the proper role of government. Such values and worldviews influence the
uptake, understanding, interpretation, and response to environmental information at all levels.
Because of the importance of values, some scholars (Hoffman 2015: 31, Corner and Clarke
2017: 48) maintain that climate change should be communicated “values up” and not
“science down.” This recognizes that the meso level is important, but a “values up” approach
nevertheless must address the macro level of the embedded fossil fuel culture and the
extensive economic and physical infrastructure that revolves around it. At least, as Lord
(2014: 9) argues, a change in a society’s dominant energy source would be accompanied by a
change in societal values.
When new information appears (whether a heat wave or tainted city water), you rely on
the values of your social referents (and their preferred information sources) to filter the
information through existing worldviews and cultural identity (Hoffman 2015: 16–17).
Although it might seem that you evaluate a fact solely at the individual level, “facts” have a
communal life and social attention (or inattention) is very much organized around them.
Journalism professor Candis Callison (2014) studied how climate change “comes to
matter” (1, 29) for a broad range of social groups, including journalists, evangelicals, and
socially responsible investors. She found that facts have a rich communal life, gaining meaning
and relevance through social interaction. Social groups of all sizes can model a participation
orientation (rather than a power or policy orientation) that relies on the strong personal ties of
a collective and on the power of social norms. While we often turn to the government or

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environmental groups for environmental change, climate change needs the cross-cutting
power of a wide variety of social groups and community efforts.
In her ethnography about a small Norwegian town during a very warm and snowless
winter, Norgaard (2011) found that ignoring climate change occurred in response to social
circumstances and was carried out through a process of social interaction, resulting in “socially
organized denial” (6). Individuals distanced themselves from the information because of
norms of emotion and conversation (things we just don’t talk about); climate change fell
into that category. We know “about” it, but social and cultural cues tell it’s not something to
pay attention to (or talk about). One cue may come from news media; even during record-
setting heat waves across the country (and world), news stories rarely mention any connection
to climate change.
All this suggests that environmental communicators and scholars need to fully consider the
broader influences and interactions of the meso and macro with the individual to better
understand how environmental sentiments and behaviors are formed, and how they can be
affected. Rather than attempting to “reprogram” isolated individual behaviors, we need to
take into consideration the social processes by which individuals internalize the reasons for so
behaving (Corner and Clarke 2017: 80). The power and influence of any individual appears
greater when acting and communicating within a social group or setting.

A holistic view of individuals and social change

Here is an anecdote to illustrate a holistic model of behavior change—a model influenced by
social norms, a wide range of cultural institutions, the physical environment, and the political
and economic systems. It is not an environmental example but one with which people are
familiar.
In the late 1970s, the newsroom where I worked was a haze of cigarette smoke. We also
smoked in conference rooms, on airplanes, and at restaurants. That sounds shocking and
ridiculous now, but smoking was the descriptive norm then: it is what people did,
everywhere.
So how and why did my (and other smokers’) attitudes and behaviors change? Many
didn’t quit until smoking became highly inconvenient, expensive, and a shunned experience
—all present in the larger social and economic system. After decades of concealment, studies
of smoking’s health impacts were finally publicized. Soon laws severely restricted smoking in
public places. Then, second-hand smoke impacts were revealed, making smoking more than
just a personal harm to a smoker. Taxes on cigarettes skyrocketed. Only after all that came the
injunctive norm: you should not smoke, nor expose others to it. There were also social
events to stop smoking, like the American Cancer Society’s annual smoke-out.
This example shows us that significant social and cultural change is possible, that it
required long-term effort, and that the change pressures must be holistic, complementary,
and present in all levels: political, economic, in the physical environment, in social groups and
by individuals. If barriers or constraints exist in one level, change is less supported at the
individual level. This example makes apparent the weaknesses in the idling campaign, and
generally in efforts to curb energy use.
The example also illustrates that change pressures often begin at the meso or macro level
and filter down to individuals through interactions. In other cases, change efforts might begin
at one level, or simultaneously among levels. This has been true in efforts by various U.S.
cities to increase bicycle use. Addressing physical barriers (lack of dedicated bike lanes, bike

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parking, bike rentals, and safety) was crucial in creating a “bike culture” that motivated
individual riders.
Another example of change at multiple levels involves pesticides, where meso-level
homeowner associations and neighborhoods in Canada came together to ban pesticide use
on lawns and parks. In one small town in Quebec, an influential doctor saw the health effects
of pesticides in her patients and rallied townspeople until the town banned their use. Today,
170 towns in Canada—including Vancouver—have similar (macro-level) laws (Tyrell 2015).
Some 80 percent of Canadians now live in places that restrict pesticide use. In the first year
after Toronto’s ban, pesticide use dropped by a staggering 88 percent. Because of the
tremendous normative pressure that supports using lawn chemicals, it’s ineffective to simply
send individuals messages to stop using them. Action must take place at the meso level and
above.
An important component of holistic behavior change across levels in a culture or
community is the identification of common values that resonate. In the pesticide examples,
“protecting children and health” was a value used to communicate and engage at all levels.
Climate change communication scholars have identified “communal values” that are
consistently associated with positive engagement with climate change. In one study (Black-
more et al. 2014), benevolence (kindness) and universalism (the rights and welfare of all
people) were key communal values across Europe as a whole. A study in the UK (Parkhill
et al. 2013) asked participants to discuss the core values they wanted to be associated with
positive energy-system change; they identified the protection of nature, fairness, respect for
the autonomy of individuals, future well-being, efficiency, affordability, avoidance of waste,
and long-term thinking. Such values can be meaningful across a wide range of social referent
groups. Even value dimensions that seem juxtaposed—“conserving tradition” versus “open-
ness to change”—can help spur conversation and work to find common ground among a
wide variety of individuals and social groups.
The key point is that communal values should be prominent in all levels—social discus-
sions, campaigns, and governance, instead of a sole focus on individual-directed “facts” and
“science” whose meanings are greatly shaped by one’s social referent groups.

Considerations for environmental communication and research

It is clear that a communication and/or research focus on individuals as social actors in an
extensive, highly interactive system is a highly nuanced and complex endeavor. It is easier to
administer self-report surveys to volunteers on Amazon Mechanical Turk and quickly publish
studies, although some have challenged the culture of speed in the academy (Berg and Seeber
2016).
But given our collective inability (in a wide variety of fields, not just communication) to
effect significant change for numerous environmental problems, an expanded view of the
communication landscape is timely and necessary. That view would consider individuals not
as research end-points but as social actors in a complex system where all elements constantly
interact and evolve—as does the communication.
Conceptualizing individuals as social actors requires examining them within their over-
lapping social referent groups where “facts” are given social meaning and where powerful
norms are exerted. In considering all levels of a holistic system, scholars should identify how
and where influence and communication flow, where decision pinch-points lie, how social
norms close down (or open up) alternatives, how values and worldviews produce attention or

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inattention to information or practices, and how the political, economic, and physical
environments support or constrain behavior change.
Such a reconceptualization might require different methods and longer-term research
projects to meld micro, meso, and macro levels. The task could be made easier with
interdisciplinary research teams drawn from a variety of fields, a practice which is gaining
broader acceptance in universities and from some funding entities.
Several bits of good news accompany this reconceptualization. First, individuals are not
solely to blame for eschewing actions communicated to them, and the burden of change does
not (and should not) lie entirely in their laps. When working within social groups, individuals
are less isolated and more supported and powerful.
An expanded notion of the individual also expands avenues for research. One possibility is
the dialogue and conversation forums and organizations that are gaining ground. Although
dialogue groups are studied by interpersonal communication scholars (Ganesh and Zoller
2012) few environmental communication scholars have examined them. Citizen summits,
civic expression groups, conversation cafes, and “living room conversations” bring varied
individuals to talk about a particular topic or concern, often aided by trained facilitators.
Following a set of guidelines or agreements, participants listen to understand and not to
influence; they speak for themselves and from their own experience, and find common
ground. For many, it is a chance to talk personally about topics that are largely encountered
only at the political level.
In the UK, participatory peer-to-peer dialogues are building a sense of broad “citizenship”
around climate change, which recognizes responsibilities rather than solely individual rights
(Corner and Clarke 2017: 83). Environmental citizenship can foster a sense of fairness and
justice between humans and increase participation in local community organizations and
decision-making (Dobson 2010). As Corner and Clarke (2017) conclude, individual behaviors
matter most as expressions of climate citizenship, rather than as ends in themselves (85).

Note
1 Social desirability response is the tendency to respond to a question in a way that puts oneself in a
socially favorable light. For questions about the environment, that could mean reporting that you
drive less than you do or value biodiversity more than you do, in order to align with perceived social
norms and values regarding those topics.

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 PART II

Pragmatic communication
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 13
DIRECTIONALITY
IN THOMAS COLE’S
THE OXBOW
Ecocritical art history and
visual communication

Alan C. Braddock

For more than a decade, I have worked to translate the insights of ecocriticism from literary
studies and other fields into my home discipline of art history. The purpose: to enrich and
expand art historical inquiry by connecting it with a vital new current of transdisciplinary
communication, and conversely, to make the contributions of art history available and useful
to those beyond my field. As scholars outside art history know well, ecocriticism is a mode of
cultural interpretation that takes into account ecological relationships, environmental history,
and the ethics of interconnectedness. Literature scholars have been immersed in ecocriticism
at least since the early 1990s, but art historians did not begin to embrace it until a decade later,
a delay caused by lack of interest, ignorance, arrogance, and/or fear of appearing sentimental in
a discipline still carrying heavy burdens of object-oriented empiricism and modernist-formalist
emotional restraint. Although art historians have always studied the representation of
“nature” and landscape, they still tend to do so using traditional anthropocentric modes of
interpretation, including connoisseurship, stylistic analysis, iconology, psychoanalysis, and
human-centered social history or identity politics. Few take ecology seriously as a paradigm
for scholarly communication and critical interpretation of historical art. While the ecologi-
cal concerns of certain contemporary artists have been recognized since the 1960s along with the
rise of environmentalism as a modern popular movement, thinking ecocritically about the deeper
art historical record is still an emerging idea. For me, though, a particularly powerful insight of
ecocriticism is that all cultural artifacts of all historical contexts have ecological implications of one
kind or another, regardless of medium or genre or even ideological orientation and intention,
because every creative work uses earthly materials and constructs environmental knowledge,
perceptions, relationships, and values. As Scott Slovic (2008) has noted in the context of
literature, ecocriticism is “the scrutiny of ecological implications and human-nature relation-
ships in any literary text, even texts that seem (at first glance) oblivious to the nonhuman
world” (27). Ecocritical art history expands the meaning of “text” to include visual art of all
forms, places, and periods. Or, as Timothy Morton has observed, “all art—not just explicitly

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ecological art—hardwires the environment into its form” and “is ecological insofar as it is
made from materials and exists in the world” (Morton 2010: 11).
By the early 2000s, the time had finally come to engage ecocriticism in relation to art
history, so I began teaching a course on “American Art and the Environment,” which later
morphed into the more transnational “Art and Ecology” and spawned my related seminars on
“Visual Politics of Nature,” “Art and Environmental Justice,” “Realism and Animality in
Art,” and “Posthumanism and Contemporary Art.” These pedagogical initiatives comple-
mented a growing ecocritical discourse about historical art in scholarly publications and other
forms of communication, including conferences and exhibitions. Following the lead of Greg
M. Thomas’s seminal study Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of
Théodore Rousseau (2000), I co-edited a book of essays with Christoph Irmscher (a literature
scholar) titled A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009). A major
exhibition and related book titled Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (2018–19),
which I recently co-curated and co-authored with Karl Kusserow at the Princeton University
Art Museum, offered a comprehensive ecocritical revision of American art history by
considering the many contributions of creative artists to the emergence of modern ecological
consciousness and environmental justice over three centuries. Although trained as an “Amer-
icanist,” I now see great potential for ecocriticism to transform the entire discipline of art
history, regardless of geography or period. A number of younger scholars in the field are now
experimenting with ecocritical interpretation in a variety of contexts, extending the discourse
beyond European and American art history.
My new book project, Implication: Ecocritical Art History: Theory and Practice (Braddock
forthcoming), traces the contours of this expanding field, examining key terms in relation to
particular artists and works. The present chapter previews the book through a short case study
on directionality as a key term for ecocritical interpretation, concentrating on the painter
Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and his most famous canvas, View of Mount Holyoke near North-
ampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow of 1836 (Figure 13.1). The word
directionality here refers to the ways in which some works of art communicate an especially
powerful sense of specificity about place by inviting us to look in certain directions, thereby
prompting reflection about actual environments as opposed to mythic or fictive allegorical
settings. This might seem to recall familiar questions about mimetic realism, the gaze, or
phenomenology, but as I see it directionality entails something else. Directionality involves
visual engagement with the beholder’s palpable sense of geographical knowledge, historical
change, and corporeal orientation at an actual place and time. As someone brought up in Iowa,
I was generally aware of my orientation vis-à-vis the cardinal directions, because the American
Midwest was so thoroughly colonized, settled, and structured with those directions in mind. Yet,
I had little understanding of the power relations involved in that colonial–spatial matrix. Indeed,
many Americans seem oblivious to both directionality and to the history of colonization, perhaps
more now than ever, thanks in part to satellite-based navigation and other prosthetic devices.
Historical art often presupposed and communicated a vivid awareness of directionality,
because past artists and their audiences were by necessity very well informed about place,
topography, and changing environmental conditions—even if they were not environmen-
talists. Cole was no impressionist, nor was he a modern environmental activist, though he
did sometimes complain verbally about what we today would call ecological problems
caused by economic development. And while he was a romantic painter well known for
producing sublime allegories set in mythic landscapes, his work could also be quite precise
about topographic details and environmental conditions in real places at particular times. By
attending to directionality in Cole’s The Oxbow and other creative works of the past,

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 Directionality in Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow

Figure 13.1 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The
Oxbow, 1836, oil on canvas 51 ½ x 76 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ecocritical art history can help recover a lost world of environmentally-informed looking, in
which visual orientation played a fundamental role in how people understood themselves
and their places. Examining directionality in art can also assist in recovering forgotten or
elided colonial politics and perspectives on environmental history. As I will further
demonstrate through a discussion of Cole’s painting, close attention to directionality
brings art history into transdisciplinary communication with ecocriticism, thereby enlarging
its methodological ecosystem. At issue here is not only the power of visual art to
communicate particular environmental observations about place and orientation in histori-
cally specific ways. Just as importantly, communication itself begins to look analogous to
both ecology (a nexus of material–environmental agents) and ecocriticism (a paradigm of
cross-disciplinary exchange, translation, and interpretation). Although artistic communica-
tion is creatively informed by cultural and aesthetic traditions, it nonetheless constitutes a
form of communication, so it deserves consideration in the context of the present volume.

A transnational artist
Cole is particularly interesting as a topic for this purpose because he was a transnational artist
whose life and work traveled in multiple directions. Born in Lancashire, England, during the
early Industrial Revolution, he grew up in a petit bourgeois family of textile printers. Raised
amid growing economic stratification, environmental degradation, and labor–management
conflicts between Luddites and capitalists, Cole witnessed firsthand the price of modern
“progress” as a youth. Upon moving with his family to the United States in 1818, he gave up

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industrial labor and learned fine art painting on the fly as an itinerant student and picture
maker, living in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and eventually settling in New York City by 1825. In
that year, the newly opened Erie Canal linked the burgeoning metropolis to an important
transportation network giving access to the continental interior and rapidly facilitating
commercial growth. The year 1825 also saw the establishment of the National Academy of
Design, a New York arts institution committed to transplanting European aesthetic standards
to America, with Cole as a founding member. After conducting innovative experiments in
landscape painting in the Catskill Mountains and along the Hudson River north of the city,
Cole found a ready audience for his work among landed gentry and urban bourgeois patrons
desiring therapeutic visions of wilderness and pastoral beauty. In other words, he cultivated
clientele among those whose economic fortunes were in many cases directly tied to
transportation, banking, and other expanding enterprises of the early nineteenth-century
American market revolution. Rising to prominence as a leader in American landscape
painting during the late 1820s and 1830s, Cole helped raise the genre’s importance in the
American art world as a vehicle for expression about national values. However, as a native
Englishman who returned to Europe for extended visits on two occasions (1829–32, 1841–
42), he retained an international historical perspective that tempered his patriotism and even
led him to critique some of the imperial impulses of Manifest Destiny in his adopted country.
After dying prematurely of illness in 1848, Cole eventually was dubbed the “father” of what
became known as the Hudson River School of landscape painting (Miller 1993, Truettner
and Wallach 1994, Kornhauser and Barringer 2018).
Having lived and died before Ernst Haeckel coined “ecology” in 1866, Cole had no access
to that term, but he expressed unmistakable concern about deforestation and other environ-
mental problems associated with economic development in early nineteenth-century America
(Haeckel 1866: 286–87, Schwarz and Jax 2011: 145–53, Worster 1994: 191–93). The artist
only had an inchoate, aesthetic understanding of ecological relationships, but his works and
words nevertheless communicate valuable information and ideas about the real environmental
conditions shaping his world. In a now famous passage from his “Essay on American
Scenery,” published the same year he painted The Oxbow, Cole explained:
It was my intention to attempt a description of several districts remarkable for their
picturesqueness and truly American character. . .. Yet I cannot but express my sorrow
that the beauty of such landscapes is quickly passing away—the ravages of the axe are
daily increasing—the most noble scenes are made destitute, and oftentimes with a
wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. The wayside is
becoming shadeless, and another generation will behold spots, now rife with beauty,
desecrated by what is called improvement; which, as yet, generally destroys Nature’s
beauty without substituting that of Art.
(Cole 1836: 12)
In a journal entry written the same year, Cole opined:
If men were not blind and insensible to the beauty of nature the great works necessary
for the purpose of commerce might be carried on without destroying it, and at times
might even contribute to her charms by rendering her more accessible—but it is not
so—they desecrate whatever they touch. They cut down the forests with a wanton-
ness for which there is no excuse . . . and leave the herbless rocks to glimmer in the
burning sun.
(Braddock and Irmscher 2009: 92–93)

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In the catalog of a recent exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator
Betsy Kornhauser argued that environmental concerns about deforestation informed not only
the artist’s writings but also his paintings, most notably in The Oxbow. According to Kornhau-
ser, this painting “embodied the profound moral message presented in his essay [i.e., the ‘Essay
on American Scenery’]—an artist’s manifesto to the American public to preserve the wild-
erness” (78). The picture articulated that message compositionally through its obvious structural
opposition of sublime wilderness, seen at left, and picturesque agricultural domestication at
right, but also through the telling detail of clearcuttings on the distant mountainside in the
background—visible above the tiny detail of the artist’s self-portrait, shown seated on the
foreground mountainside, painting a landscape in progress.
Clearing and cultivation of river lowlands was one thing, but the encroachment of
deforestation on mountains signaled for Cole a particularly disturbing incursion of develop-
ment into a wilderness precinct that for him distinguished the United States from Europe. As
he noted in another passage of his essay, “American mountains are generally clothed to the
summit by dense forests, while those of Europe are mostly bare” (Cole 1836: 5). In other
words, for Cole, mountain deforestation threatened to erode the difference between the New
World and the Old. This helps explain why mountain deforestation functioned as a kind of
leitmotif in his work, one that appeared in other paintings as well, including View of Hoosac
Mountain and Pontoosuc Lake near Pittsfield, Massachusetts (ca. 1833, Newark Museum) and in a
famous detail of Consummation, the pivotal work in his celebrated five-part allegory The
Course of Empire (1834–36, New York Historical Society), in which a formerly untouched
peak, now thoroughly cleared, supports roads and buildings of various kinds (Kornhauser and
Barringer 2018: 74–75, 204–19).

Cole and directionality

With this leitmotif of mountain deforestation in mind, I would like to revisit The Oxbow in
order to consider other aspects of its environmental significance, specifically having to do with
the directionality of vision and implied lateral movement in the picture. This is a painting that
very much asks us to think about directions. For one thing, its title refers to a “view from
Mount Holyoke,” indicating a specific topography of looking. The title also identifies a
moment “after a thunderstorm,” instructing us to consider the movement of meteorological
phenomena passing from right to left, a direction strongly implied by the leftward tilt of the
large foreground tree, echoed by the angle of the mountainside and the Connecticut River
below. Some scholars have found ambiguity in the implied lateral direction of the storm’s
movement (Miller 1993: 47–48), but as Kornhauser correctly observes in the Metropolitan
exhibition catalogue, Cole’s self-portrait in the foreground shows him working on a canvas
that is well under way, strongly suggesting he has been sitting in clear weather for some time,
“after” the titular thunderstorm’s passage offstage toward the left (79).
The directionality of implied movement in The Oxbow has also spawned considerable
scholarly discussion about the painting’s allegorical significance as a vision of encounter between
wilderness—embodied in the mountain forest at left—and countervailing forces of development
or civilization—represented by the agricultural landscape at the right. For example, one art
historian has said, “the subject of Cole’s Oxbow is the confrontation between wilderness and the
colonizing energies of American agriculture at a particular moment in history” (Miller 1993:
40). According to another scholar, “The tide of history is, it seems, moving inexorably from
right to left, from East to West: the forest is destined to be swept away and the land brought
under mankind’s rational control” (Barringer 2002: 40). Likewise, a recent Washington Post

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review of the Metropolitan exhibition reiterated this assertion, including the reference to
cardinal directions, saying, “The sharp division in the picture, roughly corresponding to east
and west on a map, dramatizes the march of cultivation and the loss of wilderness”
(Kennicott 2018).
While the general idea of The Oxbow presenting a bifurcated encounter between wilderness
and civilization is correct, the notion that the picture corresponds to cartographic conventions
of right=East and left=West is erroneous. As anyone can attest by being there (or by consulting
Google Earth), when you’re standing on Mount Holyoke and looking down at the oxbow-
shaped curve of the Connecticut River, you’re looking toward the southwest. Cole’s picture
reproduces this view down river in a southerly and western direction. Therefore the storm
moving from right to left is moving from west to east, not east to west. Kornhauser, in
correctly identifying the southward direction of our gaze in the painting, is actually one of the
very few scholars who has bothered to mention this fact, even though the artist’s title for the
work—View from Mount Holyoke—clearly invites such topographical considerations (74). One of
the only other scholars to make this correct assessment of the picture’s directionality is the
environmental historian William Cronon. In a 1992 essay, he wrote,
It is important to realize that the viewer in this painting is looking south, so that
one’s ordinary association of right and left with east and west are here reversed. This
is the only way to know that the painting captures the end of the storm, and that the
golden light flooding in upon the scene comes from a setting, western, sun.
(198, n. 3)
Cronon does not say anything more about the significance of this “ordinary association of right
and left with east and west,” but it deserves scrutiny for the rich cultural baggage it carries.
Contemporary maps of the United States exemplify the prevailing cartographic conventions in
America when Cole painted The Oxbow. In addition to locating the East predictably at right,
such maps rendered the continent as an abstract space available for westward colonization,
defined by mathematically delineated longitudes and latitudes, consistent with the nation’s
influential 1785 Land Ordinance, which established a system for partitioning parcels of property
to be settled according to an emphatically east–west pattern of directionality (Johnson 1976,
Weems 2015). The fact that Cole’s Oxbow reversed the “ordinary association of right and left
with east and west” therefore distinguishes his work from the many American maps and
pictures that embraced such directional logic in the era of Manifest Destiny.
For example, William Jewett’s The Promised Land (1850, Terra Foundation) portrayed the
pioneer family of Andrew Jackson Grayson on their trek through the Sierra Nevada
Mountains to San Francisco and the Gold Rush (Hills 1991: 97–100). The Graysons had
completed their journey to California in 1846, not long after journalist John O’Sullivan
famously declared “Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by providence
for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (1845: 5). With its exhilarating
westward view of the Sacramento River Valley bathed in gold at left, The Promised Land
echoes O’Sullivan’s expansive sense of divine providence, imperial entitlement, and opti-
mism. Jewett’s picture also helped institutionalize in art the cartographic logic of right and left
as east and west.
The art historian Roger Aikin has noted how the same leftward directionality appears
frequently in American pictures of westward movement during the second half of the
nineteenth century. As Aikin (2000) observes, “it is difficult to find any depiction of
American westward expansion, or ‘progress,’ in high art or popular illustrations that does
not feature strong right-to-left, or ‘westward,’ movement” (80). While not an absolute rule,

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this cartographic correlation does seem to be a recognizable tendency. It also appears in

Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, painted in 1861 for the U.S.
Capitol, showing another group of pioneers traversing mountains on their way to a golden
California at left. Albert Bierstadt’s Emigrants Crossing the Plains, or The Oregon Trail of 1869
(National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City) depicts settlers in a wagon
train accompanied by domestic animals, passing by bleached buffalo bones and Native
American tipis in the same direction. Photographs and magazine illustrations likewise
represent “East” and “West” metaphorically shaking hands at the completion of the trans-
continental railroad in 1869 (Beard). And perhaps the most recognizable example of all, John
Gast’s American Progress of 1872—an oil painting widely reproduced as a chromolithograph—
displays a mythic female personification of Euro-American enlightenment floating across the
North American continent from right to left, stringing telegraph wires and accompanied by
various other avatars of Manifest Destiny (Figure 13.2).
Cole certainly knew about the forces of social and environmental change that were already
sweeping across the nation by the 1830s, but he did not follow cartographic logic in
representing them. In fact, he often located the East at the left of his compositions, not just
in The Oxbow but in many other works as well. For example, in View of the Round-Top in the
Catskill Mountains (Sunny Morning on the Hudson River) (1826, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),
the morning light of the East shines from left to right. The same orientation informs The
Savage State and all the pictures in The Course of Empire, in which the artist equated dawn

Figure 13.2 George A. Crofutt after John Gast, American Progress, 1873, chromolithograph, 37.6 x 49 cm.,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC

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 Alan C. Braddock

metaphorically with the earliest stage in the development of civilization. In a late work of
1843, offering a view of Mount Etna in Sicily looking south from the ancient Greek ruins at
Taormina, eastern morning light again floods the scene from the left (Wadsworth Atheneum,
Hartford). By no means was Cole absolutely consistent about this correlation between left and
East, however. In his 1837 View of Florence from San Miniato (Cleveland Museum of Art), for
example, we look across the famous Renaissance Italian city from the East toward the West,
our eyes following the path of the Arno River toward the setting sun at the far left
(Kornhauser and Barringer 2018: 135, 191, 206, 256).

Verticality
In contrast to the cartographic orientation evident in many later nineteenth-century Amer-
ican pictures of progress and environmental change, The Oxbow and other works by Cole
defied any predictable cardinal directionality. Could this have something to do with his roots
in Europe, where different historical patterns of land acquisition prevailed that were less
emphatically directional than America’s East–West flow of national settlement and continental
conquest? Perhaps, but instead of speculating on this large and complex cross-cultural
question, I will return to a statement by Cole that I quoted earlier regarding the specific
directionality of forests. As Cole had written, “American mountains are generally clothed to
the summit by dense forests, while those of Europe are mostly bare” (1836: 5). The
directional orientation of this statement is neither lateral nor cardinal but rather vertical.
That is, it frames environmental concern about forests in terms of elevation as opposed to
longitude or latitude. Cole’s interest in geology broadly echoed that of Alexander von
Humboldt, the famous Prussian naturalist, so it is intriguing to contemplate the possibility
the painter may have known about the scientist’s inquiries concerning isothermal lines of
plant and tree growth at different elevations. However, the statement quoted here from
Cole’s “Essay” clearly refers to human impacts on forest growth rather than Humboldtian
isothermal lines (Kornhauser and Barringer 2018: 71–72, 92, 95).
Cole’s observation about “American mountains . . . generally clothed to the summit by
dense forests” corroborates the findings of a recent historical statistical study published in the
Journal of Biogeography. Authored by a team of Harvard researchers, the study, titled “Three
hundred years of forest and land-use change in Massachusetts,” used historical tax evaluations,
agricultural census records, and geographic information systems to track changes in forest
composition, structure, and distribution across Massachusetts from the early years of European
settlement to the present (Hall et al. 2002). According to these researchers,
Much of the eastern USA was cleared for cultivation or grazing in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. . .. The Connecticut River Valley and the central part of
the Lower Worcester Plateau were also settled relatively early because of the rich,
easily tilled soils, abundant freshwater meadow grass, and history of use by Native
Americans. . .. Agriculture generally peaked between 1830 and 1885 . . . c. 50% of
the land was pasture, hay, or cultivated fields. . .. Forest cover reached a nadir during
the mid-nineteenth century . . . Woodlands were most common in 1830 on poor
agricultural lands such as mountains.
(1320, 1323, 1324, 1325)
In other words, around the time Cole painted The Oxbow, farm-related deforestation had
radically reduced forest cover in Massachusetts, with mountains providing one of the last
refuges for “woodlands,” or dense areas of tree growth, in the region. A particularly striking

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graphic in the scientific study compares forest cover in 1830 and 1999, revealing, as the
authors explain, “large portions of the region supporting greater forest cover today than at any
time in the past 200 years” (Hall et al. 2002: 1324). A visit to the Oxbow site today confirms
this transformation, for it reveals many more trees lining the river today than in the artist’s view
of 1836. On the other hand, as the researchers point out in another graphic, the composition of
Massachusetts forests has changed dramatically over time as well, with old growth oaks, beeches,
and hemlocks largely replaced by the secondary growth of short-lived maples and pines (1328).
The prominent beech tree in the left foreground of The Oxbow—recognizable by its distinctive
bulging base and deciduous leaves—expresses Cole’s awareness of its historical significance as a
majestic, old-growth species whose populations were declining.

Political ecology
Ecocritical art history can obviously benefit from interdisciplinary research in environmental
history and science, but there are also important political matters that come into play as well. After
all, not everyone experiences an environment in the same way, either now or in the past.
Ecological relationships and perceptions are intrinsically political because they entail complex and
often contested interactions, not to mention multiple directions of vision and communication.
In the case of Cole, for example, the politics of Indian Removal clearly informed his romantic
idealism about nature. As Tim Barringer has noted, Cole basically viewed Native Americans as
stereotypical props in a grand moral narrative that celebrated pure, untouched wilderness
against the encroachment of modern civilization (Kornhauser and Barringer 2018: 53, 56). In
Kaaterskill Falls (1826, private collection), the artist erased all signs of modern tourism but he
inserted a tiny, solitary figure of a Native American standing on a ledge in the center, a
primordial human emblem of the pristine natural surroundings. The Oxbow performed similar
erasures by discreetly editing out the visual evidence of tourist structures and traffic at the site
—phenomena documented by other artists in contemporary lithographs. One such litho-
graph, based on a drawing made by William Bartlett during a visit to the U.S. in 1836–37, was
reproduced in an 1840 book titled American Scenery by Nathaniel Parker Willis. In the same
section of Willis’s book, the author described the long colonial history of conflict between
white settlers and Native Americans in this very region of the Connecticut River Valley in
Massachusetts:
The early history of all these towns on the Connecticut river is filled with events of
Indian warfare. Northampton, by its rich alluvial land allured the first settlers of
Massachusetts long before most of the country between it and the sea-coast
possessed an inhabitant. These adventurous pilgrims seated themselves in the midst
of an unprotected wilderness, and surrounded by populous Indian tribes; and, first
purchasing the land at the Indians’ valuation, they defended themselves afterwards as
they might from the aggressions of these and others. The township of Northampton
(called Nonotuc by the aborigines) was first bought in 1653. . .. The settlers of
Nonotuc lived in comparative harmony with the tribe about them; but in the
subsequent Indian wars they lived in perpetual fear and agitation. The town was
surrounded with palisades, “the meeting-house” was fortified, as were most of the
private houses, and several forts were built within the town. Still their dwellings
were often burnt, their women and children carried into captivity, and their time
was divided between war and agriculture.
(Willis 1840: 1, 11–12)

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During the seventeenth century, English colonists rapidly expanded into the area historically
inhabited by various Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Wampanoags, whose chief,
Metacom, or King Philip, eventually waged war against the invaders. Metacom’s Rebellion,
also known as King Philip’s War, was the deadliest war in the history of North American
colonial settlement, resulting in the death of thousands, mostly Indigenous people, over
several years during the 1670s (Lepore 1999). Cole’s Oxbow did not represent any of this
regional history or the recent tourist infrastructure. Instead, his painting offered a gratifying
illusion of primeval mountain forest, where the artist and kindred spirits could rise above both
history and environmental change. For all of his directional specificity and resistance to the
prevailing visual dynamics of Manifest Destiny in nineteenth-century American landscape
imagery, Cole’s work ultimately naturalized the idea of pristine wilderness at the expense of
politics and history.
Cole’s dream of an uncompromised, unspoiled wilderness also therefore ends up compro-
mising his environmentalism. Ecology demands critical examination of interconnections of all
kinds—including symbiosis, coexistence, and conflict—not obfuscation, purification, and
erasure. This is the basic point of the recent withering critiques of both wilderness and the
“nature” concept long cherished within the tradition exemplified by Cole (Guha 1989,
Cronon 1995, Morton 2009, Vogel 2015). Unfortunately, as the many authors of this critique
have now told us, romantic representations of wilderness tend to aestheticize nature as an

Figure 13.3 Thomas Cole’s fossil and rock collection, ca. 1830–40, Thomas Cole National Historic Site,
Catskill, New York

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impossible utopian realm of purity and historical amnesia, cleansed of politics, difference, and
change. Ecocritical art history counters such idealism by excavating complexity in aesthetic
objects and environmental history, whether beautiful or contested.
I close with a very different work by Thomas Cole: his fossil and rock collection
(Figure 13.3). This assemblage strikes me as interesting evidence of the artist’s willingness, on
some level, to accept complexity and difference, regardless of directionality and without
illusions of wilderness. The collection consists not only of “natural” fossils and rocks but also
various modern and ancient human artifacts, including medallions, fragments of mosaic, an oil
lamp, and the heads of figurines. By integrating objects of human and nonhuman antiquity,
Cole here imagined an integrated, environmental view of the past. We still sense no political
conflict, but unlike the elusive purity that he imagined and valorized atop Mount Holyoke,
his collection of fossils embraced some of the messy mesh of history.

Works cited
Aikin, Roger. “Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation.” American Art 14.3(Autumn 2000):
78–89.
Barringer, Tim. “The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity in America and Britain, 1820–80.”
American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880, edited by Andrew Wilton and Tim
Barringer. Princeton University Press in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
2002.
Beard, Frank. “Does Such a Meeting Not Make Amends?” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 28.713 (May
29, 1869): 176.
Braddock, Alan C. Implication: Ecocritical Art History in Theory and Practice. Yale University Press, forthcoming.
Braddock, Alan C., and Christoph Irmscher, eds. A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art
History. University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Cole, Thomas. “Essay on American Scenery.” American Monthly Magazine 7 (January 1836): 1–12.
Cronon, William. “Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change.” Discovered Lands,
Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, edited by Jules David Prown. Yale
University Press, 1992.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon
Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon. Norton, 1995, pp. 69–90.
Guha, Ramachandra. “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World
Critique.” Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83.
Haeckel, Ernst. Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Reimer, Berlin, 1866.
Hall, Brian, and others. “Three Hundred Years of Forest and Land-Use Change in Massachusetts, USA.”
Journal of Biogeography 29 (2002): 1319–35.
Hills, Patricia. “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion.” The West as America: Reinterpreting
Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, edited by William H. Truettner. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Johnson, Hildegard Binder. Order Upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi
Country. Oxford University Press, 1976.
Kennicott, Philip. “Did America’s Great Landscape Painter Fear Progress and Hate Democracy?”
Washington Post (February 2, 2018).
Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin and Tim Barringer. Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings. Metropolitan
Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2018.
Kusserow, Karl, and Alan C. Braddock. Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment. Princeton
University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018.
Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Vintage, New York,
1999.
Miller, Angela. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–75.
Cornell University Press, 1993.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University
Press, 2009.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2010.

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O’Sullivan, John. “Annexation.” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (1845): 5–10.
Schwarz, Astrid and Kurt Jax, eds. Ecology Revisited: Reflecting on Concepts, Advancing Science. Springer, 2011.
Slovic, Scott. “Ecocriticism: Storytelling, Values, Communication, Contact.” Going Away to Think:
Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. University of Nevada Press, 2008, pp. 27–30.
Thomas, Greg M. Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau.
Princeton University Press, 2000.
Truettner, William H., and Alan Wallach. Thomas Cole: Landscape into History. National Museum of
American Art in association with Yale University Press, 1994.
Vogel, Steven. Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature. MIT Press, 2015.
Weems, Jason. Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest. University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 2015.
Willis, Nathaniel Parker. American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River/Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature.
George Vertue, 1840. Vol. 1.
Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd edition. Cambridge University
Press, 1994.

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 14
CHALLENGES TO
DEVELOPING A LONG-TERM
ENVIRONMENTAL
PERSPECTIVE
PAN and DIM1

Patrick D. Murphy

Facts do not speak for themselves, as has become painfully obvious to climatologists, other
scientists, and environmental activists. Nor does a compelling story necessarily render those
facts persuasive. In order to be compelling, the audience for a story usually has to be already
predisposed, or at least open, to the climax of the plot and the lessons contained in the
denouement. Often Hollywood undercuts the scientific lessons provided in environmental
disaster films by having the climax and the denouement focus on the reunification of the
nuclear family, thereby drawing attention away from the causes of the disaster and encoura-
ging the impression that all is now well with the world.
Also, novelist Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (2016) has argued that the modern
novel has generally not served the public well as a vehicle for factual communication about
major environmental issues. Ghosh, in critiquing a review by John Updike, remarks that “the
contemporary novel has become ever more radically centered on the individual psyche while
the collective–‘men in the aggregate’–has receded, both in the cultural and the fictional
imagination” (78). Strikingly, Ghosh argues that this turn in the novel, which he states does
not derive from its form, is the result of “a turn that fiction took at a certain time in the
countries that were leading the way to the ‘Great Acceleration’ [in unsustainable consumption
and carbon emissions] of the late twentieth century” (79). Facing such tendencies in popular
narrative, then, communicators need to address patterns of thought and prejudices that
generate resistance to the facts presented. They need to do that in order to generate more
persuasive narratives that would encourage audiences “in the aggregate” to take public action
in response to environmental information.
Increasingly in not only the United States but much of the rest of the world, economies
lurch rapidly through boom and bust cycles without any lessons seemingly learned from the
last bust as producers and consumers charge into the next boom. If people respond with this
kind of short-term amnesia to blatant upheavals in their lives, how much more likely are they

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 Patrick D. Murphy

to fail to recognize and respond to larger natural disasters and longer-term anthropogenic
forcings of such disasters, as well as ongoing buildups of life-destroying pollutants, and the
species loss of the sixth great extinction?
The mindset that facilitates such behaviors bodes ill for communicating environmental
values that would encourage cultural shifts from destructive consumption to sustainable living,
which would slow and perhaps even reverse environmental degradation and species extinc-
tion. Two components of the consumptive mindset that need to be understood in order to
enhance the effectiveness of environmental communication are PAN and DIM. The first
acronym stands for “Present as Always Normal” and the second for “Discrete Incident
Mentality.” Together, these two attitudes occlude the otherwise obvious signs of environ-
mental crisis. They need to be brought to consciousness in order to be resisted and overcome
as part of generating counternarratives and action generating environmental lessons. Through
recognizing and countering these two self-destructive interpretations of reality, environmental
communication can participate in replacing destructive cultural values with environmentally
healthy ones.
DIM is an acronym for the malaise I call Discrete Incident Mentality. By that I mean that
many Americans treat every recurring event as a unique occurrence without precedence or
prediction. As a result, people rebuild the same kind of home in the same place with the
expectation that they won’t get hit again, relying, for instance, on the myth about the
singularity of lightning strikes or the pretense that this year’s extreme weather was “unimagin-
able.” That is the term President George W. Bush used for the impact of Hurricane Katrina in a
national proclamation: “Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in our
Nation’s history and has caused unimaginable devastation and heartbreak throughout the Gulf
Coast Region.” He also claimed that Katrina was not a normal hurricane. Both statements are
false as the storm itself and its effects were widely predicted leading up to the year of its
occurrence (“Proclamation” 2005, see Hallowell 2005). DIM thinkers invoke probability only
when it favors their own desires and ignore it when it warns that Galveston, New Orleans,
Long Island, and the Outer Banks will get hit by hurricanes again, sooner or later, and that
communities in Oklahoma will get flattened by tornadoes each in turn. Americans were already
forgetting that very issue of rebuilding or rethinking life along the Jersey coast as a result of
Superstorm Sandy even as they sat on the edge of multiple nor’easters in the winter of 2017–18.
And, as the news reports at the time of Sandy indicated, despite all of the warnings to evacuate
and prepare for a “perfect storm,” many people disregarded the warnings because they believed
that hurricanes only occurred in some other discrete location.
DIM is a device also used repeatedly by climate change denialists to argue that every piece
of evidence for anthropogenic global warming is anomalous, unconnected to anything else, or
a fluke. DIM is employed to deny the cumulative effects of personal, cultural, and national
behavior; it is a denial of history and ecology.
PAN stands for Present as Always Normal and, while not identical with it, often overlaps
with DIM in people’s thinking. It is a mindset whereby the conditions of the moment are
treated as if they are the conditions that have been typical over an indefinite period of time.
People who disbelieve that evolution applies to human beings imagine that as a species we
came into existence fully formed and have always looked the way we look now. Thus, in no
way have we been altered by the massive environmental changes during the deep history of
hominid development. That kind of bias precludes realizing that “it is possible that currently
observable behavioral traits are nonadaptive or even maladaptive because they were adapted
for an earlier environment” (Smail 2008: 120). Andrew Revkin (2010), the New York Times
blogger, posted that Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel, notes that “each generation is

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born with a new sense of normal—even as conditions are steadily shifting. This is what Peter
Kahn, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, calls ‘environmental genera-
tional amnesia’.” One of the problems with the amnesia of PAN is that such a mindset
encourages a continuing kind of passive adjustment that always assumes existing conditions
are perpetual, which is a form of inertia. If PAN were accurate, FEMA would never need to
update its flood zone maps.
Likewise PAN encourages people to assume that areas that currently have sufficient
supplies of fresh water, such as those southwestern regions reliant on snowmelt and the
Colorado River, will not only always have enough water for their current populations, but
also will be able to accommodate growth because they have done so in the past. Curiously
enough, the climate change denial ploy of stating that “the climate is always changing” is a
form of PAN in that it negates any recognition of the difference between past climatic
regimes and contemporary anthropogenic forcings. Current human population pollution
levels are treated as fundamentally no different from those of the past.
Elke Weber (2006) at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia
University argues that research indicates that decision-making is driven by associative and
affective factors. “The associative system,” she notes, “is intuitive, automatic, and fast. It maps
uncertain and adverse aspects of the environment into affective responses (e.g., fear, dread,
anxiety) and this represents risk as a feeling” (105). PAN short-circuits such affective responses
because the belief that whatever occurs now is normal calls for acceptance and accommoda-
tion rather than resistance or mitigation. Weber explains that the “second processing system
works by analytic algorithms and rules. . .. It is slower and requires conscious awareness and
control” (2006: 105). DIM short-circuits this system by making each potentially significant
event that might elicit an analysis of trends and patterns appear unique and unpredictable.
PAN and DIM take rhetorical form as rationalization and dismissal of systemic implications
in response to external stimuli from small daily events, such as unhealthy eating, to global-
scale phenomena, such as anthropogenically induced glacial melting. Some years ago,
Preetum Shenoy (2010) posed the question: “A Twelve Step Program for Unsustainable
Consumption?” She noted that:
Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a surge in public interest in sus-
tainability. . .. But despite the exponential increase in social and environmental
consciousness, recent research shows that only modest gains—if any—in shifts
toward more sustainable behavior. . .. Perhaps what we really need to overcome
our addiction is a “twelve step program” with the first, most critical step being the
admission that the American way of life is unsustainable.
An extremely dangerous form of PAN, aided and abetted by DIM, is American Exception-
alism. The belief that the contemporary phenomenon of the United States as the world’s
largest economy with far and away the largest military is not bound by the historical trends
experienced by all previous empires explains Americans’ widespread lack of interest in history.
There are no lessons to be learned from the past if the contemporary United States is a unique
phenomenon for all time. Nor is there any need to prepare for a world when the oil wells
and the aquifers have run dry because “ingenuity” or “technological innovation” will
spontaneously arise and avert disaster without any long-range planning required. As Weber
notes:
Each culture selects some risks for attention and chooses to ignore others. Cultural
differences in risk perception are explained in terms of their contribution to a

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particular way of life . . . culture teaches individuals where their interests lie and
what variables and events pose risks to those interests and ways of life.
(Weber 2006: 111)
Tema Milstein, Mariko Thomas, and Jeff Hoffmann (2018) echo this point in the opening
sentences of their essay on ecocultural reflexivity: “Our shared ecological relations spring
from the co-constructed meanings we harbor about ‘nature’. These cultural productions
shape views, and propel or stall actions, ranging from the intimately local to the over-
whelmingly atmospheric” (1).
A variation of DIM can be observed in what Weber labels “Single Action Bias.” Her
research indicates that:
Decision makers are very likely to take one action to reduce a risk that they
encounter and worry about, but are much less likely to take additional steps that
would provide incremental protection or risk reduction . . . presumably because the
first action suffices in reducing the feeling of worry or vulnerability.
(Weber 2006: 115)
In other words, some level of recognition of an environmental problem will trigger sufficient
emotional discomfort to generate action, but that action, like hitting the bottle after a stressful
day at work, serves only to allay anxiety or stress rather than solving or mitigating the
generative problem because no comprehensive analysis of the problem’s root causes is
undertaken. Rather, the symptoms of the problem only receive discrete treatment.
Jonathan Friedman (2007), Professor of Social Anthropology at Lund University, argues
that:
Survival is a short-term operation for most social actors and the premises of survival
are constituted within larger sets of assumptions about reality that are not often
subject to real reflexive analysis about systemic conditions of material reproduction
and survival. Bourdieu (1977) suggested the importance of this phenomenon in
discussing the notion of doxa, a set of assumptions that form the rules of the game
and the shape of the playing field.
(109; Milstein, Thomas, and Hoffmann refer to these as “meta-narratives” [3])
The doxa of climatic and environmental awareness in many cultures is based on PAN and
DIM kinds of attitudes that preclude interrogation of the ideological system that has
constructed them. Friedman’s analysis helps communicators understand not only why social
actors think in terms of PAN, DIM, and various forms of exceptionalism, but also why
scientific research and activist campaigns elicit such strong resistance: they challenge funda-
mental cultural values and “ways of life” (Weber 2006) and demand “real reflexive analysis”
(Friedman 2007) in order to comprehend the critique of political and economic inertia in the
face of environmental degradation and the solutions proposed for halting such degradation.
Recognizing PAN and DIM as powerful rationalizing traps facilitates environmental
communicators interdicting the mental gymnastics that enable people to ignore human
addiction to self-destructive consumption and encouraging the pursuit of sustainability as the
only avenue for recovery through increasing individual ecocultural reflexivity (on the concept
of addiction here, see Smail 2008: Chapter 5). Milstein, Thomas, and Hoffmann emphasize
the importance of such reflexivity as having
the potential to nourish mass critical awareness of doxa, interrupting unconscious
reproduction of the mythical story of progress premised upon disconnection and

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extraction from ecosystems no longer recognized as self, as interconnected, as alive,

as well as turning toward rehabilitating and revivifying the many biodiverse
casualties of colonization, industrialization, and marketization.
(2018: 13)
A lack of reflexivity can be seen in the preponderance of car culture and vehicle buying
patterns. With global oil prices low, there has been a worldwide uptick in the sale of trucks
and SUVs over passenger cars. Hiroko Tabuchi, writing in March of 2018, noted that the
global personal transportation market has been imitating the American one in buying SUVs
rather than sedans. In the early 2000s average fuel economy for new cars increased almost 2
percent per year, but since then has slowed to half that average (a 3 percent increase per year
is estimated to be needed to “stabilize emissions from the world’s car fleet,” according to
Tabuchi). If current trends continue, in just four years, 50 percent of all new car purchases in
China will be SUVs with their lower mpg than the cars Chinese are currently buying.
Likewise, there has been an increase in sales of pickup trucks to people who use them almost
entirely for commuting. In the United States, as soon as gasoline prices fall, people forget
when prices were high and act in purchasing vehicles as if the price of a gallon of gasoline on
the day they go vehicle shopping is the price it will remain for the life of the vehicle. But the
data contradicts such a mentality. The average life of a vehicle on American roads is 11.5
years. Gasoline prices in contrast fluctuate more rapidly than such a vehicle life span. In 2016,
U.S. gasoline averaged $2.14 per gallon; in 2012 it averaged $3.62 (“Regular”).
Any review of future energy demand based on a continuation of business as usual (PAN)
compared with the cost and resources required to ramp up energy production indicates that it
is highly unlikely that world commercial production, whether one is talking about free
market or state owned, can find the means to develop alternative sources of energy or
alternative sources of oil production as rapidly as conventional oil production is declining. For
example, McKinsey and Company (2018) in its “Energy Insights” notes that about 5 million
additional barrels of oil per day (that is, 1.8 billion barrels per year) must be brought into
production just to offset declines in mature fields at the same time that total global
consumption will increase each year through 2030. At the same time its analysts estimate
that such growth will be covered mainly by U.S. shale production only through 2026, when
such output peaks, and by 2030 it too will be in decline. As a result, both land-based
conventional and shale oil production will increasingly have to be replaced by offshore and
deepwater discoveries and production. That oil will necessarily cost much more per barrel
than land-based crude given the investments required to bring it online.
PAN thinkers who rely on the burst of late-twentieth-century technological innovation as
the standard for solving unsustainable resource consumption will respond to peak oil data
with the retort that Elon Musk and electric cars will keep drivers behind the wheels of their
personal conveyances on into the distant future. Most near-future science fiction movies
reinforce this viewpoint with the tired narrative that even overpopulation will not do away
with private transportation, although usually they depict the use of electric vehicles. Yet, in
order for half of the world’s motor vehicles to be able to be powered by electricity generated
from alternative forms of energy by 2030, automobile factories would need to be able to
build over 40,000,000 electric cars per year. That in itself is a DIM statistic. A more systemic
view of the problem would also need to take into account the challenge of mining enough
lithium for the batteries and each country upgrading its power grid to handle the load of
charging such cars, including those traveling across contiguous international boundaries. The
PAN mentality of the automobile as the primary means of mechanized travel flies in the face

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of all of the available data and yet has globally become an accepted norm in many countries
and the proof of “middle class” status in others.
Many of the authors who write about alternative futures and planning for the end of the
oil-based transportation era encourage various forms of exaptative action. “Exaptation,”
unlike “adaptation,” requires a different way of thinking. Developing a different way of
thinking requires reconfiguration of language, promotion of new metaphors, and changes in
the daily narratives that guide decision-making about consumption and pollution. Theodore
Brown (2003), professor emeritus of chemistry and founding director of the Arnold and
Mabel Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois,
in Making Truth, quotes Thomas Kuhn, who noted that “Theory change, in particular, is
accompanied by a change in some of the relevant metaphors and in the corresponding parts of
the network of similarities through which terms attach to nature” (28). PAN and DIM could
serve as two such needed metaphors for altering resistance to environmental awareness.
Metaphors, according to Brown, “stimulate creation of similarities between the source and
target domains, such that the target domain is seen in an entirely new light” (2003: 29). In
other words, metaphors are crucial for building models that could successfully convey vital
environmental messages. Successful environmental communication requires developing and
disseminating new kinds of stories and promoting new figurative language. The shortest form
of a story is the metaphor and new metaphors are the seed syllables for new narratives. Once
established such metaphors become terms in their own right.
Fred Pearce (2006) wrote about the developing global crisis of potable fresh water scarcity in
When the Rivers Run Dry more than a decade ago. He provides not only the kind of analysis that
enables predicting the Cape Town water crisis of early 2018, but also how to enable people to
think more comprehensively and reflexively about this fundamental component of all forms of
life on this planet. Pearce wants people to develop a broader vocabulary and more diverse
narratives for talking about the changing parts of the water cycle, rather than the permanent
parts. That is, he wants people to understand “watering” as process rather than “water” as
commodity or discrete resource. As a result, he introduces various new terms to help his readers
think differently, such as “porous cities,” “water ethics,” and “rain harvesters” and to begin to
recognize the need for developing strategies for the sustainability of freshwater in the face of an
estimated two-thirds increase in global water demand by 2025 (Pearce 2006: 305–306).
In line with what Pearce is attempting to accomplish with metaphors and new narratives,
Thomas Princen (2010), who teaches social and ecological sustainability at the University of
Michigan and is a fellow at the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, observes
that “the present patterns of consumption are consuming life-support systems, locally and
globally. The point is that what we take for normal is actually excess” (12). He calls for
language that situates daily decision making, individual and collective, in natural
processes, language that overcomes the us-versus-them of military metaphors, the
build-a-better-world of engineering metaphors, the get-the-right-price and buy-it-
and-sell-it of commercial metaphors. We need language that enables living with
nature, not living against nature.
(12)
The arguments of Pearce and Princen both speak to the need to challenge PAN and DIM,
while the recently deceased novelist Ursula K. Le Guin (1990) critiqued PAN some years
ago, “Only the imagination can get us out of the bind of the eternal present, inventing or
hypothesizing or pretending or discovering a way that reason can then follow into the infinity
of options, a clue through the labyrinth of choice” (45; emphasis added). To advocate the

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sustainability that both Pearce and Princen champion, a person has first to think systemically
and then communicate new metaphors and narratives that interdict PAN and DIM knee-jerk
reactions in order to educate effectively within the parameters of respective disciplines and
work environments.
DIM has to be challenged by reconfiguring the way people talk about the world. Pearce
recognizes, for instance, that we have to get away from treating phenomenal reality as a series
of discrete objects, largely fixed and inert, and speak more in terms of processes and activities,
what the new materialists would label “entanglements.” Milstein, Thomas, and Hoffmann
(2018), in their data collection of the ways students think about nature, noted that
participants overwhelmingly relied on lists . . . in which “nature” came across as
largely fragmented atomized static objects instead of systemic interrelated agentic
subjects. This descriptive pointing . . . revealed blockages in narrative and scarcity in
lexicon . . . and appeared symptomatic of a predominant absence of holistic Western
ecocultural stories at a time such stories are urgently needed.
(1–2)
Tyler Volk (2008) attempts just this type of new systemic narrative in CO2 Rising: The
World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge, when he explains the deep history of the carbon
cycle by means of a set of carbon atoms given human names and treated as characters in a
story about their travels through the biosphere. In his Preface, he argues:
The climate effect that we now read about and see almost daily in the media
becomes much more salient when grounded in the material reality of how carbon
shapes life and how the global carbon cycle links all organisms to one another and to
the atmosphere.
(Volk 2008: xi)
His seemingly simple story about “Dave” and other carbon atoms makes palpable the
“100,000-year average lifetime in the biosphere” of individual carbon atoms and seeks to
impress upon people that the impact of today’s carbon emissions far exceed the brief history
of human inhabitation of this planet (201).
Freeing people from the traps of PAN and DIM would enable them, for instance, to see
Gary Snyder’s (2007b) appeal for a “Thousand-Year Forest Plan” for the Sierra Nevada
region as a practical and sensible approach to maintaining and restoring regional biodiversity,
rather than some utopian pipe dream. Snyder warns that “environmental histories are
cautionary,” yet few people know such history of the place or places where they live. He
further notes that “The choices we make in regard to our natural environment and our
society have increasingly long-range implications in this hyper-informed but historically
clueless speeded-up contemporary world” (2007b: 40–41). Yet, Snyder (2007a) also recog-
nizes the potential for redirecting culture through transformative thinking because societies
are capable of “surprising shifts and turns” (97). Facilitating such shifts means
winning hearts and minds. Watershed imagining, bioregional ideas of governance,
the actual existence of communities that include the nonhuman in their embrace,
dreams of ecological justice, and the faint possibility of long-term sustainable land
and culture—all this nutty ancient stuff is a matter of engaging hearts and minds
(Snyder 2007a: 98)
of generating effective environmental communication through overcoming the doxa of PAN
and DIM that impede the hearing of the message.

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Note
1 Portions of this chapter are based on “Consumption as Addiction, Sustainability as Recovery,” in
Patrick D. Murphy, Transversal Ecocritical Praxis (Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 73–84.

Works cited
Brown, Theodore L. Making Truth: Metaphor in Science. University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Friedman, Jonathan. “Toward a Comparative Study of Hegemonic Decline in Global Systems: The
Complexity of Crisis and the Paradoxes of Differential Experience.” In Sustainability or Collapse? An
Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. Edited by Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich, and Will
Steffen. The MIT Press in Cooperation with Dahlem University Press, 2007, pp. 94–113.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press,
2016.
Hallowell, Christopher. Holding Back the Sea: The Struggle on the Gulf Coast to Save America. Harper
Perennial, 2005.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Place. Harper & Row,
1990.
McKinsey and Company. “Energy Insights.” www.mckinseyenergyinsights.com/services/market-intelli
gence/reports/global-oil-supply-demand-outlook/. Accessed 6 April 2018.
Milstein, Tema, Mariko Thomas, and Jeff Hoffmann. “Dams and Flows: Immersing in Western Meaning
Systems in Search of Ecocultural Reflexivity.” Environmental Communication (2018): 1–14. doi:10.1080/
17524032.2018.1423626.
Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century. Beacon,
2006.
Princen, Thomas. Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order. The MIT Press, 2010.
“Proclamation by the President: National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of Hurricane
Katrina.” The White House, 8 September 2005. www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/print/
20050908-12.html. Accessed 11 February 2006.
“Retail Price of Regular Gasoline in the United States from 1990 to 2017 (in U.S. Dollars per Gallon).”
www.statista.com/statistics/204740/retail-price-of-gasoline-in-the-united-states-since-1990/.
Accessed 6 April 2018.
Revkin, Andrew. “Hot Weather in a Warming Climate.” Dot Earth. The New York Times Online, July 9,
2010.
Shenoy, Preetum. “A Twelve Step Program for Unsustainable Consumption?” August 25, 2010. www.
sustainability.com/blog/a-twelve-step-program-for-unsustainable-consumption. Accessed 28 August
2010.
Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. University of California Press, 2008.
Snyder, Gary. “Sustainability Means Winning Hearts and Minds.” In Back on the Fires: Essays. Counter-
point, 2007a, pp. 97–98.
Snyder, Gary. “Thinking toward the Thousand-Year Forest Plan.” In Back on the Fires: Essays. Counter-
point, 2007b, pp. 37–42.
Tabuchi, Hiroko. “The World Is Embracing S.U.V.s. That’s Bad News for the Climate.” The New York
Times, March 3, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/climate/suv-sales-global-climate.html.
Volk, Tyler. CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge. The MIT Press, 2008.
Weber, Elke U. “Experience-Based and Description-Based Perceptions of Long-Term Risk: Why Global
Warming Does Not Scare Us (Yet).” Climatic Change 77 (2006): 103–120.

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 15
THE “CHERNOBYL
SYNDROME” IN U.S.
NUCLEAR FICTION
Toward risk communication parameters
of “nuclear phobia”

Inna Sukhenko

Introduction
Contemporary communication methods and tools significantly contribute to a better under-
standing of “nuclear energy” issues—from the image-making tools of the nuclear energy
industry to the networking of “nuclear energy” stakeholders—authorities, scientists, media,
NGOs and the entire community. Clear and precise rules of communication processes, based
on their full understanding into the nuclear power program, are crucial for making consistent
decisions, and as a result, for using the full potential of the nuclear industry.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion (April 25, 1986) went through a transfor-
mation—from a technogenic catastrophe in the Soviet republics into an ecological, economic and
political shift in society, with further “human–nature” relationships at personal, social and national
levels. A clear systemic failure, the government not only concealed seminal information on the
disaster, but also failed to focus on issues that needed urgent attention. As a result of the government
policy on covering up the nuclear plant explosion and sharing little information with the world
outside, a biased and distorted narrative of the disaster was what was presented to the world at large.
The explosion at the Chernobyl NPP demonstrated how all the weaker aspects of communication
systems in the nuclear energy industry resulted not only in coping with the large-scale aftermath, but
also in shaping the stereotypes about “nuclear energy” as a concept, as well as about a certain sense of
skepticism and aversion towards the nuclear energy industry in general. Stemming from the lack of
an effective communication policy as well as tools at the national level, the lack of information,
despair, the “generation” memory, the loss of hope and a sudden shift from total trust to total distrust
toward the government resulted into a phenomenon known as the “Chernobyl Syndrome.”
In this chapter I investigate how U.S. nuclear fiction on the Chernobyl disaster not only
interprets the Chernobyl Syndrome as a social phenomenon for contemporary readers but also
shapes the “nuclear phobia” within risk communication studies, further mapping the parameters
of the Nuclear Other.

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The “Chernobyl Syndrome”

On April 25, 1986, humanity faced a new word, “Chernobyl,” which stemmed from the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion and its aftermath in Ukraine—the erstwhile Soviet
Ukrainian Republic, located in the eastern part of Europe. Initially there was a total blackout of
information, only gossip on “something happened at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl.” It
was impossible to receive even the remotest possible information on the destroyed reactor, the
uncontrolled leak of radionuclides somewhere in the Eastern European territory of the Soviet
Union—all the information was being hidden by the local and central authorities.
It was not until two days later that the decision on the necessity to evacuate the residents
of Prypyat city and nearby inhabited areas was made by the central Soviet government,
located in Moscow. Within those two days, being unaware of the consequences of the
explosion at the nuclear power station, the local people walked around the city, worked in
the gardens, got ready for the coming May Day parade and paid no special attention to the
fire engines’ and ambulances’ sirens because the local media informed that the situation was
under total control, and there was no need for panic. And the people believed them—while
the radioactive power slowly covered their heads and shoulders, their houses and balconies,
their clothes, trees, flowers and wells (Ing 1988: 6).
After the first few days of the explosion, few people watched what happened at the
nuclear power plant, and how that impacted the residents of Prypiat, Chernobyl and residents
of the 30-kilometer zone, later declared as the Exclusion Zone. The Chernobyl Syndrome
occurred later—in six months—when the society faced the social and psychological tension,
directly linked to the Chernobyl accident and its aftermath.
The Chernobyl Syndrome is not only a medical diagnosis, but is also associated with great
psychological trauma. The Chernobyl Syndrome refers not only to the lack of information about
the nuclear disaster, but also refers to the forceful evacuation of residents, their displacement all
over the former Soviet Union. The Chernobyl Syndrome formation was based on their reactions
and responses to wandering, deprivation, uncertainty, and lack of information.
The Chernobyl Syndrome is defined as “a set of ecological, economic, ethnic problems and
other consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, [which] happened on
April, 25, 1986” (Radiophobia 2008: 836). In particular, the Chernobyl Syndrome is
regarded as (1) a set of disorders related to the fear of radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear
power plant explosion; and (2) the mistrust of the government in terms of nuclear energy
technology and nuclear energy policy as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Ovsyannikov (1999) refers to the Chernobyl Syndrome as not merely a disaster that had a
huge impact on the economy, but also as something that affected the health of the population.
This loss of trust in nuclear energy stems from the overwhelming radiation psychosis, developed
by mass media. Chernobyl Syndrome is based on a distorted, aggravated perception of radiation
risk, including consequences of health issues that resulted either from being exposed to
common radiation sources or to nuclear explosion radiation (Ovsyaannikov 1999: 261).
According to his opinion, such psychosis is significantly important in terms of forced resettle-
ment for a huge number of Chernobyl sufferers and the further problems of their adaptation to
new places as well as their intentional living in the territories affected by radioactive pollution
to some extent. The Chernobyl Syndrome stems from an anti-nuclear campaign and
unbalanced ecological policy, implemented by the governments of the countries that suffered
after the nuclear power plant explosion. Typically, the following features could be termed as
the Chernobyl Syndrome: a huge geographical space affected by a nuclear catastrophe, which
was impossible to predict; the lack of the authorities’ reasonable actions in case of emergency;

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 The “Chernobyl Syndrome” in U.S. nuclear fiction

the total “radiation” incompetence of doctors as well as common people living nearby the
nuclear power station; the outdated measuring system of radiation norms in the former
USSR; and the lack of realization about “radiation risks” that could overwhelm people.
Ovsyannikov stresses that all these factors are objective (the fact of the nuclear plant explosion)
and subjective (social, economic, political defects of the local/national/central authorities’
governing system) in nature, in terms of perceiving the Chernobyl disaster (Ovsyannikov
1999: 261).
Lusted (2011), in The Chernobyl Disaster, defines the Chernobyl Syndrome in this way:
There is actually a name for the psychological ailment that many people suffer as a
result of their experiences after the Chernobyl accident. Called the “Chernobyl
Syndrome,” its sufferers feel helpless and overwhelmed about the possible conse-
quences to their health: impact of the disaster may not even be seen in some people
until 2016 at the earliest. They also feel like they are victims of circumstances they
can not control and have little confidence in their ability to help themselves. The
Syndrome has led to an increase in alcohol abuse and clinical depression for millions
of people.
(Lusted 2011: 87)
It should be mentioned that at the stage of its formation, the Chernobyl Syndrome depends
more on authorities’ and policymakers’ declarations and mass media’s statements, proving the
fake information in terms of radiation biology, radiation ecology and radiation protection,
than on the medical and physical criteria of radiation contamination.
The Chernobyl Syndrome assumes not only the impact of the Chernobyl accident on the
people’s psyche (resulting in fear, uncertainty, and stress), but also public distrust toward
authorities, politicians, and the media, especially within the context of the nuclear disaster.
Skeptical attitude to the authorities’ decisions about the radiation influence and its consequences
is followed by inability of officials to explain the situation to the public.
At the initial stage after the nuclear power plant explosion, the public’s distrust toward
official sources was so strong that the government had to invite foreign experts to visit the
contaminated areas, meet with local experts and express their opinion on the situation. In
order to lessen the public tension, famous writers, actors and later the media were invited to
Chernobyl to reduce fears caused by the Chernobyl Syndrome.
The reasons for this are well known. In the first years after the Chernobyl tragedy,
reporting any information dealing with the accident was prohibited; journalists and literary
scholars, writers, and poets were only allowed to repeat the official—governmental—point of
view on this catastrophe. There was a complete factual blackout on the actual event. But
some time later, in spite of all obstacles and prohibitions, Ukrainian society became aware of
Chernobyl as a technical accident that had global ecological effects, the lingering conse-
quences of which will be experienced by future generations. This awareness of the real events
that occurred at Chernobyl reached the mass media in part because of the publication of
memoirs of the Chernobyl catastrophe by first-hand witnesses.

Nuclear phobia within risk communication parameters

Studying “nuclear energy” as a concept within risk communication studies, Fahlquist and
Roeser (2015) emphasize that in terms of researching “nuclear energy” issues, “. . .risk
communication should not only be effective, but also ethical, which requires taking
moral emotions into consideration” (343). They highlight the role of emotions (such as

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sympathy, empathy, responsibility, curiosity), which are regarded as a key factor for
addressing and explicating moral values towards nuclear energy in a perspective of risk
communications (333).
This emotional component twists a three-level framework of morally responsible risk
communication, which includes the levels of the procedure, the message and the effects of
risk communication: reconsideration of “nuclear” risks launches the conditions of ethically
responsible risk communication; it requires “a legitimate procedure, an ethically justified risk
message and concern for and evaluation of the effects of the message and procedure”
(Fahlquist and Roeser 2015: 335).
The situation with the Chernobyl nuclear explosion demonstrated how the emotional
component of risk communication shifted the Chernobyl Syndrome from a phenomenon of
the medical/psychological level to the social one.
And it is nuclear phobia—the most significant one among other components (including
“nuclear energy” ignorance, the rejection of nuclear studies, health problem aftermath,
forceful resettlement)—which demonstrated how the lack of knowledge on the legitimate
procedure about the “post-nuclear explosion” actions, the distorted message about nuclear
energy and the poor evaluation of the risks added the emotional and moral perception of the
nuclear accident and further shaped the Chernobyl Syndrome.
Nuclear phobia, sometimes defined as “radiophobia” (Novikau 2017: 800) is considered
to be an obsessive fear of radiation as long-term psychological consequences of the
Chernobyl nuclear explosion (Pastel 2002: 134). The primary health effect of Chernobyl
has been widespread psychological distress in so-called liquidators (those nuclear plant work-
ers who were involved in the process of clean-up), evacuees and inhabitants of the
contaminated nearby areas. In the medical aspect, nuclear phobia is characterized by multiple
unexplained physical symptoms including fatigue, sleep and mood disturbances, impaired
memory and concentration, and muscle and/or joint pain. These syndromes, which resemble
chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, are probably not due to direct effects of radiation
because they do not appear to be those related to radiation exposure and because they occur
in areas of both high and low contamination (Pastel 2002: 134).
Thus, Novikau, in his paper “What is ‘Chernobyl Syndrome?’ The Use of Radiophobia in
Nuclear Communications” (Novikau 2017), investigates the phenomenon of “radiophobia/
nuclear phobia.” He emphasizes that the usage of terms “radiophobia,” “radiation phobia
syndrome,” “survivor syndrome,” and “Chernobyl syndrome” are common to describe
mental reactions of the population affected by a nuclear plant explosion. He emphasizes the
fact that in contrast to fears, which is a rational response to an imagined or actual threat,
phobia is “a special form of fear, which is out of proportion to the demands of the situation,
cannot be explained or reasoned away by the afflicted, is beyond voluntary control, and leads
to avoidance of the feared situation” (Berman and Wandersman 1990: 85). In this concern he
stresses that after the Chernobyl explosion, the term “radiophobia” was commonly used as a
tool to avoid any questions about the health effects of the Chernobyl explosion: any
complaints and concerns about the health effects of radiation were regarded as “radiophobia”
(Novikau 2017: 804).
I support his statement that “Rejection of nuclear power or ‘overestimation’ of effects of
radiation by public cannot be legitimately characterized as ‘irrational.’” However, mental
effects in the aftermath of nuclear disasters are detectable mainly at a subclinical level.
Increased rates of mental disorders have been usually observed only among high-risk groups,
such as evacuees and mothers with young children. At the same time, the psychological
effects of Chernobyl are not limited to mental health outcomes. It also has implications for

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 The “Chernobyl Syndrome” in U.S. nuclear fiction

other areas of subjective health and health-related behavior, such as reproductive health,
medical service utilization, and willingness to heed safety advice from the authorities
(Havenaar and Bromet 2005: 182).
Nuclear phobia as a phobic thinking about nuclear energy and nuclear power is under
discussion in works by DuPont (1982), Makhijani and Hu (2000), Murray and Holbert
(2001), Alonso (2012), and Bauer (2014). Thus, nuclear phobia as a social phenomenon
includes irrational fear of radiation, caused by the lack of information, by ignorance of nuclear
energy studies, uncertainty, and anger, which stemmed from a traumatic experience after a
nuclear explosion.

Nuclear phobia in American nuclear fiction about the

Chernobyl disaster
The current analysis is focused on the most representative novels about the Chernobyl
explosion in North American nuclear fiction: Frederik Pohl’s Chernobyl (1988), Andrea
White’s Radiant Girl (2008), and Orest Stelmach’s The Boy from Reactor 4 (2013).
All these novels tend to depict Ukraine as a country in the Eastern part of Europe, which
has long been famous for its magnificent landscapes, huge crops, and beautiful gardens and
meadows. Here is an example from Radiant Girl:
When the lane dead-ended into the woods, I started down a dirt trail made by the
elk and deer. Mama and I used these trails on our hunts for mushrooms and berries,
and Papa and I followed them on our weekend hunting and fishing trips. . .. We
counted it an unlucky Sunday when we didn’t have boar, deer, rabbit, or trout for
dinner along with seasonal gifts from the forest like mushrooms, wild strawberries
and dandelions.
(White 2008: 18)
And from Chernobyl:
We have farms in the Ukraine! We grow food, the best in the world
(Pohl 1988: 117)
But one April night in 1986, a part of this land changed forever. Since then this area has been
called the Zone—a scalded, contaminated, bad for living area:
[T]he entire land of the Ukraine has been poisoned.
(Pohl 1988: 137)
The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has become not only a nuclear explosion
landmarked as a new reference point in the history of nuclear energy production, but also a great
example to show the dangers uncontrolled nuclear energy can result in. The nuclear explosion
launched a new phenomenon and new values in the “nature–science–human” relation scheme.
It is the fiction about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion that contributed to shaping a
phenomenon of “nuclear phobia” as a component of nuclear culture, and as a part of the
human environmental memory.
The novels under study here depict the Chernobyl explosion and its aftermath which gave
rise to overwhelming fear (“here is a limit to grief, but no limit to fear” (Stelmach 2013:
133)) of soon-to-be horrible events (“Her subconscious feared any one of them might be the
phone call she was waiting for” (Stelmach 2013: 34)) and inevitable death, caused by radiation
(“He was going to die and he did not fear that” (Pohl 1988: 133)).

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 Inna Sukhenko

Being written by U.S. writers, the novels under analysis here give a full range of
representation, how U.S. nuclear fiction about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion depicts
the characteristic components of nuclear phobia as a new phenomenon which further
will shape the Chernobyl Syndrome. Here are these components and some textual
examples:

1) The fear of radiation and mental disorders:

“Those people have radiophobia,” Papa said. “What’s radiophobia?” I asked. “The
fear of radiation sickness. We have an epidemic in this area.” I recognized the
special scorn in Papa’s voice that leaked out when he was referring to people who
weren’t as tough as he was.
(White 2008: 19)1
In my depressed state, I began to wonder if she was dead.
(White 2008: 72)
Part of health is mental toughness. I know I received a massive dose of radiation. I
have tried to act as if I didn’t. But I know . . . I do know that working at the station
is not completely safe.
(White 2008: 133)
2) The fear of coming health risks to children:
A guard held the door open, and we passed into a waiting room packed with men,
women and children of all ages. Now all the people looked healthy.
(White 2008: 72)
[T]he woman suddenly demanded, “Get off this elevator!” The man used his body
to block the elevator door from closing. Both of them waited, expecting us to leave.
“I’m sorry. What do you mean?” Mama asked. She had a country woman’s natural
grace and inability to grasp rudeness. “We don’t want to get sick. Get off,” the
woman ordered us.
(White 2008: 76)
Now I asked, “Can those people catch radiation sickness from us?”
(White 2008: 77)
3) The fear of uncertainty in terms of further actions:
I was puzzled, though not yet afraid.
(White 2008: 21);
. . .most frightening of all, the adults seemed confused.
(White 2008: 60)
I had the vague impression of frightened people and lines of metal buses shooting
off into the darkness. I was certain that I couldn’t return to my home. That world
would no longer exist.
(White 2008: 40)
Mama shrugged. “I don’t know whether we are still radioactive or not.”
(White 2008: 77)

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 The “Chernobyl Syndrome” in U.S. nuclear fiction

4) The fear of a next nuclear explosion:

“I do know that working at the station is not completely safe.” He sighed. “I even
know that it can happen again.”
(White 2008: 133)
5) The fear of curiosity (in terms of nuclear issues):
“Even I’ve been afraid of my own curiosity,” Papa managed.
(White 2008: 133)
Mama and I stepped into our creaky apartment elevator. Our arms loaded
down with groceries, we were returning home from the market. The occupants
of the elevator, a man smoking a carved pipe and a woman holding a mongrel
puppy, stared at us. Even their dog’s eyes bugged out with interest and
curiosity.
(White 2008: 76)
At this point, I had so many questions that I had lost the ability to ask even
a single one. Without a word, I grabbed Mama’s hand, and we followed the
crowd.
(White 2008: 72)
I am trying to assess the damage to our health. Our government still denies
everything.
(White 2008: 93)
6) The fear as a “mirrored memory” trauma (GULAG, the Second World War):
At the present time its image is still feared, but perhaps mostly as a looming presence
offstage, somewhat as lung cancer is feared by a heavy smoker who won’t quit
anyway. It is no longer feared in quite the same way as in Stalin times—it was
called the OGPU then, and later the NKVD—when it was feared as plague is
feared during an epidemic, when death and destruction strike often, ruthlessly and
seemingly at random.
(Pohl 1988: 90)
“You’ve got to leave, Babushka. This is a war,” the soldier said.
(White 2008: 89)
7) The fear of radiation, usually with political overtones, usually the fear of Cold
War consequences:
. . .a sudden nuclear attack from our enemies.
(Pohl 1988: 27)
Fallout! From the American testing nuclear bomb!!!
(Pohl 1988: 55)
“The United States was going on with testing wherever it chose.”
(Pohl 1988: 76)
The woman’s eyes widened with curiosity. “America. When I was a child, we used
to fear this place, America.”
(Stelmach 2013: 189)

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 Inna Sukhenko

I remember it all. Planes, helicopters—there was so much noise. Soldiers. I thought

the war’s begun. With the Chinese or the Americans.
(White 2008: 167)
“Not from America at all? Then from Israel” . . . That was astonishing; Israel and
the USSR had no diplomatic relations at all. . .. No Israeli citizen could possibly get
a visa to enter the Soviet Union.
(Pohl 1988: 115)

These writers of the three novels demonstrate that nuclear phobia is supported with a sudden
shift from total trust in their government by the Soviet people (who are grateful for having
this nuclear station nearby, who believe that the government will do their best to protect
those who suffered, because the explosion can be caused by a nuclear attack from the political
enemies—the US, China, Israel):
We were all deeply grateful to the government for selecting our area as the site
for the most up-to-date and modern power station that the Communist world had
ever constructed.
(White 2008: 22)
But just as Papa believed his beloved country was the greatest in the world, he
continued to insist that his government would protect him.
(White 2008: 133)
The shift exhibits a new total distrust in the Soviet government that kept the
accident secret and lied about the aftermath, which encouraged the phenomenon of
“glasnost” and further collapse of the Soviet Union and independence of Soviet space
countries:
It was clear that Papa and the government had both lied to me.
(White 2008: 108)
We cannot trust our government. We cannot trust our colleagues because they
work for the government.
(Stelmach 2013: 141)
For three whole days, the government had tried to keep the accident a secret from
the world.
(White 2008: 121)
The government herded us from our homes. . .. Like sheep. I don’t want to be
a sheep anymore.
(Stelmach 2013: 74)
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion resulted in undermining the social systems and
the traditional way of life—due to the fact that the majority of the residents of the
contaminated zone were forcefully displaced, which affected the existing family as well as
social structures. The lack of the government’s support in helping them to settle down in new
places and the poor quality of living standards, despite what had been promised and funded by
the government, contributed to an overwhelming disappointment and created a paradigm
shift from total trust to distrust.

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 The “Chernobyl Syndrome” in U.S. nuclear fiction

Here I should stress that all the novels under analysis (by Pohl, White, Stelmach) are
written by American writers. It is important to understand this because essentially all the
novels introduce a foreign (mainly, American) journalist who interviews people (survivors,
resettlers, and evacuees) in order to obtain the direct information about a nuclear explosion (a
TV producer from the US, a reporter from the Voice of America, a researcher from the
international health organization):
Dean Garfield . . . really is a highly successful television producer in America. . .. (Pohl
1988: 48) . . . was able to interview scores of people with direct knowledge of the
Chernobyl accident, journalists, eyewitnesses, firemen who fought to control the
damage, nuclear experts who were on the scene and many others (Pohl 1988: 168). It
is not exactly illegal to listen to the Voice of America and the other foreign broadcasts
beamed into the USSR, but it is not something most citizens want to advertise.
(Pohl 1988: 78)
“I am still working for an international health organization. We’re investigating
the disaster,” Uncle Victor said. “My wife stayed in Canada, but I’ll be here for
almost a year.” . . . A few minutes later, he returned, holding what looked like a
stack of papers. He pressed them into my arms. “Please bring these journals back.
A friend of mine translated them.” The first journal article was entitled Alas,
Chernobyl . . . I read much of the night.
(White 2008: 106)
“They would respect and admire an American newspaper reporter.” His eyes lit
up even more. “A reporter? From New York City?”
(Stelmach 2013: 123)
The reason for this is known (and clearly introduced by Stelmach in his novel): The people of
the Soviet Union have little trust in their government and prefer a foreigner:
“You know who’s the only person a Soviet Ukrainian trusts less than a
foreigner?” Anton glanced at her. “A Soviet fellow. You know which countrymen
he trusts the least?” “The government.”
(Stelmach 2013: 94)
As American writers, they tend to emphasize the role of the U.S. in helping the Soviet Union
after the Chernobyl disaster and in revealing the information kept secret:
His first appointment that day was to make another offer of American technical
assistance to the Soviet authorities at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy.
(Pohl 1988: 122)
[W]e now have a wonderful American doctor. . .. He is one of the good
Americans. . .. He has always been a friend to the Soviet Union.
(Pohl 1988: 95)
In her novel Andrea White uses real facts and narrates an event that she participated in—Bill
Clinton, the American President, shut down Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station—in order to
not only highlight the impetus of the Chernobyl disaster on the independence of Ukraine but
also stressing the role of the U.S. in the further nuclear energy policy of Ukraine.
Although at the time I didn’t realize this, the Soviet Union President Mikhail
Gorbachev had begun promoting “glasnost” or political openness throughout the

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 Inna Sukhenko

Soviet Union, and everywhere Ukrainians were debating the justice of Soviet
domination over our country. . .. A little over a year later—on August 24, 1991—
the Ukraine broke away from the Soviet Union. With hindsight, it seems apparent
that the government’s lies about the Chernobyl disaster played a key role in my
country’s independence. . .. On December 15, 2000, the President of the Ukraine,
Leonid Kuchma, shut down Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station forever. American
President Bill Clinton called this event, “a triumph for the common good.” He
added, “Slava Ukrayini, Glory to Ukraine. . ..” Papa died just two months later. He
was forty-two.
(White 2008: 177)
The American writers focus on the positive role of the United States in revealing the truth
about the Chernobyl disaster as the initial stage of “glasnost” and as a first step towards the road
to democracy, which can be easily explained within soft nuclear diplomacy, including debating
nuclear issues.
All these novels demonstrate the literary dimensions of the Chernobyl Sydrome with “nuclear
phobia” as its main component while stressing how the factor of emotional perception of “nuclear
energy” risks—how uncertainty, distrust, a lie, curiosity, misrepresented the risk communication
parameters and contributed to the formation of the Chernobyl Syndrome as a social phenomenon.

Conclusion
Studying the Chernobyl Syndrome within risk communication parameters in U.S. nuclear
fiction provides an opportunity for a precise reconsideration of emotional components of
“nuclear phobia,” represented in Chernobyl narrative studies. This aspect of research faces the
issues on the edge of humanities and sciences while regarding the Chernobyl explosion in the
perspective of social, political and ethical representations in nuclear fiction, which generally is
correlated with the acute issues of environmental humanities and literary energy studies.
Under such circumstances nuclear identity is studied in its relation to conceptions of
sustainable development, technology, energy humanities, nuclear narrative studies and in its
correlation to the energy distribution of environmental hazards.
The risk communication vision of how the Chernobyl disaster has been represented in
American nuclear fiction, specifically in the novels by Pohl, White, and Stelmach, demonstrates
how there is a sudden shift from trust, collective responsibility, and confidence to total distrust,
uncertainty, and despair, which changes not only the reception of “nuclear energy” (from “we
must be proud of working here [at the Chernobyl NPP]” to “I hate the station” (White 2008:
121)), but also emphasizes the political aspect of “literary Chernobyl” while stressing the
phenomenon of nuclear phobia and the lack of trust in the government, and a significant turn in
Ukrainian politics, facilitating a slow but steady change leaning toward democracy.
The focus on the emotional components of the Chernobyl Syndrome, represented at the levels
of the procedure, the message, and the effects of risk communication in the “post-nuclear
explosion” situation, contributes to the multidisciplinary debates on nuclear energy issues. This
allows the study of a historical event in close connection with the human, animal, and
technological studies in the context of contemporary eco-centered research, stressing the
need for an understanding of identity and the related issues concerning a real historical
event represented in fiction. Incorporating diverse ideas from environmental philosophy,
ethics, cultural studies, and literature under a single umbrella gives an opportunity not only
to reread the Chernobyl disaster and consider nuclear communication within environmental

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 The “Chernobyl Syndrome” in U.S. nuclear fiction

humanities and energy humanities, but also facilitates new debates about soft “nuclear
diplomacy” in the coming years.

Note
1 Author’s own emphasis added in bold, pp.180–184.

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 16
ART AS ECO-PROTEST AND
COMMUNICATION IN
TANURE OJAIDE’S SELECTED
POETRY
Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure

Since prehistory, literature and the environment have always shared a close correlation—
a continuum evident in the Medieval period, the Renaissance, the Romantics, and
African literatures over time. Consequently, contemporary writers have become increas-
ingly engaged with ecological destruction and the potential harm to human communities
because of such destruction. Modern Nigerian poetry focuses on discourses about the
environment and the fate of man in a modern, integrated world. The growing concern
with the human/industrial behavior is causing a major disruption of environmental
processes by creating hazards for wildlife and human beings in Nigeria. From this
vantage point, much can be learned about the poetry of mining, environmental
annihilation and cultural disruption by exploring contemporary Nigerian writings.
Nigerian poets share a common concern for the forms of environmental degradation
that result from mining activities, ranging from petroleum exploration and exploitation in
the Niger Delta and the quests for precious minerals on indigenous lands. Therefore,
literary works play vital roles in engaging with writings that could assist mankind to live
in harmony with the ecosystem.
A significant name in Nigerian literary studies is the Nigerian poet Tanure Ojaide. His
poetry raises discussions around existing issues such as the Niger Delta oil crisis, the widening
economic chasm between the rich and poor, environmental destruction, militarism and
political dissensions which keep unfolding in the Nigerian social space. He depicts the
extent to which the collaboration between multinational corporations and the ruling elites
have endangered the progress of the Niger Delta and Nigeria at large. Lamenting the socio-
ecological disorder in the Niger Delta region, G.G. Dara (2009) declares that:
the sinew of Ojaide’s poetry harps on the urgency of Ojaide’s art of resistance. The
poetry of Tanure Ojaide fits into the tradition of outrage against political injustice,
exploitation and environmental disasters. His poems are verbal missile directed at
political oppressors whose rules have brought misery and distress to the region.
(12)

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 Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure

Contemporary Nigerian poetry collections, therefore, act as a medium of eco-communication,

resistance to globalization, simultaneously addressing issues of industrialization on one hand that
is geared towards a people-centered advancement and the environment on the other.
On this conceptual sphere, “art,” the vehicle for the expression of thoughts, can shape the
way individuals perceive issues that take place within society. It can reflect beauty as well as
the despotic. Art, a product of the creative impulse, finds expression through a variety of
materials such as the literary, the performative, and the plastic arts. The literary arts include
novels and poems, the performative arts include dance, drama and music, while the visual arts
include painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, decorative arts, crafts and other visual
works. These art forms are interconnected in that they are mediums by which one informs,
persuades, educates and gives expression to what is in the soul. Therefore, the use of art to
address socio-economic, political and environmental concerns is not new. Alex Potts (2015)
asserts that art as protest can take two different forms:
It can be an intervention which makes an explicitly political statement. As such it
needs to be immediately recognized by its audience as registering opposition to
some aspect of the dominant social and political order and as offering a provocation
to its ideas and attitudes. The other form of art as protest operates on a less
immediate, more long-term basis. It can be thought of as critique rather than
intervention. It provokes reflection on the politics inherent in the situation or
material it presents without subsuming this politics within some single, clearly
articulated political statement. Such art may often put a viewer in mind of under-
lying attitudes, beliefs, and general corruption of values—the ideology—which
sustain the current state of society. . ..
(39)
In other words, art as a means of protest and communication could be used as a canvas of
cultural resistance. History has witnessed the wide use of arts, literature and other practices to
challenge and resist unjust oppressive systems or power holders within the context of non-
violent actions, campaigns and movements. Udenta Udenta (1993), in Revolutionary Aesthetics
and the African Literary Process, puts it that art as a force of production exists only in the context
of the negation of existing contradictory reality of class society by rising above its impedi-
ments, by going beyond its ideology and developing a system, qualitatively new, that
challenges it (55).
Along these lines, I wish to argue that the term “eco-communication” simply means
communication about environmental affairs. It captures how individuals and societies dis-
seminate messages about the environment. This includes everyone from the most passionate
environmental advocates, to the fiercest opponents of ecological protections. Therefore,
environmental communication influences understanding the ecological problems, sensitivity
to ecological laws, appreciation of environmental ethics, and the people and organizations
involved (https://theieca.org). In this regard, the Austrian Communist Ernst Fischer (1924)
comments that “in a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless
it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And
help to change it” (5). He claims that art is not an optional form of entertainment, a pleasant
luxury of civilized life, but an essential or constitutive part of human consciousness and social
being. Subsequently, art is, in a way, predisposed to challenge the existing order that exploits
the unprivileged few and causes destruction of the earth which is tantamount to the
destruction of human existence. Thus, the writer/artist becomes a “righter of wrongs, a
savior from ogres, a defender of truth in a world in which falsehood threatens to overwhelm

188
 Art as eco-protest and communication

the truth” (Ojaide 2012: 76). The artist functions as the recorder of the mores and experience
of society, and at the same time the voice and vision of his time. Literature, a form of art that
Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (1978) portrays in Homecoming “does not grow in a vacuum, it is given
impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in
a particular society” (32). In other words, the artist has the power to communicate and affect
things in a way which could change people and communities by raising questions and
awareness about the universe, natural resource exploitation and imaginative manifestations in
a diverse cultural ambience.
Poetry, the focal point of this analysis, creates mental images, shares experiences, passion
and observations through words. “Poetry is a social form whose immediacy is pressed into the
urgent service of societal well-being and transformation” (Fasan 2012: 155). Just like the
martyred Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, Tanure Ojaide, Nnimmo Bassey,
Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, Remi Raji, Ogaga Ifowodo, and others are vibrant in raising
consciousness through the power of language. They are committed to the affairs of the Niger
Delta region and Nigeria at large. To validate this, a growing number of artists are creating
ecologically sound art intended to restore to health the natural environment and proffer
solutions to the many crises facing the ecosystem. Don Krug and Jennifer Siegenthaler (2006)
affirm that:
artists have become involved in ecological actions through their art. Making art
about ecological issues is political in the sense that artists offer different and some-
times conflicting perspectives on the significance of sustainable ways of living . . . if
land is to be used as a site, and earth as a media, artists must express their ability to
co-exist with nature and rehabilitate it in its current state of crisis.
(greenmuseum.org)
Barrett and Worden (2014) in Oil Culture write that:
since oil’s nineteenth-century rediscovery, there has existed a steady chorus of
protest and lamentations aimed at the petroleum industry, a chorus sounded in
reformist treatises, muckraking investigative reports, conservationist essays, environ-
mentalist manifestos, political protests, theoretical critiques and other cultural texts
that have attempted to check the onrush of oil.
(xxv)
The poet Ojaide recognizes the consequences of modern technological development,
exploitation of natural resources, displacement, and sense of place as they utilize their creative
energies to illuminate real-life challenges that affect marginalized minorities and landscape.
Art as a medium of eco-protest and communication in Daydream of Ants and Delta Blues
and Home Songs contest the extent to which the Niger Delta’s rich environment is afflicted by
decades of oil exploration and exploitation in the wake of increasing environmental crisis.
Ojaide presents the experiences of the marginalized Niger Delta region as manifestations of
dehumanization of the weak by Nigerian rulers in conjunction with multinational oil
companies for selfish interests. In doing so, Ojaide illustrates that oil exploration, marketing
and the results thereof do not constitute development. This is because as oil exploration
increases, marginalization of the people deepens. Cyril Obi and Siri Aas Rustad (qtd in
Caminero-Santangelo 2017: 363) note that the result has been an escalation of armed
violence: rebel groups have proliferated and turned to kidnapping of oil workers and
sabotaging installations; criminal gangs and ethnic militias fight for control of the oil-
bunkering trade and for protection money from oil companies and the Nigerian military.

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Corroborating this, Michael Watts (2007) notes in “Sweet and Sour” that “gas flaring and oil
spills have poisoned the air, water, and land and resulted in the loss of traditional livelihoods,
food sources, and potable water, as well as catastrophic health problems.” Since the 1990s,
socio-ecological devastation and state- and industry-sponsored terror have fueled “a gigantic
reservoir of anger and dissent” (39). Taken together, the subsequent sections validate the
extent to which Nigerian poetry is a veritable instrument of eco-protest and communication
that could be used to challenge power, thereby opposing forms of repression, sidelining and
pauperization prevalent in the Niger Delta region.

Postcolonial ecocriticism and technological advancement in Daydream

of Ants and Other Poems
This chapter investigates postcolonial ecocritical communication evident in Ojaide’s Daydream
of Ants and Other Poems, in contrast to the technological development that keeps altering the
Nigerian eco-space. Daydream of Ants and Other Poems affirms Ojaide’s sense of place to his
Urhobo homeland in the Niger Delta region and the disparaging impact of modern
technological progress on it. Tonukari Ochuko (2016) remarks that the Urhobo, birthplace
of Tanure Ojaide, considers “the land and its sacred grooves . . . represent natural enigma
where many things happened as constituents of an overall cosmic order” (waado.org). The
Urhobo people’s perception of place, notion of the unity of life with the visible, tangible
realm of the living and the invisible realm of the spirits and ancestors that influence human
undertakings affirm their reverence of the material world.
Along these lines, a postcolonial ecocritical framework is important in understanding the
ways that descriptions of the material world (nature) are mediated by culture and society.
O’Brien and Vital suggest that “post-colonial eco-critics often explore how discourses of
nature and the environment have been shaped by the history of empire” (qtd. In DeLoughrey
and Handley 2011: 10). For Donelle N. Dreese (2002),
Postcolonial ecocriticism as a way of thinking illuminates how elite-driven processes
like (neo)colonialism, capitalism, international development and globalization are
connected to the spaces in which people live and act, while at the same time
recognizing that the reclamation of space, land and resources is a key part of the
process of peoples’ liberation. It consciously understands “spaces” as broadly as
possible, considering the physical and metaphysical spaces with which humans
interact.
(19)
In a practical sense, postcolonial ecocriticism explores the relationship between contemporary
environmental crises and society by offering diverse ways of how to approach harmony of
humans and nature locally, nationally and globally. For many writers from the developing
world, writing/communicating about their lived environments is a way to re-inhabit a
landscape, rekindle their sense of place or space that is intrinsic to their philosophies of
being in the world to give irrefutable meaning to places of deep significance.
Therefore, prior to colonial conquest and its resultant consequences, the Niger Delta land
flourished in rich biological diversity. The forests belong to the tropical evergreen, moist
landscape. The waters support rich fisheries and cultivation of bewildering variety of
cultivated crops such as cassava, plantain, okra, palm tree, cocoyam and yam found all over
the neighborhood and protected by shifting cultivation and religious sanctions (waado.org).
Ezeoechi Nwagbara (2012) writes that “to remake the Delta region environmentally . . .

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sustainable, Ojaide’s poetry advances the possibility through . . . resistance, a kind of dis-
sidence poetry couched in Ecocriticism that negates ecological imperialism, a capitalist
practice that destroys the Niger Delta environment” (19). Like every other literary medium,
poetry awakens people’s perception concerning their realities and “Literature plays a sig-
nificant role in . . . articulating a poetry of place in the alienating wake of globalization”
(Deloughrey and Handley 2011: 15).
Tanure Ojaide’s Daydream of Ants and Other Poems is partitioned into sections I, II, III, and
IV, respectively. However, the relevant poems that fit into this investigation will be analyzed.
From the title of the poetry collection, the words “Ants” and “Daydream” are cynical images
which the poet employs to communicate the uneasiness in the Nigerian society with an aim
of ridiculing human irrationality for technological advancement, petroleum resource explora-
tion and their corollaries. For instance, in the poem “Technology” the poet condemns the
havoc of technological advancement which continues to modify the Nigerian environment.
The lines, “the ban on trespassing collapsed/the world swamped with hostility. . .” (13),
foreground the extent to which globalization has opened trade across continents alongside its
disquiets. The poem “Technology” provides a dark parody of the exploitative practices by
industrialists on the Nigerian ecosystem. Ojaide’s thematic preoccupation with technology
deeply contrasts concerns that mainly emphasize the negative influence of oil exploration.
Ojaide’s vivid images of the dispossessed Nigerian communities struggling for survival in the
encompassment of techno-capitalism is portrayed:

This started cold-headed strategies: . . .

The bush-rat dug a dungeon
Of infinite outlets. . .
ants raised a hill
to cover their habitat of holes
out for a sliding adversary. . .
the eagle cast an evil spell
over the ostrich
to have birds that couldn’t fly
the hawk started endless war
against the tribe of chicks. . .
You can see what we were born into!
(13)

The lines in the stanza are so striking such that they become imageries that allow the readers
to visualize what the persona is saying. The lines make apparent that the crisis confronting
mankind is intimately linked to the perception of nature’s assets as resources to be exploited.
The poet employs his poetry to indict Nigerian leaders and their cohorts as liable for the
destruction of the Nigerian ecosystem in: “bush-rat dug a dungeon/of infinite outlets . . . ants
raised a hill/to cover their habitats of holes? The eagle cast an evil spell . . . to have birds that
couldn’t fly. . ..” As well, the images “bush-rat” and “ants” are symbols of plunder—one
operating from outside and the other from within. This conveys an overall representation of
mistreatment to which Nigerian environment is cramped. The poet mentions further:

. . .and opened the trade

for masquerades to market height
in their sleights,

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 Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure

didn’t I in godly deference

want to scrape the sky
and push back my small horizon?
(13–14)

From a satirical perspective, the poet conveys ways in which Nigerian political elites in
partnership with transnational corporations who, as “masquerades” and agents of global free
trade, despoil the Nigerian natural environment to suit their insatiability as they: “opened the
trade/for masquerades to market height/in their sleights. . .. The poet laments they . . . want
to scrape the sky and push back my small horizon?” This suggests the enormity to which
individuals can become manipulative in exploiting nature’s resources, thereby underpinning
the environmental justice principle, which “opposes the destructive operations of multi-
national corporations” (Naguib 2007: 245–247). Like Ojaide’s work under study, Alu Nester
(2008) mentions that the Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare’s Eye of the Earth is one of the fiercest
indictments of modern economic culture of the people and alien destructive forces. It takes a
pictorial account of aggression “on man and the earth” (70). Uzoechi Nwagbara in “Nature
in the Balance: The Commodification of the Environment” puts it that Eye of the Earth is
devoted to reclaiming the earth that has been made prostrate by capitalist practices in the
quest for alternative order for better leadership (14); hence, Osundare cautions in the poem
“The Rocks Rose to Meet Me”: “. . .the gold let us dig/not for the gilded craniums/of
hollow chieftains (. . .Who deem this earth their sprawling throne) . . .” (14).
Similarly, in “Compound Blues,” Ojaide’s opposition against modern expansion demon-
strates that the reverence for the Nigerian environment has waned. Hence, to change this
state of things, the poet says: “whenever a wall rises in my front/I crave to tear it down/And
ride through the rubble/To see what it used to hide. . .” (10). The “wall” denotes forms of
barrier and disconnection that arise from modern developments. This “wall” breeds a
demarcation between the “have” and the “have not” and alienates man from nature. Using
a strong sense of repulsion for alteration of values, the poet declares: “Whenever a wall rises
in my front/I crave to tear it down. . ..” This is because the whole idea of development
generates waves of challenges for capitalist economies. The lines criticize the economic and
social system working the environment to death, imprisoning it, and erecting a wall of
demarcation between man and his natural world. The poet laments the realities of Nigeria’s
socio-political and environmental anguish as he rhetorically questions “. . .how could we/
have arrived here/violating the sovereignty/of quiet ones?” It is evident that Nigeria’s
ecological problems are the outcome of the structures of hegemony and elitism geared to
exploit the common people and the natural world. They accumulate and control resources by
appropriating the land. The poet interrogates the logic that leads inevitably to desecrated
lands, murdered oceans, demolished mountains, damned rivers and poisoned air space as he
articulates: “how could we/have arrived here/without breaking through mountains?”
The title poem “The Daydream of Ants” bemoans how global schemers and conspirators
assert:

We are in league with powers

To wreck one vision
With lust for more visions
To refashion a proud world
With the same hands that raise a storm of dust. . ..
(15)

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The poet denounces the industrialists and their cohorts who plot to pillage Nigeria’s natural
resources for profit, hence “. . .wreck one vision for lust for more visions. . ..” On the
contrary, the poet suggests a cordial relationship with the ecosystem in opposition to the
inclination for modern advancement. Sickened by their persistent exploitation, the poet
decries how: “He has torn apart the human suit/he was born with for good/now an elephant
he charges/and tramples the earth/everything yields to his boots” (16). The lines foreground
that industrial globalization depicted in the likeness of “elephant” and “boots” are representa-
tions of misuse and abuse crushing down the Nigerian landscape. By conveying conditions of
the Nigerian natural world, Ojaide directs humans to understand their place in the world and
create awareness about the preservation of the Nigerian environment, thus making account-
ability of the environment an ethical point of reference.
Likewise, the poem “A T & P, Sapele” conveys the numerous problems associated with
modern civilization since the period of colonial conquest—typified by destruction of
indigenous cultural and ecological systems. The poet presents an appalling picture of
environmental dismantling of the people’s land. The poet interweaves scenic memories of
the past frustrated with total annihilation in: “A big clearing welcomed me/No longer the
unending sheet of green” illustrate that there is an interconnection in the web of things and
the destruction of one affects the other. The land, the trees, people are of one entity the poet
grieves: “the waterfront taken over/by phalanges of water hyacinth. . .” (31). By reflecting
postcolonial environmental concerns, Ojaide advocates a pragmatic approach towards a deep
respect for the natural world by maintaining ecological balance. He believes that industrial
civilization, technological expansion and their corollary are fundamentally unsustainable, and
thus must be dismantled to secure a livable future for all species.
In “Steel of Dominion,” just as the title designates, the poem bemoans the destructive
activities of notable individuals against the Nigerian landscape such that “. . .if the mountain was
not to our taste/we blew it to the shape of our heart. . .” (32). The poet applies this poem to
sensitize humans of their place on the planet and to avert catastrophic fates against other
organisms in their bid to manipulate the environment. This corroborates Scott Russell Sanders’
(1996) claim that: “once a forest is cut down, or a stream is filled with waste, or a wildlife refuge
is opened up for drilling, it is virtually impossible to undo the damage. . .” (182). In view of this,
Jensen (2011) insists that “destruction is not merely a byproduct but, a requirement of
civilization. The drive to create more delusional civilized wealth requires active destruction of
the land base. . .” (13). The pursuit for wealth, profit and technological growth has led to
unprecedented theft and rape of natural resources in Nigeria, thus causing: “seismic motions
under lake/emitted highly gaseous poisons/from the earth’s underbelly. . .” (42–45).
From postcolonial ecocritical evaluation which highlights socio-political and economic
inequality because of the ruling elites and multinational corporations’ penchant for land and
natural resource grab, the poet Ojaide, like many postcolonial ecocritics, disseminates through
poetry that profit and technological-driven inclinations are at the detriment of the existence of
the dispossessed people. Edward Said (1993) describes the impact of technological expansion
as never ending, as a huge number of plants, animals and crops . . . gradually turned
the colony into a new place complete with new disease, environmental imbalance
and traumatic dislocations for the overpowered natives—and connects, inextricably
this geographical violence to the politics of empire: the culmination of this process is
imperialism which dominates, classifies and universally commodifies all space under
the aegis of the metropolitan center.
(271–272)

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Huggan and Tiffin (2010) affirm that “postcolonial ecocriticism preserves the aesthetic
function of the literary text while drawing attention to its social and political usefulness, its
capacity to set our symbolic guidelines for the material transformation of the world” (14).
Ojaide in “Belated advice” cautions: “Yield to no one. . ./to behead the forest/from the soil/
minerals for explosives/to tear the earth to pieces. . .” (46). These lines affirm the environ-
mental justice concerns for the sensitization and “education of present future generations
which emphasizes social and environmental issues based on experience and an appreciation of
our diverse cultural perspectives” (Naguib 2007: 245–247).
Daydream of Ants and Other Poems validates that under postcolonial dispossession the
subjugated people are often confronted with oppressive social issues such as poverty,
disillusionment, underdevelopment and natural resource exploitation which leads to disen-
gagement between humans and the physical world. Therefore, the Nigerian ecosystem and its
attendant concerns have taken a prominent place in postcolonial discourse and it is obvious
that there is a correlation between the treatment of flora, fauna and the treatment of
dominated and oppressed people. In this regard, the next section investigates Tanure Ojaide’s
Delta Blues and Home Songs to further demonstrate the poet’s responses to the concern of
resource exploitation and the plight of the brutalized inhabitants of the Niger Delta region.

Oil exploitation and the postcolonial condition in Delta Blues and Home
Songs
Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Home Songs is a collection of 51 poems and is divided into
two sections. The first section, Delta Blues, is in honor of Ken Saro-Wiwa, while the second
section, Home Songs, is in honor of Ezekiel Opkan. The individual poems in the collection
vary, however; all of them represent an encounter that stems from the poet Ojaide’s sense of
place, displacement, oil exploration, oil exploitation, underdevelopment and ecological
degradation in his delta landscape. Thoreau avers that
writers who speak a word for nature attempt to increase our feel for . . . places
previously unknown and places known but never so deeply felt, by defamiliarizing
the familiar, teaching us to see things new, and inviting us to contemplate the
individual fact in relation to whatever truth that seems to flower from it.
(Adamson 2001: 71)
This is because these threatened landscapes and spaces are symptomatic of a people’s identity,
values and way of life.
Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Home Songs (1998) rummages into the socio-political and
environmental happenings that have wielded a compelling influence over the Niger Delta
people and the world at large to unfold sinister vistas which poetry illuminates. The poet
captures the horrendous experiences of the Nigerian people as it relates to environmental
vistas of contemporary Nigeria. Subsequently, this section utilizes postcolonial ecocritical
concepts by which the ambiguous legacies of development, the problem of the subaltern
(including non-human) agency determines the scope of postcolonial and eco-imagination,
and the necessary tension that follows. The concept of postcolonial condition captures all the
values affected by imperialism and its discontent from the period of colonization to the
present. This is because there is a connection of preoccupations throughout the historical
process initiated by European onslaught, the overbearing African leadership that followed and
the resultant outcome—pollution, damage to land, sacred groves and loss of livelihood for the
native inhabitants who have lived and used the land for generations. Ojaide facilitates

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reverence for the Nigerian landscape, particularly the Niger Delta enclave, by taking up
concerns regarding environmental annihilation masterminded by industrialists over time. He
depicts poetry in which themes of oil exploitation, sense of place, displacement, poverty,
disillusionment, and environmental crisis loom large. A postcolonial ecocritical reading of
Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Home Songs is feasible because of the poet’s consistence with
environmentalism of the Niger Delta region.
In analyzing the title poem “Delta Blues,” Ojaide shows a profound sense of physical and
spiritual connection to the place of his birth; hence, he declares:

This share of paradise, the delta of my birth,

Reels from an immeasurable wound.
Barrels of alchemical draughts flow. . .
The inheritance I sat on for centuries.
Now crushes my body and soul. . ..
(21)

The above stanza demonstrates that human excesses and socio-environmental injustices have
played an active role in modifying the Niger Delta environment, as the poet recalls in a
mournful tone “barrels of alchemical draughts flow/from this hurt to the unquestioning
world. . .” (21). The poet’s search into Nigeria’s environmental ruin is a prelude into the
future that requires intervention, a future that has been truncated by years of unparalleled oil
exploration and exploitation. This paralysis that now engulfs the land of his birth is the poet’s
antagonism as he bemoans:

Masked in barrels of oil-

I stew in the womb of fortune.
I live in the deathbed
Prepared by a cabal of brokers
Breaking the peace of centuries
and tainting not only a thousand rivers. . ..
(21–22)

The above lines are words of dissent against the Nigerian rulers and cohorts who indulge in
nefarious acts to propagate their exploitative undertakings on the Nigerian landscape. Multi-
national corporations prop up dictatorial trails by brutally manipulating the land and its
resources for capital. Thus: “breaking the peace of centuries/my life blood from the
beginning/. . .scorching their sacred soil. . ./the animals grope in the burning bush.” Ojaide
does not only relate the memories of yester years; he recalls the desolation that has become
the norm in his home land, all for “barrels of oil.”
Beyond expression of grief for the annihilation of biodiversity in his native land, the poet
Ojaide reminiscences the brutal killing of the eight Ogoni men and Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose
deaths signify the collective tragedy and political struggle of the Niger Delta people in the
dilemma of environmental devastation. Ojaide reiterates this horrifying loss in the poem
“Elegy for nine warriors”: “Those I remember in my song/will outlive this ghoulish season/
. . . I hear voices stifled by the hangman” (25).
In a defiant manner, Ojaide calls to mind the martyred fighters who stood against the
exploitation and annihilation of the land and were silenced by the brutal leadership of a
onetime Nigerian head. This misdeed remains alive in the collective memory of the poet and

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people. Ken Saro-Wiwa once emphasized how a close relationship between the Nigerian
state and Shell-BP enabled the company to appropriate land for little or no compensation and
to avoid regulation, just as it had with the blessing of the British colonial government. Saro-
Wiwa foregrounded the damage done to the Niger Delta’s ecosystems and to the health and
livelihoods of the Ogoni by the flaring of gas and oil spills, and the lack of any benefit to
them from oil revenue, for example, “functional hospitals and schools . . . steady electricity,
and even running water” (qtd in Caminero-Santangelo 2017: 364–365).
In “When green was the lingua franca,” the poet mourns the effects of capitalist and
industrialist sprawl on the land, animals and people of the rich Niger Delta. The poet Ojaide
often takes a journey back to his childhood memories. Ojaide realistically demonstrates a
strong attachment to his childhood connection to the land, which describes the glaring
difference between the past and present state of things, as he recounts:

My childhood stretched
One unbroken park
Teeming with life.
In the forest green was
The lingua franca
With many dialects. . .
(12–13)

The lines above capture the agrarian environment and biodiversity that the poet once knew
and for which the Niger Delta is celebrated. Using outrage through sharp hints, Ojaide
continues to lament the state of things; thus:

Then Shell broke the bond

With quakes and a hell
of flakes. Stoking a hearth
under God’s very behind!. . .

I see victims of arson

Wherever my restless soles
Take me to bear witness. . .
Wiped out by prospectors-
So many trees beheaded
And streams mortally poisoned
In the name of jobs and wealth!
(13)

The notions of exploration, exploitation, destruction and repression are employed by the poet
in words such as “wiped out,” “beheaded,” “restless soles,” “mortally poisoned,” and
“victims of arson” to portray the havoc meted on the delta landscape by the ruling class and
multinational companies “in the name of jobs and wealth.”
Postcolonial ecocritics maintain that technological “progress” has been purchased at the
detriment of nature. Such consequences are consistent with Western philosophical and
religious traditions that privilege “man” in comparison with lowly “nature.” Thus, post-
colonial ecocriticism appraises issues of power, exploitation, alienation, economics, politics,
and culture and how these elements function in relation to postcolonial hegemony. The poet

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 Art as eco-protest and communication

utilizes his craft to orchestrate the disequilibrium as he strives to respond to the persistent
ecological calamity. The poet is of the opinion that, the more repressive a situation, the more
urgent the communicative purpose of the poet to assuage it. Hence, he communicates: “let
me be the perennial river/that will be swallowed by the sea/but will continue to swagger. . .”
(68).
It is depressing that Nigerian political rulers and cohorts are bequeathing an environment
that is completely eroded, communities whose shorelines have been washed away due to the
high volume of deep-sea exploration and exploitation activities. Once hilly and highland
environments have been reduced to below sea level; navigable creeks which once supported
socio-economic activities among local dwellers have been silted with dredge dump. This has
brought forth various militant groups in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria who claim to be
against every form of oppression of the environment, which has impoverished the region and
its people. They engage in conflicts by actions such as sabotage, hostage-taking and property
destruction to have a greater share of Nigeria’s oil revenue. Etenga (1997) maintains that:
the specific, highly exploitative and grossly inequitable endowment/ownership-
exchange entitlements relations between the Nigerian state and the oil-bearing com-
munities, explains why the enormous oil wealth generated is scarcely reflected in the
living standard and life chances of the peasant inhabitants of the oil-bearing enclave.
(21)
Against this circumstance, Ojaide’s poetry finds ample expression in employing poetry as a medium
of persuasion which culminates in environmentalism against global commercialism. He states:
my view is to touch people’s mind about what is happening in the Niger Delta
through imaginative reconstruction of episodes, events and situations. And these
issues should draw sensitivity to idea about the environment and society which
concerns everybody. I am doing it from a different perspective which I think is very
effective. I am fighting this battle from an intellectual, imaginative, and emotional
level, from a level that people will be more sensitive to what is happening and that
has nothing to do with violence and the politics of it.
(Onyerionwu 2012: 326)
Ojaide’s works are veritable gadgets to winnow out the disquiet enshrined in resource
accumulation so that socio-ecological equilibrium may hold sway in the Nigerian
landscape.
Taken together, Tanure Ojaide’s Daydream of Ants and Other Poems and Delta Blues and
Home Songs substantiate that Nigerian rulers in partnership with multinational corporations
undermine the Nigerian ecological space by over-exploiting natural resources for power,
wealth and profit. From a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, Ojaide’s works of study
underscore valuable ways of positing resistance to myriad forms of human and ecological
exploitation while illustrating parameters for the material reformation of the ecosphere.
Tanure Ojaide’s poetry as a medium of eco-protest and communication conveys conditions
that reshape and damage all kinds of bodies, human and non-human, along with the
connection that individuals should have towards the natural world. The poet critically
opposes the destruction of Nigeria’s ecosystem and portrays its crisis as a manifestation of
man’s insatiable desire, greed and the general human condition. The study therefore
illuminates that environmental representations in Ojaide’s selected works convey the need
for sustainable connection between man and other life forms.

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 Joyce Onoromhenre Agofure

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 17
NATURE WRITING IN THE
ANTHROPOCENE
Christian Hummelsund Voie

For a significant part of the past two centuries, one of the principal modes of communicating
environmental ideas to mass audiences in many countries throughout the world has been
literature. In America, for much of that time, the most recognizable, most popular, and most
prolific form of environmental literature was the nonfiction essay genre that we now refer to
as “nature writing.” Through nature writing, prominent voices in environmental thought
such as Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Mary
Hunter Austin, Gene Stratton-Porter, Henry Beston, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Wendell
Berry, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and Bill
McKibben have been able to communicate their ideas and environmental concerns to
receptive audiences that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. American
readers, in particular, seem to have an insatiable appetite for learning about remote locations
with wild and charismatic creatures, but, more specifically, they seem hungry for a deeper
understanding of the world they live in. This is more than evident, because the genre they
engage with is no simple adventure fare, but challenging reading. More often than not, nature
writers have delivered detailed firsthand observations, accompanied by thoughts on science,
religion, spirituality, philosophy, history, art, literature, culture, politics, and society, rendered
into its own form of art through the lyrical prose of some of the nation’s sharpest
environmental thinkers. The genre, throughout its history, has made a multipronged project
out of exploring a subject as complex as nature, no less, in a way that readers eagerly
followed. So in the present era of unprecedented environmental and societal urgency, a time
that some now refer to as the Anthropocene, the ever-adapting genre of nature writing
should be recognized as a form of environmental communication with the multidisciplinary
depth, factuality, elasticity, range, diversity, and readership to address the particularities,
complexities, and urgencies of our turbulent times.
Paradoxically, however, although going through one of the most important and produc-
tive phases in its history, nature writing does not always receive significant academic interest
as a form of relevant environmental communication. Considering the vital role the genre has
played in shaping modern environmental thought, it seems both predictable and logical that
academic fields of inquiry into literature, culture, and the environment, such as ecocriticism
and the environmental humanities, would acknowledge that their earliest forms of commu-
nication centered partly on the genre of nature writing. Naturally, this focus was later

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expanded to include a wide range of cultural phenomena in their intra-actions with the
environment, in what Timothy Clark in The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the
Environment (2011) refers to as a movement “beyond nature writing” (87). This movement
“beyond nature writing” is now central to how scholars historicize ecocriticism and the
environmental humanities. It is portrayed as a pivotal development—a minor renaissance for
the field—whenever scholars aim to present a short history of either the environmental
humanities or ecocriticism. In “The Emergence of the Environmental Humanities” (2017),
for example, Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye stress the importance of scholars that
“critiqued the limited focus of earlier environmental histories and the literary canon of ‘nature
writing’” (4). The wording of this statement is representative of recent critiques of nature
writing in the way that it, although making a relevant case, also connects nature writing to
the “limited focus” that had to be left behind.
Led by the publication of anthologies such as Karla M. Armbruster and Kathleen R.
Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001), the movement
beyond nature writing initiated a productive and necessary expansion of ecocriticism and the
environmental humanities. However, the movement beyond nature writing also invited
reductive rhetoric against the genre that would establish dismissive attitudes among ecocritics
regarding nature writing, as exemplified by Gabriel Egan’s (2006) exhortation to “retreat
from the blind alley of treating ecocriticism as the study of nature writing” (45). In a typical
line of argument that targets both nature writing and scholars of nature writing, Clark suggests
that in the complicated environmental contexts of the present “critics concerned with the US
wilderness tradition have sometimes come to look like defenders of outdoor leisure pursuits”
(87). Nature writing, in Clark’s line of argument, is equated with “[p]urist notions of the
environment as pristine wilderness,” and Clark cites an activist’s conclusion that “‘. . .the real
purist notion of environment—that it is just the natural world—just can’t work in today’s
world’” (88). The perception that nature writing is devoted to representations of nature that
“just can’t work in today’s world” is prevalent among certain circles of ecocritics and scholars
in the environmental humanities.
The marginalization of nature writing within contemporary ecocriticism and the environ-
mental humanities seems decidedly odd when one takes into consideration the justifications
ecocritics and environmental humanists tend to list for the relevance of their prospective
fields. In arguing for the environmental humanities, Emmett and Nye, for example, conclude
that “[t]he planetary crisis can best be addressed through an interdisciplinary approach to
environmental change that includes the humanities, the arts, and the sciences” (7–8). This
approach has always been central to nature writing. Who could argue that Thoreau’s Walden,
for example, does not draw on “the humanities, the arts, and the sciences”? As for being
mindful of environmental changes, Thoreau’s writings and journals were observant and
exacting enough in their approach to environmental change that scientists now use them as
reliable data points in their approach to climate change, as can be seen in Richard B.
Primack’s Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods (2014). Homing in on
what makes the environmental humanities especially important, Emmett and Nye argue that
the “humanistic disciplines can . . . discover ways to address the public more effectively” (8).
In their words, environmental problems “. . .demand broad thinking, teamwork across the
disciplines, and knowledge that is affective, or emotionally potent, in order to be effective, or
capable of mobilizing social adaptation” (8), and this they consider a task ideally suited for the
environmental humanities. But, clearly, I would argue, this is also a task suited for nature
writing. Anyone familiar with Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring and its legacy will be aware of the

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capacity of nature writers to convey knowledge that is “affective,” “emotionally potent”

enough to “be effective” and “capable of mobilizing social adaptation.”
It might seem puzzling that nature writing is a marginal concern to most scholars, when
the most significant justifications for the present and future role of the environmental
humanities read as if they could just as well have been written about nature writing. The
peripheral position of the genre in environmental scholarship probably has more to do with
the impression articulated by Clark above, that nature writing is an outmoded way of
portraying the environment that “just can’t work in today’s world” (88). Nature writing is
clearly seen by many as an uninteresting form of environmental communication because its
representations of nature are perceived as outdated. However, I would argue that such a view
of the genre could only survive in an environment informed by stereotypes that are
themselves outdated. Indeed, it seems hardly credible that a genre whose practitioners,
according to Thomas J. Lyon (2001) in This Incomparable Land, are characterized by their
“poeticscientific temperament,” and whom he describes as “inveterate and important synthe-
sizers . . . seeking always to express the possible meanings and implications of new data” (31),
should represent the environment in ways that “just can’t work in today’s world.” Nature
writing has always had a tremendous capacity for adjusting itself to “new data,” and to the
environmental requirements of the moment. These close links between the genre and its
scientific and environmental present have never been more evident than they are in many of
the most recent exemplars of contemporary nature writing that grapple with the major
environmental challenges and scientific complexities represented by the Anthropocene.
Rather than in a nostalgic fairyland perceived as untouched by humanity, nature writing in
the Anthropocene takes place in a world now widely recognized as deeply affected by
industrial humanity across various scales, where conventional motifs of the genre such as
“retreat” or “escape” or “refuge” in mainly nonhuman environments are no longer possible.
The “[p]urist notions of the environment as pristine wilderness” (88) that Clark critiques no
longer hold sway in the nature writing of the Anthropocene. Rather, the nature writing of
the Anthropocene emerges from what I call “Anthropocenic awareness,” which is the
recognition among its authors that the material interactions between nature and culture have
grown complex to the point where the two can no longer be meaningfully disentangled from
each other. This recognition of large-scale and pervasive anthropogenic change and the
emerging Anthropocenic awareness in the genre, result in significant adjustments to nature
writing’s approach to its subject. In the Anthropocene, nature writing is characterized by its
encounters with nonhuman agency, mainly with reference to five different perspectives: what
might be referred to as material nature writing, a scientifically motivated interest in
ecosystemic function, a choice of focus that entails what Lawrence Buell (1995) has called
“the dignification of the overlooked” (184), the exposure of what Yi-Fu Tuan (1979) has
called “the landscape of fear” (6), and a turn towards matters of environmental justice.
The environmental landscape of fear is perhaps the most immediately notable feature of
Anthropocenic nature writing. Writing before the Anthropocene became a popular term,
Lyon, for example, observes how the scale of human effects on the planet was having effects
on nature writing: “[t]he expanding technosphere, some of whose consequences were
described so cogently by Rachel Carson, has also had an inevitable effect upon the literature
of solitude” (109). Lyon recognizes the ways in which pervasive environmental pressures have
begun to oppress experiences of the environment for writers everywhere: “In the modern
era, being alone in nature may still refresh the spirit, but the literary record indicates there
now may be, quite often, a certain shadowed quality to the experience” (110). The
phenomenon Lyon refers to here has become more pronounced in nature writing over

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time. In the nature writing of the Anthropocene, the “shadowed quality” has begun to
inflect, and often even control, the way nature writers understand and portray the
environment.
In Landscapes of Fear (1979), Tuan defines landscapes of fear as “the almost infinite
manifestations of the forces for chaos, natural and human” (6). Tuan asserts that these
landscapes are multitudinous and virtually “omnipresent,” and as a consequence, human
efforts at containing them are equally diverse and pervasive. Tuan goes as far as to assert that
“every human construction—whether mental or material—is a component in a landscape of
fear because it exists to contain chaos” (6). Specifically art, literature and philosophy are
singled out as channels for coping with the chaotic and fearsome, or what he more lyrically
describes as “shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily,
from the siege of inchoate experience and doubt” (6). Tuan argues that there are many
distinct types of fearsome landscapes, but maintains that for the “individual victim,” the
experience of these landscapes will produce two “powerful sensations”:
One is fear of the imminent collapse of [the victim’s] world and the approach of
death—that final surrender of integrity to chaos. The other is a sense of personalized
evil, the feeling that the hostile force, whatever its specific manifestation, possesses
will.
(7)
A possible alternative formulation to Tuan’s statement, for the purposes of more accurately
describing Anthropocenic nature writing, would be to suggest that rather than will, the
environmental landscape of fear possesses agency.
While the landscapes of fear that Tuan investigates mostly have to do with historic,
mythical and religious landscapes of fear, Landscapes of Fear concludes with the author’s
observations regarding a tectonic shift in what constitutes fearsome landscapes to humans:
“Without doubt, fear of wild nature has greatly diminished throughout the world in modern
times. ‘Wilderness’ once signified a demonic power utterly beyond human control; now it is
a fragile web of life needing human protection and care” (211). This shift of perception, for
Tuan, is likely to change the entire dynamic of what causes fear in terms of the environment:
If the educated people of the Western world can still be said to fear nature, it is the
paradoxical fear that plants and animals, even rivers and lakes, may die through human
abuse. The fragility of nature, not its power, now makes us almost constantly anxious.
(212)
In other words, Tuan predicts that the future landscape of fear will be the environmental
landscape of fear. He also predicts a condition much like the Anthropocene, in which these
worries will be scaled beyond anything previous civilizations have known: “The global scale
and the future tense are . . . new” (212).
Arguably, the environmental landscape of fear represents a fusion of “forces for chaos,
natural and human” that is perhaps unique in history. It can be understood as a place where
human actions have disrupted a perceived natural order of things to the point of being
irreparably compromised or even breaking down. The environmental landscape of fear these
days often comes as the result of large-scale industrial intervention, and as such, the
environmental landscapes of fear are often the results of far more concretely personalized
forms of “evil” than Tuan probably had in mind. The landscapes of fear are also very much as
Tuan describes them, qualities or presences to be observed because the landscapes are
perceived as dynamic and responsive to human pressures of many kinds.

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The environmental changes that define the Anthropocene are first and foremost physical.
They are interconnected material alterations at various scales to the geology and life systems
of the earth. They are chemical changes in the planet’s atmosphere that cause global warming.
They are the acidification of the world’s oceans. They are deforestation, habitat fragmentation
and habitat destruction. They are the dieback of countless species collectively known as the
sixth mass extinction event. They are plastic pollution, acid rain, and soil erosion. They are
the declining ability of agrarian lands to yield crops sufficient to the demands of rising
consumerism and the expanding global population. These are material phenomena that affect
the processes that drive ecosystems across the earth, stimulating unpredictable change as other
than human agencies respond to anthropogenic change. As these material changes accelerate,
leaving more pronounced effects on the environment everywhere, environmentalists, ecocri-
tics, and environmentally minded writers become increasingly attentive to the changing
character of the physical interaction between humans and their environment.
In the introduction to Material Ecocriticism (2014), Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann
refer to “a powerful ‘turn to the material’ in the environmental debate” (2). Material
ecocriticism can be characterized as the endeavor “to couple ecocriticism’s interest in
revealing the bonds between text and world with the insights of the new materialist wave of
thought” (2). There is a similar “turn to the material” in the nature writing of the
Anthropocene as Iovino and Oppermann describe in scholarship and “environmental
debate.” This refocusing on nonhuman agency and the dynamics of matter is taking place in
contemporary nature writing through the rise of a mode of description that I refer to as
material nature writing. Material nature writing is a particularly forceful and productive mode
in the nature writing of the Anthropocene. Nature writing has always been preoccupied with
the material reality of nature, but I would put forth that the focus is shifting. While nature
writers have been keen to stress the reality of material nature existing out there, indepen-
dently of human perception and imagination, currently, nature writers seem to show
increasing attention to the human–nature relationship, and to the many interesting, and
sometimes disconcerting, potential effects of this interaction.
In short, material nature writing is nature writing that is preoccupied with the materiality
of the body and the environment, which is invested in the physicality of experience across a
variety of scales, and which is attentive to the dynamism of matter, as it perceives matter as
active rather than inert. Hence, material nature writing foregrounds the processes that shape
environments across a wide range of scales, from the large dynamisms of geology, to minute
interchanges between cells in bodies, even down to chemical reactions and processes inside
the cell itself. Of particular interest to such nature writing are the porosity of boundaries and
the movement of substances across them, such as between the body and its environment. The
openness of bodies, human and nonhuman, to their surroundings is a central feature of such
nature writing. Of equal importance is the openness of ecosystems to influences from other
places, both near and far.
Material nature writing is also alert to the porosity between scales of being, for example how
the internalization of minute quantities of toxic matter to the cell can wreak devastation on the
entire organism. The material world is perceived as characterized by activity, interpenetrations,
exchanges, and interactions, between and across all scales of being. Such nature writing is not
necessarily political or environmentalist, but material nature writing is often the means by
which the Anthropocene is unveiled. When informed by Anthropocenic awareness, material
nature writing often entails a confrontation with the many and varied anthropogenic pressures
on organisms, ecosystems and landscapes. It is often by outlining the porosity between scales of
being that material nature writing demonstrates the enmeshment of small locations or beings in

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large-scale phenomena like global warming. In this respect, material nature writing often
becomes the most politicized mode of Anthropocenic nature writing.
The condition of openness and embeddedness that contemporary environmentalism,
material ecocriticism and material nature writing recognize is particularly precarious in the
Anthropocene. Alaimo (2016) suggests that recognizing what she calls “transcorporeality”
means recognizing vulnerability. Attending to the Anthropocenic disturbance of the material
flows of the world becomes a political act especially when vulnerability is taken into account,
as Alaimo suggests: “Performing corporeality as that which is violable entails a political claim
against future harm to those bodies, but it also disperses the political subject through risky
places where human actions have resulted in landscapes of strange agencies” (2016: 78). The
material nature writing of the Anthropocene often draws attention to the realization that in
the Anthropocene all landscapes have to various degrees and extents become “landscapes of
strange agencies.” There is thus a dystopian possibility of regarding every landscape as a
potential landscape of fear. Material nature writing is thus informed by an ethical drive
reminiscent of what Alaimo refers to as “an insurgent vulnerability,” which is to be under-
stood as “recognition of our material interconnection to the wider environment that impels
ethical and political responses” (94). This formulation foregrounds the human’s doubled role
in the Anthropocene and in Anthropocenic nature writing, as both perpetrator of environ-
mental decline, and victim of environmental decline.
As already suggested, one of the things that typifies Anthropocenic nature writing is its
increasing attentiveness towards factual information or science, which does not mark a
rupture with previous modes of writing, but an enhancement of a genre feature that was
already significant. However, more often than not, the shift towards an increased reliance on
science goes hand in hand with another shift to the foreground of an already well-established
feature of the genre—its environmentalism. The Anthropocene evokes the landscape of fear
in nature writing, and the landscape of fear provokes environmentalist responses in nature
writers. As stated above, more and more texts seem to be purposefully activist. The landscape
of fear in nature writing is not meant to cause abjection so much as it encourages resistance
based on often disturbing information regarding what is happening to nature. In Xerophilia
(2008), Tom Lynch argues that “[o]ne goal of environmentally responsible writing should be
to find ways to awaken our intellectual and emotional awareness of . . . overlooked species
and of the ecological processes they support” (142). The lens of “environmentally responsible
writing” should be recalibrated towards the functionality of systems, and towards “the
dignification” of those frequently overlooked, uncharismatic organisms on which such
systems critically depend. Such writing should also “exhibit knowledge of reliable information
regarding the behavior and ecological role” of such organisms. He suggests that
if it is to have a literary as well as ecological dimension, such literature should
employ the resources of its art to engage the environmental imagination of the
reader so that these invertebrates become a part of the reader’s emotional and
psychological connection to their bioregion.
(142)
What Lynch argues relative to invertebrates applies to the overall representation of over-
looked species and places in Anthropocenic nature writing, which frequently takes form
through a fusion of science and art for the purpose of motivating reader investment in the
relevant species or location.
The “dignification of the overlooked” is not a new or unique strategy used in nature
writing to widen the scope of reader appreciations of the natural world, but from being a

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fringe concern it has become relatively mainstream. The term was first coined by Lawrence
Buell in The Environmental Imagination (1995) to denote a literary device that meant “a
breakthrough of great importance to the romantics” (184). Buell mentions James Thomson’s
The Seasons, which was both “the first English poem to make natural processes its ‘protago-
nist,’” and “the first major fictive work to display a heightened sensitivity to the treatment
and feelings of the brute creation,” or animals (184). While Buell’s analysis mainly targets the
extension of concern and empathy towards the animal kingdom, his remark about “the
natural processes” is noteworthy, since these are part of the often overlooked aspects of nature
that Anthropocenic nature writing foregrounds.
In Xerophilia, Lynch bases an entire chapter on Buell’s concept of the dignification of the
overlooked, relating it mainly to a context of desert writing, and particularly to the human
tendency towards ecophobic disdain for invertebrates. In reference to the dignification of the
overlooked in the nature poetry of Ofelia Zepeda, Lynch summarizes:
These brief poems are not so much designed to impart information about these
creatures and their interactions as they are designed to evoke, through imagery, the
presence of these creatures and their interactions with each other in the imagination
of the reader. Simply by being deemed worthy of aesthetic attention, these animals
are transfigured; they are given identity and a meaningful place in our imaginative
lives. Such attention grants a dignity to the overlooked.
(168)
Lynch’s concern is to extend aesthetic appreciation to all segments of the natural world, such
as the invertebrate kingdom. In this respect, his version of the dignification of the overlooked
echoes Scott Slovic’s thoughts on the analogous concept of “appreciating the unappreciated,”
which he perceives as a major feature and achievement of desert nature writing in his
introduction to the anthology Getting over the Color Green (2001). For Lynch, the extension
of aesthetic appreciation to overlooked species has distinct environmentalist motivations:
Regardless of one’s position on the matter, it seems undeniable that the chances of
survival of such creatures are enhanced by this poetic attention. When such creatures
become a part of our storied landscapes . . . they also become a part of our moral
landscape, and hence must be taken into account in our moral judgments.
(168)
The dignification of the overlooked can thus be considered an overt environmentalist feature
of Anthropocenic nature writing. While the strategies, functions, and aims outlined by Lynch
serve very well to describe how the dignification of the overlooked tends to take shape in the
genre, I would add that this type of nature writing tends to focus even more emphatically on
a deeper ecological sense of function and connectivity. The landscape, process or organism
that such writing dignifies, tends to be selected based on particular evolutionary adaptations
and services to the ecosystem of which it is part. The dignification of the overlooked in
Anthropocenic nature writing thus motivates the appreciation of organisms and places for
qualities that go beyond questions of what can or cannot be found aesthetically pleasing.
As Lynch’s work demonstrates, engaging with the dignification of the overlooked often
means engaging with what Simon C. Estok (2011) calls “ecophobia” (2), or what Lynch refers
to as “biophobia” (145). Estok understands ecophobia as “contempt for the natural world” (2).
Lynch more moderately refers to “biophobia” as a dislike or distaste for certain aspects of the
natural world. Many of the organisms that can be considered uncharismatic are also found by
large groups to be repulsive or scary. They are, in other words, creatures that people are

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culturally conditioned to have ecophobic reactions to. Recently it seems that an attempt to
redeem these categories of creatures has been added to the agenda of nature writers. An early
and notable example of such a project can be found in Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men (2004).
While it is hardly reasonable to refer to wolves as uncharismatic, Lopez points out how few
other animals have suffered so directly the consequences of ecophobic mythmaking as these
animals have over centuries. The book can be regarded as an attempt at dignifying the
overlooked through its highlighting of neglected aspects of the lives of wolves, and its attempts
to provide a rational ecological portrayal of wolves against the misinformation and irrational
demonizing that wolves have been subjected to for centuries. And while wolves are creatures
that have never fallen below the public radar, the project of Of Wolves and Men can in some
ways be read as the dignification of the overlooked insofar as it draws attention to the crucial
ecological functions wolves fulfill in ecosystems where people tend to ecophobically dismiss
them as pests and vermin. Likewise, while one cannot say this about all of Lopez’s work, Of
Wolves and Men could be classified as an early instance of Anthropocenic nature writing, because
its point of departure is the large-scale cultural-material intervention of human beings in the
lives of these animals and their habitats.
In the nature writing of the Anthropocene, it is the descriptive passages of material nature
writing that tend to promote the dignification of the overlooked. This is where the function
and importance of often overlooked or denigrated organisms and processes are explicated,
frequently aimed to produce a perspectival adjustment in the readers that provides them with
a sense of the complicated and dynamic embeddedness of these organisms in the environ-
ment. The dignification of the overlooked and the preoccupation with functionality rendered
in the mode of material nature writing also furthers an understanding of the “insurgent
vulnerability” of the featured ecosystem or organism, to borrow Alaimo’s term. As Alaimo
suggests, recognizing the ways that material intra-actions with “the wider environment”
expose bodies to risk can lead to “ethical and political responses” (2016: 94). It is precisely in
order to elicit such responses that nature writers dramatize the “insurgent vulnerability” of
overlooked organisms.
Alaimo suggests that “insurgent vulnerability” could be understood as synonymous with
what she calls
a politics of exposure, in which the environmentalist recognition of having been
exposed to such things as carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and radiation arouses a
political response . . . which does strip off the conventional armor of impermeability
that blithe capitalist consumerism requires.
(94)
While Alaimo refers to the exposure of human bodies primarily, Anthropocenic nature
writing foregrounds the insurgent vulnerability of all nature. It brings attention to the many
ways in which nature has been exposed to and remains vulnerable to the harmful dynamics
that characterize the Anthropocene. Humanity is doubly at stake in these scenarios of
exposure. Not only are they the perceived perpetrators of harm, but when stripped of “the
conventional armor of impermeability that blithe capitalist consumerism requires,” humanity
is also shown to share in the “insurgent vulnerability” of other species and ecosystems. The
scientific interest in ecosystemic functions, the dignification of the overlooked, and the mode
of material nature writing all contribute to a “politics of exposure” in Anthropocenic nature
writing that is designed to provoke activism. The confrontation with anthropogenic destabi-
lizations and degradations to ecosystems leads to dramatizations of insurgent vulnerability that
includes all life forms.

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The emphasis on insurgent vulnerability also has to do with nature writing’s penchant for
specification and particularization. Discussions of the Anthropocene are prone to positing
matters of culpability at the abstract scale of an aggregate humanity. This is a scale at which
individual agency and responsibility all but evaporates. The suffering of humans and nonhu-
mans also vanish from sight at these scales. Material nature writing, the dignification of the
overlooked, and the emphasis on ecosystemic function in Anthropocenic nature writing are
all means by which the large-scale phenomena of the Anthropocene are grounded in the
specificities of localized and individualized examples. They are mechanisms in nature writing
for the concretization of environmental culpabilities, costs and distress. They foreground the
ways in which humans and nonhumans depend on the continued, but threatened, function-
ality of the various ecosystems of the earth. The scientific interest in the way ecosystems work
provides information about dynamics in nature that readers may be entirely unaware of, as
well as of often unknown anthropogenic pressures on these dynamics. The dignification of
the overlooked foregrounds the ecosystemic services of species and processes regardless of
their charismatic values, and the ways by which their existence has become precarious in the
Anthropocene. Material nature writing traces the often unseen streams of matter and their
effects through bodies and ecosystems in specific frames of reference, highlighting the often
long-term consequences of human behavior. When these perspectives are focused through
the place or species-specific lens of nature writing, these features of the genre serve to ground
many of the abstract phenomena of the Anthropocene with concrete examples.
The scientific preoccupation with the function of ecosystems encourages a change in
awareness. In Hyperobjects (2013), Morton describes the Anthropocene as “a momentous era,
at which we achieve what has sometimes been called ecological awareness. Ecological awareness
is a detailed and increasing sense, in science and outside of it, of the innumerable inter-
relationships among lifeforms and between life and non-life” (128: emphasis in the original).
Anthropocenic nature writing affirms “ecological awareness” of the innumerable interdepen-
dencies that characterize existence, even as it also promotes the Anthropocenic awareness of
the countless ways in which these “innumerable interrelationships” are exposed to multiform
anthropogenic pressures. Even as it expands its horizon to engage with environmental
phenomena that span the planet, the nature writing genre’s traditional drive towards
particularization and individualization leads the nature writing of the Anthropocene towards
the more concrete dignification of the many potential victims as the functionality of
ecosystems across the planet comes under threat. The ecological awareness of interconnection
coupled with Anthropocenic awareness brings the human sufferers of environmental decline
more profoundly into focus than they have previously tended to be in the genre. The politics
of exposure in Anthropocenic nature writing begins to level the field between humans and
nonhumans, suggesting that all, to various degrees, share in the perils of the Anthropocene.
Just as the dignification of the overlooked foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems and
organisms are unevenly impacted by industrial humanity along fault lines of their charismatic
appeal to politically and economically enfranchised human beings, such nature writing is also
increasingly aware of the ways in which ecological perils, while increasingly relevant to all
humans in an age without what Alaimo calls the “conventional armor of impermeability that
blithe capitalist consumerism requires” (2016: 94), continue to be distributed unequally
among humans according to class, gender, wealth and ethnicity.
Early concerns in Anthropocenic nature writing center on the challenge of establishing a
sense of the new environmental situation itself, of encouraging readers to recognize the new
nature of nature and its implications for them. In other words, many of these writers work
toward bringing to light unacknowledged anthropogenic dimensions and incorporating them

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into their portrayals of places, species, and ecosystems. In Of Rock and Rivers: Seeking a Sense of
Place in the American West (2009), for example, the geomorphologist Ellen Wohl redraws the
map of nature writing’s most popular wilderness refuge in the American West, presenting a
scientist’s view of the region as a place of dynamic interactions between natural processes and
past and present human impacts across a wide range of scales that have severe implications for
the future of both human and nonhuman life in the region. Biologist David George Haskell’s
The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (2012) presents a scientist’s portrayal of the
material and evolutionary dynamisms that bind the human and nonhuman world together
across all scales of being. In this book, Haskell uses his focused micro-level scrutiny of a circle
of forest floor with a diameter of one meter to demonstrate the extreme global connectivity
that holds all places, and the many new anthropogenic calibrations of these streams of
connection that must be taken into account in the Anthropocene. In Yellowlegs (1980), John
Janovy Jr. produces an emotionally poignant portrayal of the Anthropocene, which he refers
to as “the technological state” or “the technological age” (20). In the overwhelming context
of anthropogenic planetary transformation, Janovy directs his attention towards the now
technologically mediated everyday lives of creatures that are so ordinary as to slip beneath the
attention of most forms of environmental engagement. Erik Reece’s Lost Mountain: A Year in
the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia (2006) chronicles
the most severe examples of nature’s destruction at the hands of the fossil industry in America.
While acknowledging nonhuman consequences and suffering, his exposé is at its most potent
when dealing with the environmental injustice and multilayered “slow violence” that affects
the region’s human inhabitants. Common to all of these texts is the way they consistently use
their preoccupation with ecosystemic function to weave together the threads of human and
nonhuman existence in indissoluble partnerships, affirming that the Anthropocene has
implications for us all.
Such a sense of a shared stake—between all branches, formations, and scales of life—in the
environmental realities of the Anthropocene seems to be driving the emergence of a new
aesthetic in the genre, an aesthetic that cannot be disentangled from the intensifying ethical
drives of such writing. In The Song of Trees (2017), Haskell articulates the so far most succinct
and detailed understanding of how the emerging aesthetics of nature writing will partner with
ethics for the purpose of encouraging more viable modes of co-inhabiting the earth:
Ecological beauty is not titillating prettiness or sensor novelty. An understanding of
life’s processes often subverts these superficial impressions. A burn “scar” can be a
long awaited renewal. The microbial life under our feet may be more richly
beautiful than the obvious grandeur of a mountain sunset. In rot and scum we
might find the slimy sublime. This is ecological aesthetics: the ability to perceive
beauty through sustained, embodied relationship within a particular part of the
community of life. The community includes humans in our various modes of being
within the biological network, as watchers, hunters, loggers, farmers, eaters, story
singers, and habitat for microbial killers and mutualists alike. Ecological aesthetics is
not a retreat into an imagined wilderness where humans have no place, but a step
towards belonging in all its dimensions. In this ecological aesthetic we might then
root our ethic of belonging. If some form of objective moral truth about life’s
ecology exists and transcends our nervous chatter, it is located within the relation-
ships that constitute the network of life. When we are awakened participants within
the processes of the network, we can start to hear what is coherent, what is broken,
what is beautiful, what is good. This understanding emerges from sustained incarnate

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relationship, becomes manifest in a mature sense of ecological aesthetics, and gives

rise to ethical discernments that emerge from life’s network.
(149)
Haskell’s take on the new aesthetics and ethics for nature writing centers on a reorientation of
what we find aesthetically pleasing that involves the dignification of the overlooked, is
founded on recognizing the importance of function, which foregrounds the material aspects
of existence, and which importantly involves humanity in intra-action with all aspects of the
network of life. Haskell perceives this as a necessary maturation of humanity’s perspectives on
its environment, a potential step towards laying to rest the environmental landscapes of fear
that for now characterizes most discourses of the Anthropocene.
At its core, Haskell’s vision is rooted in his scientific understanding of ecosystemic
functions that is characteristic of Anthropocenic nature writing overall. The scientific
investment in the function of ecosystems leads Haskell, and other nature writers, to knowl-
edge of the many ways in which humans are both disrupting ecosystems and dependent on
them. The shift towards ecological aesthetics and Anthropocenic awareness in nature writing
consequently motivates environmental justice perspectives in the genre, both in terms of
identifying various culprits of environmental damage, and showing the many different human
and nonhuman victims. The next chapter in The Song of the Trees, for example, dwells
extensively on matters of environmental and racial injustice. In Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon outlines an understanding of environmental
injustice as particularly impactful on the poor. Nixon asserts that environmental damage must
be understood as a form of violence, and since this type of violence is predominantly
characterized by effects which are distributed across various scales of time, he refers to it as
“slow violence” (2). “Slow violence” is an overlooked dynamic, according to Nixon, which
“occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across
time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2).
Because slow violence is unperceived and unrecognized, he refers to its sufferers as “dis-
counted casualties” (2). Nixon also affirms that recognizing these casualties must take into
account both human and nonhuman victims. Slow violence is the type of overlooked
dimension of environmental decline that Anthropocenic nature writing has begun to bring
to the forefront. Because it includes the human in its descriptions of environmental
precariousness in the Anthropocene’s many interconnected landscapes of fear, the human is
brought into unprecedented positions of centrality in nature writing both as perpetrator and
victim of slow violence. Anthropocenic insights thus change the sense of proximity of
humans with regard to environmental struggles, from the preservation of wilderness as
something out there and distinct from the human realm, to efforts at maintaining dynamic
systems within which humanity is irrevocably embedded.
There is thus a sense in which Anthropocenic nature writing tends to personalize the links
between the implied reader and the environment by underscoring the material trans-
corporeal webs of attachments between them. This is often coupled with tendencies to
position the reader within an evolutionary scheme, stressing the ways in which the human
species, and most of its limitations and abilities, has itself emerged through material intra-
action over time with the environments it has historically inhabited. The links these texts
thereby highlight are personalized in the way they are linked to both the human and the
evolutionary in the way humans are represented as emerging forms of evolutionary negotia-
tions between bodies, ecosystems, and places. There is also, finally, a social dimension in the
way the infrastructure of industrial societies now materially inflect all these links.

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Anthropocenic nature writing often individualizes slow violence by tracing the ways in which
ordinary people and behaviors are implicated in phenomena that cause suffering or are
themselves unknowingly exposed to slow violence. The nature writing of the Anthropocene
thus positions its reader centrally within the complex entanglements it traces.

Works cited
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of Minnesota
Press, 2016.
Armbruster, Karla and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of
Ecocriticism. University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American
Culture. Harvard University Press, 1995.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. 1962. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Clark, Timothy. “Nature, Post Nature.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited
by Louise Westling. Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 75–89.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Crutzen, Paul J. “The Geology of Mankind.” Nature 3 January. 2002: 23. www.readcube.com/articles/
10.1038/415023a. Accessed 20 April 2014.
Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocritcism. Routledge, 2006.
Emmett, Robert S., and David E. Nye, eds. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. MIT
Press, 2017.
Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE
16.2 (Spring 2009): 203–225.
Estok, Simon C. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. Palgrave, 2011.
Haskell, David George. The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. Penguin, 2012.
Haskell, David George. The Song of Trees: Stores from Nature’s Great Connectors. Viking, 2017.
Huntington, Cynthia. The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod. University Press of New
England, 1999.
Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press, 2014.
Janovy, John Jr., Yellowlegs. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
Lopez, Barry. Of Wolves and Men. 1978. Scribner, 2004.
Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Texas Tech University Press, 2008.
Lyon, Thomas J. This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing. Rev. ed. Milkweed, 2001.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota
Press, 2013.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Primack, Richard B. Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods. University of Chicago
Press, 2014.
Reece, Erik. Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of
Appalachia. Riverhead, 2006.
Slovic, Scott, ed. Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Writing of the Southwest.
University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden 1854. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, edited by William Rossi.
Norton, 1992, pp. 1–223.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Landscapes of Fear. University of Minnesota Press, 1979.
Wohl, Ellen. Of Rock and Rivers: Seeking a Sense of Place in the American West. University of California Press, 2009.

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 18
EXPERIMENTAL
ECOCRITICISM, OR HOW TO
KNOW IF LITERATURE
REALLY WORKS
Wojciech Małecki

Practically anyone who knows anything about ecocriticism knows also that its name was first
proposed by William Rueckert in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology” (Rueckert 1996).
But as it sometimes happens with famous foundational essays, much less is known about what
his proposal was actually about, which is quite unfortunate because it was, and still is, of
tremendous importance. What I mean is that Rueckert saw ecocriticism as a sort of
experiment (something one does in order to test something), and one whose aim was to see
whether literature could have practical relevance at the time of an environmental crisis. In
particular, he wanted to see whether literature “could transform culture and help bring our
destruction of the biosphere to an end” (120).
In this chapter I would like to return to this idea and expand on it, but in a way that
Rueckert himself perhaps never had in mind. That is, I too believe that the question of the
social impact of environmental literature should be of vital importance to ecocritics. But I also
think that the most reliable way to study that question is to employ the methods of
experimental sciences. In what follows, I would like to argue that this kind of approach,
which I call “experimental ecocriticism,” could allow us to see how exactly environmental
literature functions in the social realm, and that it might thereby benefit not only ecoriticism
and related fields, but also the wider public and perhaps even the environment itself.

Back to the roots

When Rueckert introduced the idea of ecocriticism in his essay, originally written in 1976,
the questions of industrial pollution, anthropogenic extinction, and the ecological balance of
the planet were of little concern to literary critics. Rueckert thought that for this reason
literary studies was behind the times, (106–08; cf. Love 2003: 3), and he proposed that a good
way to change that is for the field to acknowledge and study the power of literature to induce
“creative biospheric apperceptions, attitudes, and actions” (121).
What inspired this idea in Rueckert were his encounters with concrete works such as
Whitman’s Song of Myself, Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, and W.S. Merwin’s The Lice.

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In Whitman’s poem, argued Rueckert, “There is a complete ecological vision . . . just as there is
in Whitman’s conception of a poetry cycle which resembles the water cycle within the
biosphere” (Rueckert 1996: 118); Diving into the Wreck, he claimed, is “the epitome . . . of the
ways in which poets . . . can be used as models for creative, cooperative action” (117); Merwin’s
The Lice, in turn, required “one to unmake and remake one’s mind” about “the biosphere and
what humans have done to destroy it” (117–18). These three works, and some more, had
apparently made Rueckert open his eyes to various environmental issues and inspired him to
take action, and he thought they might do the same for others. It is precisely this thought that
stands behind his original proposal of ecocriticism.
That thought, I would like to claim, has been present in ecocriticism ever since as there
have always been ecocritics who shared Rueckert’s belief that ecocriticism should be
practically relevant and that this practical relevance is significantly related to the ability of
environmental literature to contribute to social change by dismantling older ways of thinking
and bringing in newer perspectives. By way of example, consider yet another classical
ecocritical text, Lawrence Buell’s (2001) Writing for an Endangered World. That book is
widely known for its insights into environmental imagination, but again, what is not always
so clearly realized, is that Buell’s main concern there was not so much with how the
environmental imagination manifests itself in literary works, but rather with how literary
works might expand the environmental imagination of their readers and thereby have a
practical impact on society. As he argued:
Acts of environmental imagination, whatever anyone thinks to the contrary,
potentially register and energize at least four kinds of engagement with the world.
They may connect readers vicariously with others’ experience, suffering, pain: that
of nonhumans as well as humans. They may reconnect readers with places they have
been and send them where they would otherwise never physically go. They may
direct thought toward alternative futures. And they may affect one’s caring for the
physical world: make it feel more or less precious or endangered or disposable. All
this may befall a moderately attentive reader reading about a cherished, abused, or
endangered place.
(Buell 2001: 2)
Illustrating these claims was Buell’s main task in the book, and he attempted to fulfill it by
analyzing such works as Melville’s Moby Dick or Richard Wright’s Native Son. Soon other
scholars followed suit, applying Buell’s idea of expanding environmental imagination to
literatures other than American (African, Thai, Welsh, and others) and giving it all sorts of
theoretical spins (Ryan 2017; Jarvis 2008; Caminero-Santangelo 2014; Martucci 2007).
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin (2010), for instance, have borrowed the idea to con-
textualize postcolonial studies, arguing that postcolonial environmental literature’s “social and
political usefulness, its capacity to set out symbolic guidelines for the material transformation
of the world” (14), is a function precisely of its capacity to widen our imagination, a point
which is also echoed by Justyna Kostkowska (2013) with reference to women’s environ-
mental writing in the ecofeminist context (10).
But of course claims about literature’s pro-environmental impact have been made in
ecocriticism also independently of Buell’s idea. Consider still another classic ecocritical text,
“Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology: The Interiority of Outdoor Experience,”
by another key figure in the field, Scott Slovic (1996). Here Slovic states that Abbey’s The
Monkey Wrench Gang, “heightens our awareness to issues of the environment (while providing
little explicit dogma)” (360), and attributes similar features to other works as well, a diagnosis

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he will much later extend to environmental writing in general, arguing that it “might
eventually have an impact on environmental laws and policies and on the daily behavior,
even on the conscious and unconscious worldviews, of other members of society” (Slovic
2008: 140; cf. Slovic and Slovic 2015).
These are only a few examples, but one could give plenty of evidence that there are many
ecocritics who share a vision which can be found in Rueckert’s original essay and which
might be called the literary ecosystem idea: the idea of a certain literary ecological cycle
where texts influenced by the environment can have a pro-environmental influence on their
readers. That said, there is one crucial difference between the original essay and the current
practice, and it is that while Rueckert proposed ecocriticism as an experiment aiming to test
whether the literary ecosystem idea is true, the ecocritics who espouse it today seem to think
it is so sound that it does not need testing whatsoever. Or at least they do not show any
interest in doing so.

Why ecocriticism needs more experimenting

That we ecocritics who share Rueckert’s idea are generally not interested in testing it, is not
that surprising, given that it provides very good justification for the relevance of our field, the
relevance which we think makes us unique in literary studies and which we are naturally very
proud of. Our lack of interest is also not that surprising given the long historical tradition that
attributes to literature generally speaking the capacity to have beneficial social effects, a
tradition which has shaped to a significant extent our home field of literary studies (cf. Keen
2007; Hunt 2007; Gregory 2009). Finally, it is not that surprising given that we have plenty
of evidence that literature can have beneficial social effects as far as the environmental issues
are concerned in particular. We have our own personal experiences, just like Rueckert had
his, we have the experiences of our colleagues and students, and we have historical data, such
as those from Philippon’s (2004) book Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped
the Environmental Movement. Finally, let us not forget that we also have intuitions consistent
with those experiences and data.
However, this is also the only kind of evidence we seem to have, which is a problem
because historical, personal, and speculative evidence, even when there is plenty of it, is
unfortunately not enough to confirm claims about causal influence in the social realm such as
that about the impact of literature. This is one of the major lessons of social sciences, and one
that has been taught on an increasing number of examples. 50 Great Myths of Popular
Psychology is one such work which employs empirical evidence to “shatter” various widely
shared “misconceptions about human behavior,” including that “low self-esteem is a major
cause of psychological problems,” that “subliminal messages can persuade people to purchase
products,” and at least 48 others (Lilienfeld 2010: 36–41, 162–64).
Among the myths shattered by the social sciences, there is also one which should be of
particular interest to ecocritics, namely that environmental education is the way to change our
attitudes and behavior toward the environment. Isn’t the lack of proper knowledge about the
ecological consequences of our actions the main source of the current crisis? Wouldn’t it be
sufficient to give the public the relevant information about their excessive energy use and
such like in order to save the planet? The idea sounds so reasonable that most people do not
bother to check if it is true. But the psychologist Thomas Heberlein (2012a) bothered to do
so, and it has turned out that it is not. The empirical data gathered by him and other
researchers across years, and presented in his book Navigating Environmental Attitudes, shows
that giving people information about the environment will not suffice to change their ways.

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And since environmental education generally consists in doing precisely this, environmental
education won’t suffice either (Heberlein 2012a; cf. Heberlein 2012b). It does not work.
Now, the most interesting thing here is of course how it is possible that a thing which
seems so reasonable and that seems to be backed by data from everyday experience could turn
out to be so wrong? Hasn’t everyone seen with their own eyes that people can change their
ways if you give them the relevant information about the environment? Then how come
environmental education does not work? Or to put it more generally, how is it possible that
even if one experiences something that seems to prove a certain causal claim (that environ-
mental education works, that subliminal messages cause people to buy products, and the like),
that claim may still turn out to be false?
The simplest answer is that we are very often mistaken about the experiences allegedly
confirming our claims or about the conclusions that may be legitimately drawn from those
experiences, or both. In fact, available research shows that this happens shockingly often.
People are systematically wrong about what they see, hear, and feel, wrong about happened
to them in the past, wrong about what they are doing at a given moment, and wrong about
what they do generally. They tend to misjudge their character, drinking habits, driving skills,
and a thousand other things, failing to an equal extent in their judgment of others and the
world around them (Pohl 2017; Haselton et al. 2015). It is therefore quite reasonable to think
that they may be easily mistaken about the alleged positive impact of environmental literature.
Consider, for instance, the following hypothetical case. Since you started reading this kind of
literature, you have noticed what seems like a change in your behavior. You seem to have begun
to raise the question of climate change in your discussions with others more often than before and
became more environmentally conscious in your consumer choices, choosing goods that leave
less ecological footprint than comparable ones. Wouldn’t such a change mean that that environ-
mental literature has had a positive impact at least on you? It might, but unfortunately it is still
possible that there has not been any change at all, or that if there had been any change it was of an
entirely different kind. For it might have been the case that before you started reading
environmental literature you had been as eager to raise the question of climate change in your
discussions with others and as environmentally conscious in your consumer decisions as you are
now, but simply had not paid as much attention to it. In other words, the relevant behavior did
not change but has simply become more noticeable to you as a result of your encounter with
environmental literature. You have been lied to by your own experience.
But even if we are not deluded by our experience, we may still not be justified in deriving
from it the general claim that environmental literature has a pro-environmental influence. To
see this let us consider another hypothetical case. Imagine that after years of experience as an
ecocritic, you come to the conclusion that environmental literature must have a pro-
environmental impact on its readers because all the readers of environmental literature
whom you have ever encountered have a more environmental outlook than people who
prefer other kinds of literature. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that your experience
does not deceive you and that indeed all the readers of environmental literature whom you
have encountered have a more pro-environmental outlook than all the other kinds of readers
you know. Wouldn’t this be evidence enough for you to say that environmental literature has
a positive impact? Not quite, because the causal relation may be reverse in this case. That is, it
may be the case that these are precisely their exceptional pro-environmental attitudes that
make certain readers choose to read environmental literature and not the other way around,
and that your experience is simply congruent with this pattern.
But what about the cases when we supposedly can see a change happening right before
our eyes, for instance, in classroom situations, which have been of crucial importance to

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ecocriticism, from Rueckert to today, precisely because of the field’s ambition of practical
relevance (Rueckert 1996: 119–22; Waage 1985; Christensen et al. 2008; Garrard 2012;
Matthewman 2011). Imagine the following scenario: during the running of your environ-
mental literature course you notice that your students have begun to spontaneously declare
pro-environmental attitudes, whereas they did not do so before. Moreover, this is also
confirmed by an independent observer, so your impression must be right. Doesn’t that
mean that environmental literature makes people pro-environmental?
Not necessarily. First of all, rather than reflecting a real change in your students’ beliefs and
desires, their declarations might have been the effect of the mechanism which social
psychologists call impression management and which consists in trying to make others
develop a desired impression of oneself (Maio and Haddock 2012: 14; Tedeschi 2013).
Your students might have simply wanted you to have a good opinion about them, and
knowing full well that your heart is green, they tried to achieve that by expressing matching
views in your presence without actually developing them. And they did not have to be
cynical about this. We often try to manage impressions of others without even being aware of
the fact that we are doing so (Schlenker 1980: 6).
But even if your students really changed their minds about the environment as a result
of attending your course, you are still not entitled to derive from this the general
conclusion that environmental literature has a positive impact on its readers. For one,
everything depends on what you mean by “positive impact” here. I assume that you think
they changed not only their minds but also their deeds. But the two very often do not go
together. Sometimes attitudes do not predict behavior (Glasman and Albarracín 2006; Ajzen
2005; Kraus 1995), and thus it is wrong to assume that a change in attitudes toward the
environment will necessarily lead to a related behavioral change. In fact, as Heberlein
shows, it would be better to assume that one change is unlikely to lead to the other by
itself (Heberlein 2012a: 53–71). So it is quite likely that while environmental literature
changed your students’ minds, nothing has changed in their actions: in what they buy, eat,
and throw in their garbage cans, or in anything else for that matter (Małecki et al. 2018).
For two, even if something has changed here as well, your general claim might still be
unjustified. For it is possible that the real cause behind the change was not the environmental
literature you assigned and discussed with them per se, but something or someone else. It
might have as well been you, the engaged, committed, sensitive professor who has made a
huge impression on them and whom they want to emulate (cf. Chap. 6 of Webster and Sell
2007). Perhaps if your course had not involved literature at all, but, say, film or opera, or
biology textbooks, the results would have been the same, provided it had been taught by you
and concerned the environment. And this is not the only possible factor that could be the real
reason behind the change.
Finally, even if literature was the real factor here, the conclusion might still not hold. For
while literature may turn out to work for your students, it may not work for others, generally.
This is because, perhaps, it works only for people who share certain demographic or
psychological characteristics with your students (Henrich et al. 2010). Or perhaps it does not
even work generally for a specific group. Perhaps what happened in your class was a lucky
coincidence, one that is very unlikely to repeat itself. Note that this point applies also to many
historically documented cases allegedly confirming literature’s social impact. Take, for instance,
the novel Black Beauty, which reportedly made thousands of people vocally express their
concern for the lot of draught horses and take action to change it (Sewell 2012; Nyman 2016;
Johnson and Johnson 2002: 254; Garrard 2014: 409–22; Pearson 2011: 43–44, 124–25;
DeMello 2012: 183–84). While its impact might be seen as evidence that literature works, it

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too might have been a happy coincidence. Perhaps literature worked in this way only then, for
these particular people, or only for that particular text (cf. Małecki, Pawłowski, Cieński, et al.).
One could go on in this vein, but the battery of doubts articulated above is perhaps enough to
drive home the point as to how easy it is to be mistaken about causal generalities, even if one has
historical and anecdotal data suggesting they exist, and how big the practical price may be for that
mistake. To come back to Heberlein’s example, recall that despite all the personal and historical
evidence in support of the value of environmental education, it has turned out that this whole big
enterprise, involving thousands and if not millions of people and definitely millions of dollars, is
ineffective. The same, of course, may be the case with environmental literature. Just think of
those thousands of environmental scholars and writers who are extremely busy investing their
time and energy in something that does not work the way they assume it does.
If this sounds disheartening, the good news is that there is a way to establish whether
environmental literature works beyond these and practically any other reasonable doubts, and
it is, of course, the experimental way. This is because the experimental method consists in
observing phenomena in an environment controlled to such an extent that we can rule out
any competing explanations as to the causal factors underlying them. This means that
whatever the outcome of the experiment is, positive or negative, it is at least generalizable
and sound. This has been proven throughout hundreds of years of experimenting in physics,
chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine, psychology, and other fields (Webster and Sell;
Dunning 2012; Pergament 2014; Ruxton and Colegrave 2011).
If the experimental methods worked in these fields, and if people have not felt any qualms
to rely on it in matters as important as their life, health, safety, and comfort, we ecocritics
should have no qualms submitting to it the matter of the social impact of environmental
literature, especially if we see our field as being distinguished by its practical relevance
(Małecki 2012). Experimental ecocriticism would be a field that is devoted to the experi-
mental study of this matter. And if it deserves to be a separate field with its own name, this is
because there are many other matters that are important to ecocriticism aside from the alleged
positive impact of environmental literature, but which can be firmly established only through
experimental methods indeed (cf. Weik von Mossner 2017). This includes practically any of
the claims that ecocritics make about any sort of impact that environmental literature has on
its readers, good or bad: how it affects their brains, minds, affects, and habits, what it means to
them, what it does with them, and how this may affect society as a whole.
In too many of such general claims, we ecocritics rely on the way texts impact us ourselves
and on what they mean to us, and too many of such claims are tested only against the
judgment of our fellow ecocritics. Because of this, our claims may have more to do with how
environmental literature works in a certain rather narrow social environment (the environ-
ment inhabited by people with a certain very rare expertise, a certain cultural taste, belonging
to a certain class, and the like), which may have nothing to do with what environmental
literature means and does in other social environments, let alone with how it works generally
in statistical terms (cf. Part 3 of Hanquinet 2016). It would certainly be rather grotesque if a
field with such grand social ambitions as ecocriticism had such a narrow social perspective. It
is then time to get up from our armchairs, leave our seminar rooms, and look around us, and
experimental ecocriticism is here to help (cf. Knobe and Nichols 2008).

What is experimental ecocriticism?

But how is all this supposed to work? Let me explain this by referring to the concrete
example of an experimental interdisciplinary project which I participated in, and was happy to

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direct. The project was devoted to studying one particular aspect of the attitudinal power
attributed to environmental literature—broadly speaking, that is the power of stories to affect
our attitudes to non-human animals. Recall that Laurence Buell’s idea of literature’s power to
expand our environmental imagination consists also, as he puts it, in connecting “readers
vicariously with others’ experience, suffering, pain: that of nonhumans as well as humans,”
and that similar ideas have been espoused by numerous ecocritics as well as representatives of
other fields in the humanities, including animal studies, animal ethics, and the like (Buell
2001: 2; Regan and Linzey 2010). The power of literary stories to make us more concerned
about non-human animals have also been espoused across history by writers such as Thomas
Hardy as well as by all sorts of activists, who not only espoused the idea but also tried to
realize it in practice and do so until this very day (Savvides 2013; Hardy 2002; Keen 2011;
West 2017; Mazzeno and Morrison 2017; Pearson 2011; Boggs 2013).
Again, this idea is intuitively obvious and has some anecdotal and historical evidence to
support it, with Sewell’s Black Beauty being perhaps the most famous example. This and other
examples (Saunders 2015), as well as the fact that contemporary environmental and pro-animal
organizations use stories to promote pro-animal attitudes, make the question all the more worth
studying experimentally, especially given that until recently there had been no experimental
data on the topic available at all. This means, as should be clear from what was said above, that
these organizations might have been operating on mistaken presumptions and that the time,
effort, and money they spent on narrative persuasion could be spent more effectively.
In order to know whether this is the case, a team was established consisting of a literary
historian, an experimental social psychologist, a biologist specializing in evolutionary psychol-
ogy, as well as a literary theorist, that is, myself. Thanks to a grant we received from the
National Science Center in Poland we could perform more than a dozen experiments on
thousands of people over the period of three years. In our experimental procedures we
followed the best standards developed in social psychology, the psychology of narratives, and
the empirical study of literature, something which allowed us to avoid the problems
mentioned above, and more (cf. Bortolussi 2003; Green et al. 2002; Hakemulder 2000;
Johnson et al. 2013; Maio and Haddock 2012; Oatley 2011).
For one, we clearly discerned what exactly we would measure and how. Our project
focused on studying changes in attitudes toward animals and in order to do so it employed a
special questionnaire based on the Animal Attitudes Scale developed by the anthrozoology
scholar Harold Herzog (Herzog et al. 1991; Herzog et al. 2015; Herzog 2010). This method
of measuring attitudes, widely employed in experimental social psychology, allowed us to
study shifts in animal attitudes in a way that would be quantifiable, reliable, and fine-grained.
In order to avoid the problem of impression management, we made sure that our studies
would be blind, i.e. that our participants would not know what the study was actually about
(Nichols and Maner 2008). This was achieved by all sorts of standard masking procedures that
psychologists typically use, including, for instance, presenting our studies as ostensibly
concerning a topic that would be different from the actual one and that would allow us to
bury our questionnaire items among items that would be unrelated to animals.
In order to assure the generalizability of the results, we also made sure to conduct our
studies on people with all kinds of demographic characteristics and on various texts. Our
subjects were men and women of all ages, from teenagers to octogenarians, and from different
educational backgrounds. Our texts represented various national literatures and genres and
touched on all sorts of animal-related topics. They included a journalistic piece on brain
transplants in monkeys by the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, the famous episode of horse
beating by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and others (Fallaci 2010; Dostoyevsky 1993: 56–58).

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And finally, we compared the impact which these narratives had on their readers with the
results of a control group, something which allowed us to avoid the problems related to the
so-called placebo effect. The placebo effect and the idea of the control group is perhaps best
known from clinical trials of drugs. The decades of conducting such trials have made
researchers aware that it in order to establish whether a given drug has a desired therapeutic
effect, it is not enough to simply give a group of sick people a pill and then see if they get
better. This is because even if they do get better, this may be due to the fact that they simply
believed they would get better and, in fact, anything that could make them believe so, for
instance, a sugar pill with no active substance in it, could lead to that effect too (Shaughnessy
et al. 2006: 200). This is precisely the placebo effect, and in order to neutralize it, aside from
giving a pill with active substance to one group of patients, researchers also give a placebo
(usually, a sugar pill) to another group of patients, and then compare the results. In our
experiments we proceeded analogously, with this difference that our active substance pill was
an animal narrative and our sugar pill was a narrative with an unrelated content.
We have conducted more than a dozen such experiments, but here I would like to discuss
only one of them, in which we joined forces with the bestselling crime fiction author Marek
Krajewski, whose works have been widely popular in our country, Poland, and which have
also done considerably well abroad, with the number of languages into which they have been
translated exceeding 20 (Brownell 2014). Our cooperation with the author consisted, first, in
his agreeing to include an animal narrative in his forthcoming book (Krajewski 2014). The
story was written according to our guidelines and depicted the plight of a capuchin monkey
who is first captured from its natural habitat, then sold to European traders, only to be
subjected to various forms of cruel exploitation, such as brutal circus training.
Another important part of our cooperation consisted in Krajewski’s encouraging a large
number of his readers to take part in our study and to provide a believable cover for it. So some
time before the official date of the publication of his novel, Krajewski informed his Facebook
followers that he had started a cooperation with psychologists who would like to know more
about the personality of his readers, and that the readers themselves could significantly help with
the process. In order to do so, they would have to fill out a questionnaire about their personality
and worldviews. And what is more, those willing to do so would be able to read an excerpt
from his forthcoming book and win a copy, provided they correctly answered a question related
to it. Those who agreed to take part in this quiz, as it was called, would then be directed to a
special website and first offered to read an excerpt from the book.
This is precisely how our experiment started, because what the participants did not know
was that there would be two excerpts, one about the monkey (the active substance pill) and one
with an unrelated content (the placebo), and that they would be randomly selected to read one
or the other before filling in the questionnaire (cf. Shaughnessy et al. 2006: 194–96). In this way
we were able to establish our control and experimental groups, which were enormous for the
standards of psychological research, with each exceeding 900 people. Thanks to this and other
procedures that we used, the results we obtained were statistically significant and generalizable.
They showed that our text significantly improved our participants’ attitudes toward animals.
The statistical details of these results, as well as a discussion of their psychological, practical, and
ethical implications, along with a detailed description of our procedure, the questionnaire, and
the text we used, can be found in our article published in open access in the journal PLOS One
(Małecki et al. 2016), and instead laying them out here, I would like to mention two things.
First, the example of the Krajewski study can help answer one worry that is sometimes
expressed by literary scholars about studying literature experimentally, and this is that literary
reading is a process so complex and intimate that it cannot be studied in experimental settings.

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Literary reading, after all, involves being completely absorbed in a text, something which
demands the proper circumstances (the right mood, the right time, and the right place, one
that the reader finds comfortable), and such circumstances are hardly to be found in
experimental settings (Miall 2006).
To put it in more technical terms, the worry is that the results of experiments on literary
reading would be possessed of low ecological validity (Kellogg 2002: 120). Such experiments
would study literary reading in artificial (experimental) conditions and their results would be
artificial too, not having much to do with how people actually read books. But note how
(thanks to our cooperation with Marek Krajewski) our study retained a relatively high level of
ecological validity. The participants participated in the quiz voluntarily and read the texts not
because they were told to by experimenters, but because they were curious to know their
content. They also read the text in the settings of their choice, the way they would normally
read an excerpt from a forthcoming novel published online.
Note that our result was not only statistically significant and ecologically valid, but was also
corroborated by 12 other experiments conducted on other people and with the use of other
texts. This is precisely why I allowed myself the extravagant claim that experimental ecocriti-
cism may be beneficial also to the larger public and the environment itself. Recall Heberlein’s
results showing the fiasco of the environmental education. According to Heberlein, the fiasco is
in large part due to the educator’s excessive reliance on what he calls the cognitive fix, the idea
that giving people the relevant information will suffice to change their attitudes (Heberlein
2012a: 4; Simis et al. 2016). It has not sufficed thus far and it never will because, Heberlein
argues, attitudes contain a significant emotional component that is resistant to cognitive fixes
(cf. Haidt 2001). Why did our narratives work then? Weren’t they simply giving people
information about the plight of animals? Of course not, because, like any other literary text,
they engaged the readers’ affects and many other mental capacities (cf. Goldman 2013: 82–83).
It may turn out, then, that literature (and art more generally) is not merely an additional
measure of raising environmental awareness, but its key element.
This has yet to be confirmed, and is therefore another subject for experimental ecocriticism
to take up, along with such questions as whether the impact of environmental literature
depends on the narrative structures it deploys, its themes, stylistic features and the like, and
how exactly this kind of literature affects our minds, brains, and behaviors (cf. Weik von
Mossner 2017). The results may be surprising and inspiring, as were the results of some of our
own studies, for instance those on whether the impact of animal narratives depends on whether
the story is perceived as fictional or not and whether its animal protagonist is perceived as
evolutionarily close to humans (Małecki et al. forthcoming). Some of these studies pointed us to
things that had been dreamt of neither by us nor, we believe, by other ecocritics, and allowed us
an insight into the workings of literature that could not be allowed by other methods.
These, then, would be the profits of experimental ecocriticism, which can give us both a
firmer grip on some of our old claims and evidence for some new claims, with this
knowledge having potentially important practical applications in either case. But even if this
sounds promising, there are still some worries that experimental ecocriticism must address,
worries that are far deeper theoretically and far more fundamental than those we have already
mentioned. I would like to conclude this chapter by addressing them.

What experimental ecocriticism is not

Whenever I happen to give a lecture on experimental ecocriticism or merely talk about it
with my colleagues, I always encounter skeptical reactions. Given the novelty and

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unorthodox nature of this field, such reactions are only to be expected, but what is more
intriguing are the reasons behind them. When I ask my critics to articulate them, it very often
turns out that their main worry is that experimental ecocriticism is motivated by scientism, a
view that since “science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is and of what is not that
it is not,” all fields of knowledge should dutifully adopt its methods or at least imitate them as
best as they can (Sellars 1997: 83; Robinson and Williams 2014). Such a view is particularly
worrying to my critics given the current crisis of the humanities, which are rapidly retreating
before the triumphant advance of the STEM fields, leaving behind them a trail of extin-
guished departments, lost jobs, and an air of despair and frustration. Could experimental
ecocriticism, with its emphasis on experimental methods and statistical significance, be an
opportunistic reaction to this advance or perhaps even its fifth column?
Since some readers may share these worries, let me explain that I reject thus understood scientism
and believe that experimental ecocriticism does not have to do anything with it per se. I can do so
consistently while at the same time advocating the benefits of experimental methods, because I adopt
a Darwinian theory of knowledge, proposed by philosophical pragmatism, according to which rather
than instruments of copying, or representing, reality, our beliefs are rather instruments of coping with
it (McGranahan 2017; Misak 2013: 14; Rorty 1998: 186; Price 2010: 320). Looking from this
perspective, pragmatism sees the ultimate test of any method or theory in whether it can be a good
tool for a given job, and concludes that scientism is a bad idea precisely because there are legitimate
scholarly purposes for which scientific methods are useless (Rorty 1991).
The same goes for experimental methods in ecocriticism. In proposing experimental ecocriti-
cism, I would like to argue for nothing more, and nothing less, than that there are some aspects of
ecocriticism where experimental methods may be useful. For instance, if one wants to know if
literature really works, if it changes people’s minds and behavior, experimental methods are the
place to go, whether they come from experimental social psychology or neurology or other fields.
They just happen to provide the most reliable results. But experimental methods do not have to be
adopted in ecocriticsm all across the board. They do not have to become its “foundation,” “basis,”
or any such thing. Indeed, they should not, because there are plenty of respectable goals of
ecocriticism where these methods would be of no use whatsoever or where they would be more
trouble than they are worth, including, for instance, in the history of environmental literature.
This is also why experimental ecocriticsm cannot work properly without the other kinds of
ecocriticism, including those which adopt typical humanistic methods and which can provide it
with important insights about environmental literature that itself cannot generate. This is also why
it offers its own results as a friendly advice rather than the law to be laid down. And this is also
why, finally, it can be said to extend or supplement the original project of ecocriticsm rather than
abandon it. Doing experimental ecocriticism, after all, is rather like going back to the roots in
order to help the plant grow stronger rather than to tear it from the ground altogether.1

Note
1 This work was supported by the National Science Center, Poland (grant number: 2012/07/B/HS2/
02278).

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 19
GREY LITERATURE, GREEN
GOVERNANCE
James R. Goebel

A study of grey, boring things

This chapter is, in a way, a call to study boring things.1 More specifically, it is a call to develop
critical reading practices for the grey literature of green governance—for the documents, that is,
which permeate and make possible that very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as
its target the relation between population and environment, as its principal form of knowledge
political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.2 Many aspects of
this body of literature are singularly unexciting. Pick up an environmental impact statement (EIS),
for example, and you may find yourself with the unenviable task of carefully analyzing 11,000
pages of administrative process flowcharts; rubrics of assessment and classification; a range of data
visualizations, including line and bar graphs, scatterplots, and cartograms; and, of course, black
text printed on white paper with the margins justified, the purpose of which (I’ve been told) is to
give the impression of densely packed blocks of information.3 That is to say, you may find
yourself inhabiting a textual milieu so bureaucratically regimented, so terribly pleonastic that
you’re likely to find it rather difficult—if not undesirable—to admit the document’s status as an
aesthetic object; to defend the claim that, as with any literary text, it does indeed contain a
particular narrative structure and style, generic conventions that can be identified and described, as
well as a rich intertextual history. It takes some digging to unearth the dramas interred in such a
text, to restore narrative to an object so seemingly hell-bent on denying its narrative qualities, so
capable of receding from the kinds of attention required for critical scrutiny.
Yet, the grey literature of green governance can highlight a productive common ground
between the disciplinary perspectives and methodologies of ecocriticism and environmental
communication studies. While ecocritics have largely focused on analyzing traditional literary
form as an expression of specific environmental values and epistemological habits, environmental
communication specialists have been productively indiscriminate on the matter of genre,
focusing instead on the media and the sociological conditions by which environmental information
is transmitted, as well as its effects on individuals, institutions, and society more generally. The
result has been something of a lacuna in analytical attention between the two fields—a gap
opened in the space between form and medium, between the expressions and the conditions of
sociocultural life. To address this lacuna, sections “Grey literature and the ‘modern’ problem of
communication” and “Green governance and the ‘modern’ problem of nature” explore the

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 Grey literature, green governance

entangled histories and legacies of grey literature and green governance, respectively, the
purpose of which is to pose two interrelated questions. First, how does the form of a
cultural object affect its capacity to both cite and extend entrenched networks of mediation,
as well as hegemonic patterns of subjectivity, institutionality, and collective social life?
Second, and conversely, how do the sociological conditions of a specific historical and
cultural context facilitate and/or stall the circulatory speed at which certain forms are able
to “catch on” and be repeated? Put another way, why is it that 19th- and 20th-century
Anglo-American environmental literature became the template upon which the procedures
of environmental assessment were developed and ultimately naturalized in the United States
during and after the 1970s?

Grey literature and the “modern” problem of communication

In the late 1970s, the Commission of the European Communities and the British Library
Lending Division organized a seminar in York, England, the purpose of which was to discuss
methods for improving the accessibility and circulation of information contained in scientific
reports produced within Member States.4 It was during the York Seminar that “grey literature”
was officially introduced and approved as a distinct category to be used in the library and
information sciences. Yet, as Vilma Alberani and Paolo de Castro (2001) note,
Many of the participants of the 1978 Seminar had never heard of grey literature, a term
which appeared for the first time in the list of the keywords of LISA (Library and
Information Science Abstracts) in 1976, not as an original keyword, but as a translation
of “graue Literatur,” a term that is somewhat older. Despite many attempts to formulate
a more precise description, the definition and the examples given in York to this type of
literature are still valid: it is “nonconventional literature, not issued through the normal
commercial publication channels.”
(236–37)5
In the 40 years since its official debut, grey literature has been variously described as “fugitive,”
“informal,” “nonconventional,” and “ephemeral,” as the stuff which “falls through the cracks”
(Merrigan and McKimmie 2002: 278). And it has encompassed materials as diverse as technical
specifications, corporate memos, institutional bulletins, conference proceedings, government
finance reports, unpublished manuscripts, product catalogues, academic courseware, and even
lecture notes (Farace and Schöpfel 2010: 4). More recently, in response to “the changing
electronic landscape” (Pace 2002: 44), grey literature has embraced digital and online media as
well, including a wide range of institutional websites (Hopewell and Rothstein 2009: 110), maps
(McGlamery 2000: 5), data sets (Berard and Bobick 2011: 137), blog posts, and social media
updates (Banks 2010: 218–30). Today, the most commonly cited definition for grey literature is a
slight modification to the so-called “Luxembourg Definition” discussed and approved during the
Third International Conference on Grey Literature in 1997: “Information produced on all levels
of government, academics, business, and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not
controlled by commercial publishers, i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the
producing body” (Farace and Schöpfel 2010: 1).6 Historically, then, grey literature has functioned
both as a retronym applied to older and more established forms of non-conventional literature,
and as an open-ended category capable of adapting to the ever-changing sociotechnical condi-
tions of specific historical and cultural contexts.
But the legacies of the York Seminar extend beyond the purely conceptual. Taryn
Rucinski (2015), Supervisory Librarian at the US Court of International Trade, explains:

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After 1945 but prior to 1979, the collection, cataloguing, and dissemination of grey
materials were ad hoc. Grey literature was either housed in “dark archives” or
limited to the skills, networks, and finding aids of librarians and a few key services,
including the Engineering Societies Library, U.S. Government Printing Office,
National Technical Information Service, or interlibrary loan. The term “grey
literature” debuted at a 1978 conference held in York, England, . . . thereby
ushering in . . . the modern grey literature movement.
(546–47)7
This movement matured through the launch of several national and international programs
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including the now defunct System for Information on Grey
Literature (SIGLE) created in 1980 and funded by the European Association for Grey Literature
Exploitation until 1985, as well as its relaunch as the open access repository OpenSIGLE in
2005; the Grey Literature Network Service (GreyNet) created in 1992; and the US-specific
GreyNet Service established in 2001, the various databases of which were later combined and
made freely searchable by the Department of Energy after the service was discontinued in 2007.
“Today,” Rucinski writes, “the grey literature community continues to explore and challenge
conventional norms through its international conference series . . . and through its publications
in the Grey Journal” (548).
Yet, what of those years between 1945 and 1979, so often neglected in historical accounts of
this “specialized form of literature” (Auger 1975: “Preface”)? As will be demonstrated here, grey
literature’s emergence not only as a distinct category but also as one of the central problematics
in information management was in no small part due to the information-gathering activities of
the Allies in the aftermath of the post-World War II atomic era, as well as major changes in the
institutional contexts, support, and utilizations of scientific knowledge production. To trace the
history of this problematic is, I argue, to trace both tectonic shifts in the topography of geopolitical
power, as well as major transformations in the processes by which scientific information has been
produced, circulated, and controlled since the mid-20th century.
Prior to the York Seminar, the vast and unwieldy body of grey material was collectively
referred to as “reports literature.” The history of reports literature has been traced to various
points of origin in the US and the UK, including the start of the Professional Papers of the US
Geological Survey in 1902; the Reports & Memoranda series of the UK Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, which began appearing in 1909; and the publication of The Behavior of
Aeroplanes in Gusts in 1915 by the US National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.8
Despite differences in genealogical emphasis, however, there is general consensus that the
report did not become a major means of communication until the Second World War, in
general, and until the creation of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development
(OSRD) in 1941, in particular, the purpose of which was to mobilize the nation’s scientific
resources and apply the results to national defense. Writing in 1975, library scientist
Charles P. Auger had this to say:
The basis for the expansion was the realization that the report was the most suitable
way of presenting the results of the thousands of research projects necessary to
promote the war effort. With the cessation of hostilities the OSRD was disbanded,
but since there was no respite in research and development (R&D) activities, and
consequently no abatement in the flow of reports, there arose an urgent need for a
central agency to maintain the bibliographical control system which OSRD had
adopted for the identification of the projects in its charge.
(10)9

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The urgency of this need would not diminish. On the contrary, by the 1960s, the output of
scientific and technical reports in particular, but also of reports of all kinds, had grown to a
flood.10 Auger describes a common response during this period to the growing concerns of
information specialists over the continually increasing quantity of literature appearing in the
shape of reports: “the reply is invariably that such information is not intended to form a part
of the permanent literature, and consequently any problems that arise will be purely
temporary. Unfortunately,” he continued, “this sanguine view is belied by the overwhelming
evidence of the durability of reports and by their frequent citation in bibliographies and
reading lists of all kinds” (3).
The US Committee on Scientific and Technical Information (COSATI) was the first to
commission a comprehensive study of the challenges and opportunities provided by reports
literature. In 1967, COSATI assembled a Task Group of eight information specialists
representing the point of view of government, industry, and academics. The assignment
was to
Appraise the role of the Technical Report in the scientific-engineering communica-
tion process in order to: (1) recommend methods for improving its quality and
usefulness, (2) rationalize its interface with the other media for communication such
as professional society and other technical journals, symposia proceedings, and
books, and (3) continue to satisfy and to enhance the Government-sponsor techni-
cal-agent contractual relationship.
(COSATI 1968: 3)
More specifically, the Panel was asked to “view these questions from a broad economic, social,
and behavioral point of view,” which it did by supplementing the experience of its members
with a “comprehensive review of the literature on the subject of scientific communication, as
well as by visits and conferences with various elements of the scientific and technical commu-
nity, publishing institutions, Government sponsors of research, and handlers of the literature”
(3–4).11 The results of this study were submitted in a report to the Federal Council for Science
and Technology in December 1968, and made publicly available as “a contribution to the
discussion of an important and complicated problem” (“Foreword”).
As with most—if not all—government studies, the COSATI report opens with a succinct
“Statement of the Problem”:
Primarily as a result of the enormous Government involvement with scientific
research and development, there has arisen a body of technical information variously
known as source reports, R&D reports, documents, etc., (to be referred to as
technical reports hereafter) whose value to the scientific and technical communication process
has been questioned, and the proliferation of which has strained the finances and
handling and retrieval capabilities of the communities’ channels for communication.
(3, emphasis added)
The significance of this statement is subtle, but essential for the way in which it frames the
problem—rhetorically and epistemologically—as an ecological problem. Government involve-
ment, scientific research and development, reports literature, etc., are represented as individ-
uated elements in a network held together by transitive relation; and it is “the interactions
between these elements and the substitutional nature of one element for another” that are
described as “the dynamics of the total communication process” (8). If the technical report’s
value to the scientific community can be put into question—as the above passage suggests—so
too can the communication network in which scientific knowledge production happens.

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Interestingly, the Task Group turned to the methods of genealogy, suggesting that before
one can appraise the role of the technical report in scientific and technological communication,
it is first necessary to appraise “early attitudes about the scientific and technical community and
the communication process therein”—attitudes, moreover, which had grown into a convention
wisdom on the subject despite enormous changes in the societal involvement of science and
technology, its support, and in the techniques for communication. Writes the Task Group:
“We believe it worthwhile to describe and evaluate these elements in detail, and to explicitly
try to separate out ‘old myths’ from ‘new realities’ because we feel that this is essential to a
modern appreciation of the problem of communication” (5, emphasis added). Essential to this
“modern”12 sensibility is a critique of
The ennobling image of classical science . . . perhaps best illustrated in the traditional
concept of an investigator, freely sharing his observations with academic peers, and
seeking out their detailed review and criticism so that his work can profit from the
self-correcting feedback process which is often held up as the hallmark of the
“scientific method.” The scientific literature itself has been represented as the
evolving fabric of the collective scientific intelligence, transcending individual
minds and national and temporal boundaries.
(5–6)
For the “pre-modern” image of classical science, the transmission of scientific knowledge
does not arise as a problem. Instead, it is insured by the transcendental figure of the archive,
where the
public printed record . . . is the universal device that transcends the barriers of space
and time[, . . .] making the most recent advances of human knowledge accessible to
students and scholars throughout the world [and extending] into the past through an
unbroken sequence of communications.
(Overhage 1967: 804; COSATI 1968: 6)13
But, the Task Group sought to demonstrate, this ennobling image of classical science was no
longer tenable. Rather, it had been severely undermined by modern attempts to “delve more
deeply into these traditional concepts using some of the quantitative tools available to the
practitioners of the newly emerging ‘Science of Science’” (7).
Derek J. de Solla Price, a physicist and historian of science and a recurring reference in the
COSATI report, was a leading practitioner in this emergent field. By the 1960s, Price had
developed quantitative and computerized methods for measuring the exponential growth of
scientific research, as well as the half-life of its literature.14 In “The Ethics of Scientific
Publication,” an article published in Science in 1964, Price made the following pronounce-
ment (I quote at length):
The naïve assumption is that there exists an immortal record of open publication
where each man is entitled to present his findings and where each paper is subject to
scrutiny by a jury of colleagues from all countries and, indeed, all times. It is known
now that this assumption is basic to much of the motivation of scientists, and that the
lure of such impersonal and objective immortality is a veritable spring of creativity.
Unfortunately, so much of this assumption is now suspect that we begin to feel it was nothing
more than another of the several pious and prudish Victorian ideals deliberately promulgated
in the late 19th century as a picture of what science would be like if it were perfect and
pristine. There seems to be no evidence that this is now, or has ever been, much better than a

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fairy tale. In the first place, we now know with some precision that the greater part of
the scientific literature includes material from informal communication. In the second place,
the immortality of the record appears to be weaker than had been supposed. It can be
shown, from network analysis of scientific literature, that only a small part of the literature
has a usefulness that lasts after the intense localized research front has passed it by (Price
1964: 655; COSATI 1968: 7).15
If the Victorian image of classical science was sustained by fantasies of a universal,
transparent, and permanent archive, and the Victorian scientist by the lure of an impersonal
and objective immortality, the modern science of science brought to the fore the provinciality,
opacity, and ephemerality of scientific knowledge production, as well as the historical facticity
and finitude of the practitioner. Price’s declaration thus highlights the contours of a funda-
mental discontinuity—an epistemic rupture that would now require information specialists to
abandon the abstract clarity of the transcendental and instead attend to the immanent
networks and densely situated contexts in which scientific information is produced, circu-
lated, and controlled—to understand communication in “this new science-technology
milieu” (COSATI 1968: 13) as an inherently problematic process.
While the COSATI report cites Price’s pronouncement as a “disturbing observation” (7)—
one we must nonetheless accept if we wish to be modern—it provides a rather vague and not-
so-Pricean account of the generative force for this epistemic rupture. Writes the Task Group:
In recent times many important changes in the organization of scientific institutions
and in the support and utilization factors of scientific endeavor have caused
analogous changes in scientific and technological communication patterns which
have introduced new media and placed greater pressures upon the older media.
(9)
In Little Science, Big Science (1963), on the other hand, Price was much more specific in his
description of the postwar reorganization of scientific research in the US along large-scale,
capital-intensive, and corporate lines; and of the means by which research output increasingly
became an important contributor to matters of economic growth and national power.16 Still,
the COSATI report provides a fairly sober—if somewhat hyperbolic—account of the effects
of this reorganization:
Greater and wider participation in research in all phases of public and private
endeavor have led to the phenomena characterized by the term “information
explosion.” Science and its twin, technology, have become a big and important
business intimately involved with the most vital and significant aspects of our life in
the universe, closely related to our security, the satisfaction of our needs and wants, and the
understanding and control of our environment. The stakes in the success of the business of
science and technology are high, for individuals, institutions, states and geographical
areas, and indeed for mankind as a whole.
(9, emphasis added)
The problem, however, is that the modern problem of communication had shown that, “in
regard to the realities of resources and utilization,” science largely “follows the flag. . . .
Whether this is intellectually satisfying or not,” the Task Group argued, “the facts of modern
science and technology are that scientific results have become proprietary to the needs of
institutions and governments” (9).
From the wreckage of the information explosion, there emerged a new epistemological
figure: the information resource. Not so much a thing as the effect of new discourses,

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institutions, and technologies of administrative control, the information resource is never

so much described as it is both actively constituted as an object of knowledge and,
through various modes of positive intervention, managed and policed. With the mid-
20th-century industrialization of science, scientific knowledge production is no longer the
taken-for-granted basis of human progress, but is instead problematized and constituted as
a domain of social concern and potential political conflict.17 This problematic, moreover,
was placed at the center of a postwar desire to securitize the nation from internal and
external threats (“our security”), expand American markets on a global scale (“our needs
and wants”), and “enrich understanding of the ecological systems and natural resources
important to the Nation” (NEPA 1970: Sec. 2). For these reasons, the federal govern-
ment began to express concern with “the viability of the scientific communication
channels[,] . . . opportunities for disseminating the information resulting from its pro-
grams[,] . . . [and] the well-being of this scientific communication ‘resource’,” and, by the
1960s, “sponsored a large number of improved tools, indexing systems, secondary
journals, library innovations, and specialized information and analysis services to provide
more expeditious and effective exploitation of technical information” (COSATI 1968:
13). For these reasons, the Task Group closed its report with the following statement:
In conclusion, we believe that the strength of science and technology and the effective
and efficient communication of information which is basic to it, should be a primary and
continuing concern of the public and the Government. In our plural society there are
many types of institutions and organizations which contribute to this successful enterprise.
This has been rationalized both with regard to our economy and in the manner of
conducting R&D. Likewise, there are many types of communication media that enable
this system to thrive. We believe that this diversity of techniques and opportunities is a
healthy phenomenon and, providing opportunities exist for useful change and innovation
without undue controls and with enlightened support and cooperation, we believe that
progress will continue to result and the Nation’s business and welfare to prosper.
(67–68)
It would be rather difficult—if not impossible—to overstate the influence of the COSATI report
to the discourse of information management during and after the York Seminar. Even today,
it is often evoked both in calls for continued investment in the development of information
science and in arguments for the importance of this field to matters of national security,
economic growth, and environmental management. Of more general importance, however,
is that the COSATI report highlights a series of intensifications in the operations of liberal
governmentality.
When Foucault (1991) clarified what he meant by “governmentality,” he described two of
three features as follows:

1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the
calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form
of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political
economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led
towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of
power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of
a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development
of a whole complex of savoirs (102–3).

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The emergence of governmentality during the late 18th to early 19th century also marked for
Foucault the birth of biopolitics; of a moment in which the body—whether the anatomical
body of the individual (Foucault 1995: 164) or the social body of the population (Foucault
1978: 25)—became a new target and site of power. Yet, if biopolitics is characterized by a
preoccupation with the administration of “Life,” the COSATI report indexes the develop-
ment of an intense preoccupation with the design and implementation of sociotechnical
systems able to record, organize, circulate, and indeed actively produce the information
necessary for the exercise of biopower. We might therefore say that biopolitics presupposes
infopolitics, a form of administrative control not reducible to the definition and administration of
life. Infopolitics is not simply—or even primarily—concerned with “informational persons,”18
but with the hardware, software, technical specifications, data, people, groups, and institutions
that make up information systems. Information systems are ecological—relational technologies
which conceptually and physically formalize social and material relations, often in terms of a
system–environment relationship.19
I am not suggesting here that the importance of information is unique to the 20th
century. What I am suggesting, however, is that the appearance of the information resource
in the aftermath of the post-World War II atomic era registers a series of intensifications in
the operations of infopolitical power, intensifications which require us to use more than the
faculties of judgment necessary to determine what constitutes “good” versus “bad” infor-
mation—or, more relevantly, “real” versus “fake” news—and an analysis of those cultural,
political, and economic conditions that shape these faculties. As the late anthropologist
Susan Leigh Star (1999) once wrote,
Many information systems employ what literary theorists would call a master
narrative, or a single voice that does not problematize diversity. This voice speaks
unconsciously from the presumed center of things. . . . Listening for the master
narrative and identifying it as such means identifying first with that which has been
made other, or unnamed.
(384–85)
With this, I turn to the dominant processes by which environmental information has been
produced, communicated, and circulated since the Second World War, and to the master
narratives therein.

Green governance and the “modern” problem of nature

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) catalyzed what Richard Nixon
heralded in 1970 as “the environmental decade” (qtd. Culhane 1981: 2), a period in American
history of landmark legislation, institutional collaboration, and political momentum directed
toward environmental protection. In liberal accounts of NEPA’s legacies, the environmental
decade is represented as an essential turning point in the nation’s resource management policy
model—a departure from a previous model based on economic interests and political influence
toward a procedural approach grounded in the values of scientific objectivity and liberal
democracy. After all, NEPA established formal mechanisms for public participation in the
environmental planning and decision-making process. And it directed all federal agencies both
to “utilize a systematic, interdisciplinary approach which will insure the integrated use of the
natural and social sciences and environmental design arts,” and to “identify and develop
methods and procedures . . . which will insure that presently unquantified environmental
amenities and values may be given appropriate consideration in decision making along with

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economic and technical considerations” (Sec. 102). In this section, I focus on two of NEPA’s
most enduring legacies—the environmental impact assessment process (EIA) and the environ-
mental impact statement (EIS) genre—and a Foucauldian-inspired re-evaluation of the envir-
onmental decade.
Contrary to the liberal narrative, Paul Rutherford (1999) has argued that EIA goes beyond
legislating for “a science-based, ‘rational-comprehensive’ assessment and decision-making
process.” Instead, he writes, this process is better understood as
operating in a highly flexible, self-regulating manner, involving continuous mediation
between the internal formation of environmental programs and objectives within
organizations . . . and the external political and economic context within which these
operate. This suggests that EIA promotes the implementation of environmental man-
agement programs not simply through direct coercion, but through a governmental
rationality that establishes norms and procedures which channel problem solving in a
particular direction, and which stimulate administrative agencies and other social actors
to be both innovative and effective in the implementation of ecological goals.
(57)
On this account, the particular strength of EIA is that it both cites and extends the principles of
scientific ecology, while also producing, mediating, and naturalizing the parameters of “proper”
environmental knowledge and practice determined by such principles. Thus—and this should
sound familiar—EIA “does not so much describe the environment as both actively constitute it as
an object of knowledge and, through various modes of positive intervention, manage and police
it.” For Rutherford, the rise of applied systems ecology in the wake of the Second World War, as
well as its central role in “certifying what is to count as scientifically acceptable knowledge of the
natural world” (56), can help explain two phenomena: first, the modern belief that “nature can be
managed or governed through the application of the scientific principles of ecology”; and,
second, the means by which scientific ecology “has become a political resource that in important
respects constitutes the objects of government and, at the same time, provides the intellectual
machinery essential for the practice of such government” (37).
“Ecology and environmental management,” Rutherford explains, “can be regarded as expres-
sions of biopolitics, as these originate in, and operate upon, the same basic concerns for managing
the ‘continuous and multiple relations’ between the population, its resources, and the environ-
ment” (45). If the military-industrial reorganization of scientific research required information
specialists to attend to the immanent networks and densely situated contexts in which scientific
knowledge production happens, so too has it sounded a call to environmental critics to attend to
the specifically environmental dimensions of biopower, rendering more complex the way in
which we understand the body as the target and site of power. Writes Rutherford:
Not only are we forced to deal with the individual “anatomical” body and the social
body, and the relations between these, but we must also take into account an
ecological dimension in which the focus is on the relationship between the social
body and the biological species body. This is not to suggest that there will not be new
forms of discipline and normality directed at the individual level (indeed, these
would appear to be a necessary component in ecological governmentality), but that,
as with areas of social policy such as public health, the ecological is primarily
biopolitical in nature—that is, it is manifested in specific regulatory controls aimed
at the population, albeit from a somewhat different perspective.
(45)

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Rutherford and his colleagues have been instrumental to expanding Foucault’s work on
governmentality, biopolitics, and discipline, the purpose of which has been to accommodate
an increased academic interest in environmental issues since the late 1990s. This body of
research has devoted significant intellectual energy towards developing a more expansive
analytical paradigm focused on the operations of ecopolitical power.
Stephanie Rutherford (2007), for example, has argued that Foucault’s work
can be centrally important in analyzing the production and circulation of discourses
of nature if we extend the concept of biopower to include all life. . . . [B]iopolitics
can [therefore] be reframed as ‘ecopolitics,’ where concern for the conditions of the
national population is subsumed under more intensified attempts to manage the
planet’s environment.
(297)20
Similarly, in the volume A Foucault for the 21st Century (2009), Sébastian Malette argues that
Foucault’s problematization of modern governmentality can be enlarged by insisting that
the problems of ‘life,’ ‘environment,’ and ‘government’ have now coincided with
the emergence of ‘ecopolitics,’ crystallizing as such a nexus of power/knowledge
which deeply reorganizes in a relational way the three movements constitutive of
modern governmentality, namely: government, population, and political economy.
(230)
Insofar as the ecopolitical paradigm problematizes the historiographic idioms of rupture and
discontinuity used in most liberal accounts, as well as the notion that the environmental decade
marked a progressive turn toward a more “productive and enjoyable harmony between man
and his environment” (NEPA Sec. 2), I am in agreement. Moreover, I find convincing
Rutherford’s analysis of the EIA process as well as the more general claims that the postwar
liberal state has increasingly relied on extensive systems of scientific advisory structures that
have become integral to environmental and public health policymaking.21 I depart from this
paradigm, however, in two ways.
First, there is a recurring tendency to make equivocations between “the environment” and
such cognates as nature, ecological systems, and natural resources. This is, perhaps, unsurpris-
ing. Yet, Congress declared that NEPA’s purpose was to “enrich the understanding of the
ecological systems and natural resources important to the nation” (Sec. 2), its aims included
“assur[ing] for all Americans safe, healthful, productive, and aesthetically and culturally
pleasing surroundings,” as well as “preserv[ing] important historic, cultural, and natural aspects
of our national heritage” (Sec. 101). While much has been said of the role of the natural
sciences in shaping the emergence of new practices for natural resource management during
and after the 1970s, very little has been said of the role of (for example) public historians,
landscape architects, and artists in shaping the emergence of new practices for cultural and
visual resource management during this same period.22 The function of “the environment” in
NEPA is something like a dispositif. It holds together “the ecological,” “the historic,” “the
cultural,” and “the aesthetic” as categories which—to reiterate—are never so much described
as both actively constituted as objects of knowledge and, through various modes of positive
intervention, managed and policed. These elements and their management are represented as
crucial to preserving this vaguely defined—yet narrow—notion of “our national heritage.”
NEPA thus generates a sense of homogeneity, transparency, and continuity in an otherwise
heterogeneous, opaque, and discontinuous assemblage of discourses, objects, and methods—in
the natural sciences, yes, but also in the arts and the social and human sciences.

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My second departure from the ecopolitical paradigm follows from my conclusions in the
section “Grey literature and the ‘modern’ problem of communication.” As with Foucault,
recent scholarship on ecopolitics at worst neglects and at best de-emphasizes the infopolitical
infrastructure which makes possible the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of
power. Even in Rutherford’s insightful analysis of EIA, there is no mention of the EIS genre,
of the constitutive and reproductive function that such texts serve in mediating highly specific
forms of environmental rationality. This is important because NEPA mandated that for
“every recommendation or report on proposals for legislation and other major Federal actions
significantly affecting the quality of the human environment” (Sec. 102), the responsible
official must prepare and distribute an EIS—that is, a report assessing the potential impact of
development activities on not only the biological and ecological resources of a specific
planning area, but on its cultural and visual resources as well. As landscape architect and
environmental planner Richard C. Smardon (2016) explains,
In the 1960s and 1970s there were many funded and/or permitted federal projects that
were at a standstill because of a lack of public involvement and/or incorporation of
environmental and social values. With the passage of NEPA in 1970 there now had to
be incorporation of environmental values into the decision-making process. Aesthetics
is one of these values so the 1970s and 1980s saw an evolution and development of
visual landscape management systems by a number of Federal agencies.
(1333)
Visual resource management (VRM) systems consist of two stages. The first, visual resource
inventory, is a process that involves rating the visual appeal of a tract of land; measuring public
concern for scenic quality; determining whether a tract of land is visible from travel routes or
observation points; and, based on the above, assigning an area to a specific management class,
the goals of which can range from total preservation (Class I) to major modifications (Class IV).
The second, visual contrast rating, determines whether the potential visual impacts of proposed
surface-disturbing activities meet the management objectives established for an area by measur-
ing the contrast generated between the major features of the project and the existing landscape.
In a description of its VRM system, the USDI Bureau of Land Management writes,
Assessing scenic values and determining visual impacts can be a subjective process.
Objectivity and consistency can be greatly increased by using the basic design
elements of form, line, color, and texture, which have often been used to describe
and evaluate landscapes.
(“VRM System”)
As I argue elsewhere, such claims to objectivity and consistency rely on a formal capacity to
transform provincial cultural values and epistemological habits into global arrangements for
determining the parameters of “proper” environmental knowledge and practice.23 Indeed, it
can be shown from citation analysis that (a) pre-eminent Anglo-American (and mostly male)
nature writers of the 19th and 20th century populate the bibliographies of 1970s resource
management literature, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward
Abbey;24 (b) there is a consistent pattern in which these authors are cited to understand the
historical roots of (for example) the wilderness concept, but are then decontextualized as the
objective basis for developing, explaining, and legitimizing wilderness management proce-
dure; and (c) as various resource management systems were formalized in federal handbooks
published during the 1980s, such references to traditional literary works were omitted while
their overall frameworks for understanding and representing “the environment” remained

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intact. This suggests that while it is claimed that EIA is based on the values of scientific
objectivity and the processes of liberal democracy, and while EIS continues unproblema-
tized as the transparent recording of this process, both entrenched networks of mediation
and hegemonic patterns of subjectivity, institutionality, and collective social life continue to
shape—and, indeed, sustain—the discourse and politics of environmental governance in the
US. The grey literature of green governance is not simply a tool for communicating environ-
mental information. Instead, it is constitutive of the rules, ideologies, practices, subjectivities,
objects, outcomes, and organizations of ecopolitical power. That is to say, it is the means by
which very specific notions of “our security,” “our needs and wants,” and “understanding and
controlling our environment” are continually reproduced, contributing to what William
Mazzarella (2006) describes as a politics of immediation—that is, a “political practice that, in
the name of immediacy and transparency, occludes the potentialities and contingencies
embedded in the mediations that comprise and enable social life” (475).

Conclusion: bridging the gap

Visual resource management is based on a particular aesthetic philosophy developed in “that
crucible of modern environmentalism, the 19th-century American West” (Mazel 1996: 140).
More specifically, the idea that an environment’s visual resource values can be determined by
the basic design elements of line, form, color, and texture can be traced to the formalist
techniques of Anglo-American nature writers as they attempted to describe the arid regions of
the southwestern United States. Major John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado
River and Its Canyons (2003), early versions of which were published in Scribner’s long before it
was submitted as a report to the US Geological Survey, is one example. In describing the
region of the US drained by the Colorado and its tributaries, Powell often waivers between
measured descriptions of its topographical, geological, and meteorological features—a style
Catrin Gersdorf (2008) describes as “an exercise in geographical realism” (56)—and grander
descriptions that combine elements of 19th-century European romanticism and a peculiarly
American frontier ideology in an attempt to capture the West’s sublime displays of form, light,
and color. Now a classic in American exploration literature, The Exploration of the Colorado River
and Its Canyons deployed a rather clever set of tactics to overcome the limits of both Powell’s
ability to describe and his 19th-century audience’s ability to imagine this “strange, weird, grand
region” (206). John C. Van Dyke (1898), too, who it is said that provided “the first purely
aesthetic book-length treatment of the American deserts” and established “a model for literary
treatments of the region to this day” (Teague 1999: 128),25 once wrote:
The word ‘Nature,’ as it is used in these pages, does not comprehend animal life in
any form whatever. It is applied only to lights, skies, clouds, waters, lands, foliage—
the great elements that reveal form and color in landscape, the component parts of
the earth-beauty about us.
(ix)
“Under the desert sun,” Edward Abbey (1968) wrote describing the landscapes of the
Southwest,
the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. . . . What
does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies
beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.
(194)

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 James R. Goebel

In the introduction to this chapter, I asked (a) how the form of a cultural object affects its
capacity to both cite and extend entrenched networks of mediation, as well as hegemonic
patterns of subjectivity, institutionality, and collective social life; and (b) how the sociological
conditions of specific historical and cultural contexts facilitate and/or stall the circulatory
speed at which certain forms are able to catch on and be repeated. In the context of Anglo-
American expansion and settlement into the western United States during the 19th and early
20th centuries, formalism “caught on” precisely because it allowed representations of the
American West to be severed from the vicissitudes of historical and cultural difference—not
only are form, line, color, and texture understood as sufficient to appreciate an environment’s
scenic quality on this account, but anything more would be irrelevant—even potentially
destructive—to its aesthetic resource value. In the wake of the anti-colonial and new social
movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the citation and extension of this very specific literary
archive to develop and formalize environmental assessment procedure illuminates the parti-
culars of NEPA’s concern with preserving the “important historic, cultural, and natural
aspects of our national heritage” (Sec. 101). Its policies insure that dominant cultural values
and epistemological habits would not only be inscribed at the deepest levels of administrative
process, but that their repetition would normalize particular ways of understanding environ-
mental problems.
But an EIS performs its own work as well—an aesthetics of immediation, perhaps, a formal
capacity of such a text to deform itself, to obscure its mediating function in order to make a
claim upon objectivity and universality. The success of an EIS, from this perspective, is
measured not by how well it communicates environmental information but by how well it
reproduces and mediates the parameters of “proper” environmental knowledge and practice
while at the same time avoiding detection—its capacity to remain backgrounded as it shapes
and is shaped by the foreground, actively resisting the kinds of attention often required for
critical scrutiny.26 Focus solely on form-expression and you’re likely to miss the conditions by
which formalist techniques gained traction in the first place, and why they continue even today
in the grey literature of green governance. Attend only to media conditions and you’ll miss out
on how the repetition of form has the ability to shape the processes and networks by and
through which environmental information is produced, communicated, and received. Ecocritics
and environmental communication specialists are in a rather unique position to collaborate and
develop critical reading practices for the grey literature of green governance—to denaturalize
dominant modes of representing the environment and bring to the fore minoritarian ways of
imagining living in, relating to, and telling stories about environments.
By way of concluding, I would like to address my fellow literary critics. While I will insist
that we have much to contribute to the study of grey, boring things, there is a condition. If our
aim is to demonstrate how literary form can crystallize the larger and more abstract phenomena
of specific historical, cultural, and geographic contexts, it is important to expand—and to know
that we can expand—what it is that we mean by such form. If not, we run the risk of not only
maintaining an uncritical distinction between “conventional” and “nonconventional” literature,
but also of undermining the value of cultural production and its study before the question of
value is even posed. Most unfortunately, we foreclose the possibility of reading minoritarian
literary traditions with and against the grey literature of green governance—to consider how
such texts disarticulate the psychic, epistemological, and social infrastructures that continue to
shape the prevailing environmentalist paradigms of conservation, preservation, and sustainability.
This is something I’ve attempted to do in my work on post-1968 Latinx/Chicanx and Native
American poetry and prose. Against Abbey’s claim of the meaningless of the desert, for
example, one can read “Just Past Shiprock,” a short story from Navajo writer Luci Tapahonso’s

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Sáanii Dahataał, the women are singing (1993). The piece can lead one to consider how seemingly
“nondescript rocks” just outside Shiprock, New Mexico, can be anything but; how “those
particular rocks hold the haunting and lasting memory” of a baby girl, her death, and the grief
and remembrance rituals of her mother, father, and people:
We listened to the story, and since that time we have told the story many times
ourselves. Decades later, those particular rocks holding the haunting and lasting
memory of a little baby girl. This land that may seem arid and forlorn to the
newcomer is full of stories which hold the spirits of the people, those who live here
today and those who lived centuries and other worlds ago. The nondescript rocks
are not that at all, but rather a lasting and loving tribute to the death of a baby and
the continuing memory of her family.
(6)
“Just Past Shiprock” highlights the provincial and grossly myopic limits of the dominant modes
of living in, relating to, and telling stories about the Southwest—how the production and
circulation of environmental information often functions by disavowing the precarious qualities
of collective memory and the performative qualities of cultural knowledge.
What can be said of Tapahonso can be said of much of the literary works that have come
out of the Native American Renaissance of the late 1960s.27 Fight Back: For the Sake of the
People, For the Sake of Land (1980, in Ortiz 1992), a mix of poetry and prose written by
Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma) to commemorate the tricentennial of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, is a
paradigmatic example. In his introduction to Woven Stone (1992)—an anthology which
includes Going for the Rain (1976), A Good Journey (1977), and Fight Back—Ortiz writes,
Three hundred years later, some of those same conditions existed, a result this time of
a modern-day American society and the uranium industry. Corporate mining com-
panies required cheap labor—we were it. Grants, the mostly white boomtown, and its
businesses wanted profits—they took our hard-earned low wages. . . . American public
schools hardly mentioned us except as tribal participants, in fact hindrances, in
American progress and development. Christianity still mainly missionized, its members
praying for our still-heathen souls. The American political-economic system was
mainly interested in control and exploitation, and it didn’t matter how it was
achieved—just like the Spanish crown had been ignorant of people’s concerns and
welfare. I understood the reason for the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and with poetry and prose I
tried to express my perception and hope for the present and future in Fight Back.
(31, emphasis added)
Here, as throughout his work, Ortiz plays on the clarity of historical knowledge
transmitted through the storytelling practices of multiple generations, on the one hand,
and the ambiguities immanent to one’s perception of the present, on the other—an
ambivalence that is never so much resolved as it is endured and lived otherwise through
things like poetry. “When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than event,” writes
Patrick Wolfe (2006), “its history does not stop . . . when it moves on from the era of
frontier homicide.” In Ortiz’s reflection on the contrapuntal potentials of literary practice,
one finds a response to Wolfe’s claim that what is needed are ways of narrating settler
colonial history that involve “charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and
departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different
modalities, discourses, and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical develop-
ment and complexification of settler society” (402).

237
 James R. Goebel

Published in that twilight between the environmental decade of the 1970s and the
Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, Fight Back ends with a call to those vociferous critics of
the American political-economic system “spew[ing] poisons into the air, destroying plant,
animal, and human life” (361):
We must understand the experience of the oppressed, especially the racial and ethnic
minorities, of this nation, by this nation and its economic interests. Only when we
truly understand and accept the responsibilities of that understanding will we be able
to make the necessary decisions for change. . . . Only when we are not afraid to fight
against the destroyers, thieves, liars, exploiters, who profit handsomely off the land
and people will we know what love and compassion are.
(363)
As we find ourselves living in a similar transition between the environmental policies of the
Obama administration and the climate change denialism of the Trump era, it behooves us to
consider what those “necessary decisions” might be, to examine whether environmentalist
critiques of urban-industrial society are in the end sufficient, or whether there is a deeper
logic which makes these transitions more seamless than currently imagined. The disciplinary
perspectives and methodologies provided by ecocriticism and environmental communication
studies can provide useful tools on the way to addressing such questions.

Notes
1 This, as well as other parts of this paragraph, is a formulation borrowed and adapted from the
landmark 1999 essay, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” by the late anthropologist Susan Leigh
Star. Star’s work on information systems design and her insistence on the value of studying boring
things has been formative of my own study of grey, boring things in ways that I can’t even begin to
acknowledge. In the hopes of—in some way—addressing this insufficiency, I dedicate this chapter
to Susan, and express my regret at our not crossing temporal paths at the University of California,
Irvine. My gratitude to Valerie Olson as well for introducing me to Star’s work at a critical juncture
in my graduate school career.
2 This is a slight modification to Foucault’s definition of governmentality based on more recent
scholarship in critical environmental studies discussed in the section “Green governance and the
problem of ‘the environment’.”
3 My thanks to Anna Weichselbraun, who, during the Opaque Media workshop at UC Irvine in April
2018, taught me about all of the various ways in which documents can be aesthetically boring, and
introduced me to the linguistic anthropologist Richard Bauman (2000) and his work on genre on
entextualization.
4 Important to note is that during the York Seminar proceedings, a broader international debate surrounded
programs like “Universal Bibliographical Control” and “Universal Availability of Publications.”
5 On “graue Literatur,” see Hogeweg-de Haart (1985).
6 The clarificatory postscript, the “i.e.,” was added in 2004 during the Fourth International
Conference on Grey Literature in New York, New York.
7 On “dark archives,” see Berard and Bobick (2011).
8 In 1958, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was dissolved, with its assets and
personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration—or, as
it more popularly known as, NASA.
9 Important to note is that Auger, a librarian for the British aeronautics manufacturer Joseph Lucas,
Ltd., was instrumental to the discussions surrounding reports and grey literature. His part-mono-
graph, part-edited volume Use of Reports Literature (1975) introduced the concerns and arguments of
the COSATI report discussed below to a European audience, and he was crucial to the organization
and proceedings of the York Seminar.
10 The bulk of reports literature was still American in origin, but it had received significant contribu-
tions from Europe—most notably, from France, Germany, and Great Britain.

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11 In addition, the Task Group produced a provisional taxonomy for technical reports, the purpose of
which was to describe “the general archetypes in the phylum together with some discussion of the
review process and availability of each type” (COSATI 1968: 77), and conducted a survey poll of 30
principal American scientific journals to solicit editors’ views and comments on the relationship
between informally published technical reports and the body of more traditionally formal publica-
tions in academic journals (86).
12 I have decided to not use scare quotes every time I use the term “modern,” but instead to ask that
the reader assume their presence.
13 As my analysis here is of the Task Group’s literature review, I have decided to include both a reference to
source material cited and a reference to where its citation can be found in the COSATI report.
14 With these methods, Price (a) discovered that citation networks between scientific papers contain
power-law distributions, suggesting that the way an old vertex (existing paper) gets new edges (new
citations) should be proportional to the number of existing edges (existing citations) the vertex already
has (i.e., heavily cited papers are heavily cited, or what was referred to as “cumulative advantage” and
is now referred to as “preferential attachment”); and (b) to publish the first ever example of a scale-free
network, a structure which combines heterogeneity and randomness so that zooming in on any one
node in the structure’s distribution does not change its shape—the topology of webpages and the
power grid of the western United States are two other examples of scale-free networks.
15 See also Price (1965), “The Scientific Foundations of Science Policy.”
16 As Paul Rutherford argues in his account of the postwar emergence of ecopolitics (discussed below), it
was in this same context that applied systems ecology gained significant impetus as a political resource.
17 See Woodward (1980). For a similar argument regarding contemporary environmental politics, see
Cramer et al. (1989).
18 See Koopman (2014).
19 On the notion of a relation technology, see Olson (2018).
20 See also Darier (1999) and Luke (1999).
21 See Beck (1992) and Jasanoff (1990).
22 See Bastian and Bergstrom (1993), Carlson (2000), and Elsner and Smardon (1979).
23 See Goebel (2019).
24 See, for example, Gussow (1979), Hendee et al. (1978), Litton, Jr. (1979), and Opie (1979).
25 See Van Dyke (1980), The Desert.
26 I owe much of this analysis to research in anthropology and critical media and information studies.
See, for example, Bowker and Star (1999), Fuller and Goffey (2012), Harper (1998), Hull (2012),
and Riles (2006).
27 On the Native American Renaissance, see Lincoln (1983). I also suspect that what can be said of
Native American literature can also be said of most non-Anglo literary traditions, as well as of those
traditions outside the US—in Central and South America and the Caribbean, in Africa and the
Middle East and Asia.

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 20
WHEN THIRST HAD
UNDONE SO MANY
A postcolonial ecocritical analysis of
water crisis in Ruchir Joshi’s The Last
Jet-Engine Laugh and Girish Malik’s Jal

T. Ravichandran and Nibedita Bandyopadhyay

For a study on the environmental conflicts affecting the Global South, postcolonial ecocriticism
is relevant because it discerns from an egalitarian point of view coupled with a deep-rooted
skepticism on the functionality of the late capitalist machineries, which while operating at local
levels accelerate natural resource crisis at global levels. Besides, it sheds light on those grey areas
that are conveniently kept out of sight by perpetuating such hegemonically linking postulates as
man–woman, culture–nature, development–environment, economy–ecology, privileged–mar-
ginalized, and Global North–Global South. The yardsticks used for an environmental study of
the Global North are found to be lacking and missing out the most vital issues when they are
applied for a study of the Global South. The environmental concerns of the economically,
politically, culturally, and even, geographically marginalized people from the Global South are
distinctively different from those of the Global North. The very same neoliberal development
that is welcomed by the advantaged majority of the Global North, is problematic for the
disadvantaged minions of the Global South. Specifically, the environmentalism of the Global
South, as noted by Scott Slovic and others (2015),
takes on the task of articulating the socio-ecological plight of the world’s poor by
drawing attention to the fact that the uneven patterns of neoliberal development in
the Global South threaten the millions who depend upon access to natural resources
for their survival.
(3)
Apparently, the acute variables of development are caused by an egomaniacal corporate
hegemony that caters to the influential classes that are unheedful of the demands of the
marginalized people for their rightful living of a healthy life. Similarly, the impending
problem of resource depletion underscores the discourse of the “environmental justice that
has moved ecocriticism to consider how disenfranchised or impoverished populations of the
world over face particular environmental problems” (Roos and Hunt 2010: 7). Depletion of

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 When thirst had undone so many

the sources and deprivation of justice go hand in hand for the subjugated communities of the
Global South.
The Indian nation, as a conglomerate of the Global South, has its own share of the
exploited regions belonging to the territories of the underdeveloped and the marginalized.
India, while contoured within the Global South in terms of perpetuating inequalities in living
standard, inequitable distribution of natural resources, and reduced life expectancy for the
underprivileged, also transcends its local metaphoric representation of the underdeveloped and
connects with the colonial onslaught and neo-imperial capital hegemony. In this way, Nour
Dados and Raewyn Connell’s (2012) definition of the Global South suits the Indian context:
The term Global South functions as more than a metaphor for underdevelopment. It
references an entire history of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and different economic
and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy,
and access to resources are maintained.
(13)
India, like many other Global South countries, has been facing critical environment crises on
an unprecedented scale. Anthropogenic climate change has been inducing unparalleled rainfall
that floods some regions like Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala while causing droughts leading
to famine in certain other regions like Gujarat and Maharashtra. Although water crisis causes
universal concern and demands global solutions, the level of seriousness in which the issue
needs to be addressed is still lacking.
Despite frequent forebodings, the consequences of water depletion have not been given
adequate thought and consideration. A decade ago, for instance, in 2007, the ex-Secretary
General of the United Nations addressed the impending consequences of water scarcity in the
following words in the inaugural Asia-Pacific Water Summit: “The consequences for humanity
are grave. Water scarcity threatens economic and social gains. It undermines environmental
sustainability. It slows progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. And it is a
potent fuel for wars and conflict” (Ki-Moon 2007). However, the ongoing conflicts between
Israel and Palestine over the possession of the river Jordan, Pakistan’s fight to possess Jhelum
and Chenab in Kashmir, India, China’s constant endeavor to take over the rivers of Tibet, are
a few examples of the unending worldwide struggles over water resources. Poignantly, the
conflicts are not only international but also are intra-national. In India, particularly, states like
Bengaluru, and Chennai, two capitals of the states of Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, respec-
tively, have been disputing over sharing the water of the river Kaveri. In another Indian state,
Punjab, people bicker for the ownership of water storages. Drought-hit states like Maharash-
tra and Odisha have shaken the base of the Indian economy, causing the death of innumer-
able farmers and their livestock, and the massive destruction of crops. Water shortage in the
power station of state-controlled National Thermal Power Corporation on the banks of the
Ganges in Farakka in India has largely affected the power production as the engineers had to
shut down the plant eventually. Thus, scanty rains, filthy river and, above all, the dying river
beds have badly ruined the Indian electrical power production, leading to an imminent
apocalypse, which is gloomily reflected in the two works chosen for this study.
The discourse of apocalypse becomes a powerful rhetorical strategy to draw human
attention to the social and environmental problems that can cause large-scale devastation and
endanger the survival of all of humanity. As Lawrence Buell (1995) rightly remarks,
“apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that contemporary environmental
imagination has at its disposal” (275). However, as Roberto Vacca (1974) conjectures in his
The Coming Dark Age, the apocalypse today needs to be apprehended more for its

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environmental than religious connotations. Vacca fears an environmental calamity caused

primarily by the accumulation of economic and technological prowess in the hands of the few
powerful ones but something that would unhinge all of humanity. In the worst situation,
Vacca forebodes the technological machineries becoming uncontrollable and leading to
unintended consequences. He cautions:
It is not necessary for a few kilomegatons of hydrogen bombs to explode for
hundreds of millions of people to be killed. The same result may occur by less
violent and more intricate means: that is, by virtue of the fact that vast concentra-
tions of human beings are involved in systems that are now so complicated that they
are becoming uncontrollable. This hypothesis—of an apocalypse that is impersonal,
casual, and unpremeditated—is more tragic than the other.
(7–8)
These words are equally relevant for the serious environmental problem such as natural
resource depletion that poses existential crisis for the earth and earthly species.
Resource depletion as a form of environmental apocalypse disintegrates the very idea of
the nation itself by exposing the existing inequalities because one section of the population is
endowed with plenty, whereas the other part is deprived of even the basic amenities of life.
Environmental hazards in the era of globalization widen the inequalities that, as Pablo
Mukherjee (2010) discusses, “divide people of a nation on the basis of wealth, gender and
ethnicity, and illustrate the prevalent relationship between political will, governance and
environmental health” (166). The prevalent power politics between the center and the
periphery, the representation of the marginalized within the grand narrative of the nationalist
agenda of development, the neo-colonial government’s negligence to the voiceless citizens,
are central issues surrounding the water crises presented in the selected works of Ruchir Joshi
and Girish Malik.
Contextualized in the materiality of environmental degradation, Ruchir Joshi’s novel, The
Last Jet-Engine Laugh, and Girish Malik’s movie, Jal (water), offer two interesting case studies
as environmentally-informed pieces of art, where water crisis is the common motif. Jal got
special mention in the “New Currents” section in the Busan International Film Festival and
was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2014 in the Best Picture category. Jal exposes the
suffering of the poor villagers of Runn of Kutch in Gujarat, India, because of the dearth of
drinking water. Their misery worsens when a group of people representing a non-govern-
mental organization from Australia comes to save the flamingo birds in the Runn. They,
under the influence of faulty conservationist principles, arrange for expensive machinery to
provide water for the birds, yet depriving the villagers of the same. The environmental racism
implicated in such decisions actually separates the indigenous people from their own land and
natural resources, which ultimately prove to be fatal both for humans and the environment.
Similarly, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, shuttling between a past memoir and a futuristic
foreboding, depicts the prevailing inequalities that check the economically unstable people
from getting water in the time of crisis that eventually leads to bloodshed and a complete
breakdown of the social system. Vandana Shiva (2013) aptly terms such crisis emanating from
an environmental schism as “eco-apartheid.” She explains:
Eco-apartheid refers to the ecological separation of humans from nature in the
mechanical, reductionist worldview, which is resulting in the multiplicity of the
eco-crisis that is threatening human survival—climate catastrophe, species extinc-
tion, water depletion and pollution, desertification of our soils, and acidification and

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pollution of our oceans. It also refers to the apartheid created between corporations
and citizens, between rich and poor on the basis of the appropriation of the Earth’s
resources by a few and denial to the rest of their rights to access the Earth’s gifts for
sustenance of all life, including human life.
(Shiva 2013)
Eco-apartheid segregation in terms of water resource allocation is exemplified in The Last Jet-
Engine Laugh by illuminating the internal as well as the external discrepancies prevailing at the
national level, where only the privileged few have access to water, and at the international level,
where First World countries are in an advantageous position to enjoy the surplus of water and
sell them to Third World countries. The novel shows how countries like Japan, with enough
water storage, sell water to Third World countries like India at a very high and almost
unaffordable price. And inside India, greedy corporates, black marketers, and corrupt politicians
deprive the citizens of drinking water, who do not have enough material wealth to buy water
from them. Ironically, the police and the armed forces act, to use Louis Althusser’s famous term,
as the “state-controlled apparatus” to check people from getting access to water tanks.
The novel illustrates eco-power politics clearly in terms of the notions propounded by
cultural and environmental critics like Raymond Williams, David Hallowes and Vandana
Shiva. It shows how the subjugation and exploitation of nature are the outcomes of the
structural domination found in human society. As noted by Williams (2006), “The conquest
of nature . . . will always include the conquest, the domination or the exploitation of some
men by others” (84). David Hallowes’ observation in his Toxic Futures that the imminent
fourth generation war would be directed against the common citizens of the country further
strengthens Williams’ view. Moreover, understanding such eco-power politics
helps us to connect the dots between the many crises confronting the world today.
It also helps us to see why wars and violence are not inevitable occurrences but are
necessarily engineered to keep peoples dislocated, disunited and open to further
exploitation.
(Bassey 2011: viii)
In this neo-ecological imperialism, as Shiva (2013) opinionates, ironically enough, the govern-
ment would deploy armed forces to protect the interest of the big corporates so that they can
appropriate and sell natural resources to the rich. Exactly the same is described in The Last Jet-
Engine Laugh when the Delhi government appoints special military force to restrict common
citizens’ access to corporate water tanks. The state-controlled hegemony that exists in the
structural dominance in the Indian society, imbued in the text, shows the technocratic
conversion of the earth where nothing is natural and everything is converted into a predomi-
nant corporate commodity.
Fascinatingly, the narrative structure of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is conceived in a
flashback mode that recounts “the central happiness of water” (270). In the present times,
the protagonist, Paresh, misses that happiness because there is an artificially created lack that
allows only political leaders and black marketers to get enough water by depriving the rest.
Talukdar, a friend of Paresh, recalls the ominous lines from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”: “Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink. . . . Not-a, not-a, not-a,
drop. To drink” (263) that captures the basic thematic pattern of the fiction—thirst,
deprivation and lack perpetuated by the corrupted state of the postcolonial nation ruled by
the black market, money, and muscle power. At another instance, Paresh remembers how
Rolando-da, who has a small booth in his locality, pada, manages water from the black

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markets. Water scarcity, as exemplified in the text, results not only from the wastage of it but
also from the hoarding of it by the corporates. Artificial scarcity is created for their own
benefit so that they can sell it to the affluent at a higher price. While analyzing the
representation of water crisis in certain adult fictions in her article, “Children of Ravaged
Worlds: Exploring Environmentalism in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and Cameron
Stracher’s The Water Wars,” Saba Pirzadeh (2015) comments,
environmental crisis is not simply a consequence of surplus extraction of natural
resources for the purpose of development: it is, in fact, the result of the deliberate,
strategic, and sustained appropriation of the world’s resources by powerful corpora-
tions and politicians.
(4)
Joshi’s text elaborates all these issues that highlight the corrupted state of a postcolonial
country like India.
Ruchir Joshi, in the manner of Rushdie, mingles a person’s life story with the history of
the nation to point out that historical discourse is no longer impersonal, rather very much
imbued with the annals of ordinary lives. The tone of the novel is light and yet sarcastic. The
narrator recollects the day when his girlfriend Sonali was born and when from that year
onwards it became really very hard to get uncontaminated water. He recollects,
Sonali was born in 2008, which was around the time normal water really began to
seep out of our lives. I still remember the day I really began to worry about water. It
was either in 2009 or 2010, can’t remember exactly. . ..
(252)
Sonali’s birth becomes a memorable event because it marks the beginning of water crisis.
Again, at another instance, Sonali is surprised at the luxury of having a glass of uncontami-
nated water offered to her by Paresh. She exclaims anxiously, “you are crazy, you can’t waste
so much, fill a whole glass, crazy. I can’t bear it, take it away. Crazy” (249). This single
sentence explicates how difficult it will be to get water in the future world. The uncared
wastage of water leading to its scarcity, ultimately, makes it a luxury. The novel attacks the
unmindful wastage by the people of the present age who make it difficult for the people of
the future to have even a sip of unpolluted water.
The Indian citizens in 2030, as the novelist imagines, have lost their fundamental rights
over water, which is now monopolized by the Japanese companies who sell it in the form of
very expensive tablets: “One tablet is supposed to be like drinking four glasses of water”
(250). Even they have taken the lease of ponds, rivers and mountain spring:
. . . up in the mountain it’s clean, but there you have to be careful, because the Jap
water companies own a lot of it, or their sub-patentees, whole stretches of rivers,
specially, exclusively, licensed streams, and if they find you poaching they get the
cops to put you in jail.
(249–50)
Common people who are not affluent enough to buy the Japanese water tablets have lost
their rights to have potable water. The government, funded by the capitals of the foreign
NGOs, often neglects the common people, who constitute a very small part of decision-
making policies of the country. Obviously, the majority of Indians cannot afford to buy such
expensive tablets and thereby are subjected to ill health and mental disorder due to a tough
struggle for survival in the era of globalization, free trade, and international development.

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Joshi is quick to point out that monopoly over water by the powerful ones leads to eco-
apartheid between the corporate and common citizens, and the rich and the poor. His
protagonist sarcastically notes that sovereignty and freedom are futile when people are still
under the shackles of capitalist and neoliberal policies that never work for humanity in
general.
The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, thus, focuses on postcolonial India’s unevenly developed
material environment. Due to unchecked usage of water in the business of multinational
companies, the future generations of India face the lack of it. Disproportionate distribution
and selective deprivation affect the socio-psychological realm of people resulting in physical
and moral degradation. In the novel, the fight for survival really takes a terrible dimension in
the form of riots for water. Paresh commits to memory a night in Delhi when a water truck
driver who supplies water to the rich communities in Delhi is severely attacked by the slum-
dwellers. The truck driver would have died but for the timely interference by Talukdar. The
graphic description that follows the attack is appalling:
The man with the rod moves it to his left hand and pistons his right to slap the
driver twice in the face, hard. He is less in control. . . . He lands another slap. Flecks
of blood from the driver’s bleeding mouth fall on his overalls. A line of red trickles
down, impossibly straight, through the middle of the ‘M’ of the Mehrotras Water
Supply printed across his chest.
(278)
This conflict marks the gap between the rich and the poor that cannot be easily overcome, as
maintaining the eco-apartheid status serves the vested interests of the dominant group.
Later, Paresh and his friends too are taken to be invaders for stealing water and attacked by
some men of the colony who shout Hindu slogans. Joshi intentionally puts Hindu slogans in the
mouth of the hooligans to point out how India is divided by religious sentiment that makes the
livelihood of the minorities all the more precarious. Besides, struggle over life-sustaining
resources becomes the struggle and conflict centering on ethnicity. Whereas in Jal the conflict
is borne out of human and non-human needs, in The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, it revolves around
the issues of religion, wealth, gender, and ethnicity. Further, water conflict in the international
scenario leads to a future space war between India, and Pakistan-Saudi Arabian alliances
supported by the American government, where Paresh’s daughter Para takes part as a warrior.
Joshi writes: “The irony is that Para. Sitting in her little war-shop up in space, is now one of the
few Indian citizens who got to drink proper water” (252). Para and other soldiers, who risk
their lives for the nation, are specially privileged to get deliveries in the air itself from an
unmanned craft that drops off goodies, including a fortnight of water supply.
At the national level, paradoxically, in The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, humans as well as dogs
fight with each other to get water for their survival. On that fateful night when the narrator
and his friend witnessed the riot for water, they first saw dogs fighting violently to get hold of
the water tank. Joshi describes:
As soon as the tanker passes, the dogs leap at it, smashing into each other, clawing
and biting each other in mid-air, all trying to get the big tap that sticks out at the
back. One of the larger dogs, a bit whitish one, manages to hang on to the tanker.
. . . Then one of the chasing dogs manages to knock the big dog off and the two roll
on the road, going for each other. A third dog takes advantage of this, a fawn streak
and it’s on to the tanker with its mouth locked around the tap.
(257)

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This fighting scene between the dogs prologues the conflict between men, symbolizing that
in the struggles in times of existential crisis, there will hardly be any difference between
humans and animals. Thus, in Joshi’s fiction, man’s pride as a unique species, and his self-
proclaimed supremacy over the non-humans, crumbles like a house of cards.
The environmental dystopias in the discussed narratives draw readers’ attention to what Rob
Nixon (2011) terms “the catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term
effects” (15). By politicizing the want of water and by exposing the broadening rift between the
rich and the poor, they fit into the category of works that, according to Frederick Buell (2003),
compel us to “imagine the future realistically,” which in turn “force one to take environmental
and environmental-social crises seriously” (226). And to evoke seriousness, Joshi uses a serio-
comic tone, especially, to depict the futuristic part of the novel that occurs in 2030 when
getting a cup of uncontaminated water reaches to the level of grim prayer. Paresh utters in a
bleakly comic tone while intending to make a coffee with pure water:
The water’s decent today. . . . Most days it’s a pheeka brown, . . . which basically
means ‘I take your chances,’ but today it is fully green. Which means it’s managed
to handle all the junk in the supply. I think I will do something simple, almost a
prayer, almost perfect.
(3–4)
Hilariously enough, Joshi’s excremental imagination stretches to indicate the fact that the
water shortage is so critical that there is no water for the Indians to clean themselves with it
after defecation.
Of course, the multinational corporations exploit this situation and introduce innovative
ways of cleaning using a hydraulic technology that blows away the feces by several hundred
micro-jets of hot air. But there are many like Paresh who are not able to adapt to the new
norm of cleaning themselves after ablutions. As Paresh nostalgically admits,
. . .the situation is such that there is a complete divorce of the act of defecating from
the touch of water. . . . I find myself hoping that once, just once before I die, I can
wash myself with water. Maybe I’ll have to fly to Paris for that.
(264)
The passage, although lighter in tone, underscores the author’s serious concern for the
imminent crisis. While an affluent man like Paresh can go to Paris to wash himself with
water during his morning ablutions, the poor are left with no choice but to use the micro-jet
technology. Water that was freely available is replaced with a payable micro-jet service that is
still less expensive for the poor than travelling to a foreign country. This huge difference
between various classes of society and their access to water creates a dystopian scenario.
The postcolonialist Anna Guttman, who has devoted a chapter to this novel in her book
The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature (2007), says that instead of problematizing
the different “isms,” Ruchir Joshi in his novel has predicted a dystopian degradation in both
environmental and social spheres. Joshi’s novel, as pointed out by Guttman, does not shun
politics completely but gives more emphasis on the environmental aspects of a crisis that
underscores the uneven development, and socio-political implications of environmental
degradation in postcolonial India. The futuristic setting of the novel supports Anna Guttman’s
claim that
Both the conflict and the political alignments of those engaged in it seem so utterly
realistic in the context of the current environmental crises and the realities of the

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war on terror that the novel would seem to evoke the common belief . . . that world
politics is already a science fiction dystopia.
(147)
Nonetheless, Joshi blends politics and care for environment in his fiction by casting the
character of Subhash Bose, alias Netaji, the great Indian freedom fighter, in a mythical mold.
The title itself suggests the submarine of Netaji, which he used for fighting against the British.
The fictional character of Netaji worships the goddess Maa Kali (the Hindu goddess of death,
time, and doomsday) to get rid of all kinds of degradation, including the environmental, that
the Indians are facing in Kaliyug (the Apocalypse). Grippingly, Joshi depicts Netaji as a fully
sensible human being to the sufferings of the non-human that is evident from his mourning
over the killing of a herd of dolphins by his crew for meat.
The nightmarish situations recounted in Jal and The Last Jet-Engine Laugh invoke the
helplessness of the lawful citizens of India whose access to drinking water is restricted on the
grounds of monetary and technological dexterity that, as Ursula Heise (2010) has pointed out,
shows “the historical struggles over colonial and neocolonial power structures as well as
contemporary conflicts over economic globalization” (251). Jal and The Last Jet-Engine Laugh
emphasize the overlaps between environmental and socio-economic issues such as caste and
class politics that still prevail in India. The interests of the marginalized section are never taken
into account. Their small dreams and demands are smashed to realize the bigger dreams of the
corporate world. The overzealous drives for urbanization and economic growth at the cost of
environment have become the mantra of the day.
While The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is mainly urban-centric, Jal appears to be the saga of a
rural tragedy that involves the death of a young protagonist, Bakka, his wife, and their unborn
child because of the lack of potable water. The movie starts in a flashback mode when after
Bakka’s death, a check of a very high amount issued in his name, and a book featuring him
for his contribution to the preservation of the flamingo birds in the Kutch, are sent by the
Russian NGOs to the village. Soon, the movie goes back in time to disclose in detail the
circumstances that led to the unfortunate death of Bakka, who is the celebrated water god
(paani ka devta) of the village. Bakka, the water diviner who digs drinking water for the
flamingo project, is thwarted to deprivation and death for the lack of it, highlighting
predominant issues such as environmental racism, flawed conservationists’ principles, and
negligence of indigenous knowledge.
In Jal, Girish Malik highlights not only the suffering of the desert people but also the
pathetic death of birds because of the dearth of drinking water. The movie is a fictional
account of the real incident of the mass death of more than a thousand migratory flamingoes
and ten thousand or more that were moribund when a dam was built over the river of Kutch
by sidelining the ecological side effect. The construction of the dam increased the salinity of
Kutch River, turning the Rann into a burial ground for these birds. While researching the
causes of the death of the flamingos, the ornithologist B.M. Parasharya, who is also associated
with a project on flamingo breeding, initiated by the Space Application Centre under the
Indian Space Research Organization, remarks: “The sudden increase in salinity in the Rann
water has killed planktons. Faced with starvation flamingos have fled the island leaving their
chicks to fend for themselves” (qtd. in Mahurkar 2004). Hence, the NGOs plan to mix
potable water that would reduce salinity and prevent fowl mortality, though they are blissfully
oblivious to the constructed dam that would pave the way to infant mortality.
Influenced by the legendary Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s highly acclaimed
dictum that dams are like temples in modern India, several development projects were funded

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by the Indian government that actually reinforced the uneven development existing in the
very strata of Indian society. Arundhati Roy, for example, has narrated and established in her
numerous works the very truth that dams are built by evicting a large section of tribal people
and by causing damage to the ecological balance of a region. Therefore, while national leaders
like Nehru cherish great ideals about dams, contemporary writers and activists like Arundhati
Roy, Vandana Shiva and Medha Patkar subvert the grand narrative of national progress
brought upon by dams. Nehru, however, at the twilight of his political career, realized the
grave impact of displacing numerous Aadivasi communities (aboriginal tribal people) and
other marginalized sections from their natural habitats. Nehru, while speaking to the Central
Board of Irrigation and Power in November 1955, anticipated a “dangerous outlook
developing in India,” manifested in the “disease of giganticism.” He drew his audience’s
attention to “the national upsets, upsets of the people moving out and their rehabilitation and
many other things, associated with a big project” (qtd. in Guha, “Prime Ministers and Big
Dams”). Jal exposes how, without solving the water crisis, a big project like building a dam is
executed despite the fact that it will increase the salinity of water, jeopardizing the lives of
migratory birds and indigenous people.
Jal instigates the same kind of struggle depicted by Amitav Ghosh in The Hungry Tide
centering on conflicting issues such as giving priority between human and non-human.
Catering to the conservationist principles, the birds, however, are saved in Jal because they
are the major attraction for tourists. The imperialist ideology today in many cases has turned
to conservationist principles, endorsed by “the state and the conservation elite” (Guha 1989:
75) of the Global North. The project of ecotourism, closely associated with conservationist
principles, “carries significant hidden costs for both the environment and the indigenous
peoples it claims to protect” (Barnard 2013: 9). In Jal, the hidden cost the indigenous people
paid for protecting the migratory birds from dying of thirst is risking their own deaths. The
issue is heart-rendingly raised by an anonymous rustic character of the movie who questions
why, despite the record of several deaths of people in the Rann, no help comes from the
government. As we could learn from the movie, whereas the Russian conservationists were
busy saving the flamingo chicks, the Indian officials were corrupt and, owing to their inherent
hatred for the poor people of Kutch, did not take any fruitful steps. So, while everyone is
engaged to save the birds, the people are left to suffer and die. Thus, the plot of Jal critiques
the faulty conservationist ethos of the NGOs who cannot empathize with the interdepen-
dence of human life and the wildlife.
Nature in the Global South does not always have the idyllic touch in them. It is
inseparable from human politics and indigenous interactions. It is fraught with different
types of conflicts and struggles for existence by the human as well as by the non-human
species. The Rann of Kutch as depicted in the movie Jal is completely imbued with the
day-to-day struggles of people, particularly for those who live closer to nature and are
dependent on its resources. Ironically, mainstream environmentalists, guided by American-
ized environmental principles, often ignore the contribution of these people to the
preservation of environment. Their exclusion conforms to the fact that they are considered
as unenlightened, ignorant “others” whose very presence can be detrimental for the
environment. Therefore, such environmental initiative often becomes “colonialist, patriar-
chal, and exploitative capitalist projects” (Roy 2013: 77). Seen this way, Jal reflects the
story of the less visible but not the least violent catastrophe that decides the future of a
country, as some sections are forced to die because they are on the periphery in the present
socio-economic structure and their lives hardly matter. Ironically enough, those local people
whose lives are considered worthless are the ones who value the lives of the non-humans

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surrounding them. Bakka himself, at the outset of the movie, convinces the villagers to help
the NGO to dig a water reservoir for the birds so that eventually they can borrow the
digging machine to end water scarcity in their village. But the situation goes against the
villagers as the Western masters refuse to lend the water digging machine. Bakka gets
implicated in an attempt to steal the machine, wherein he loses his job and reputation.
Magga’s rhetorical question in the movie, “pakshi o ke liye pani hai par manas ke liye kyu
nahi?” (why water is arranged only for the birds, and not for the village people?) is left
unanswered by the NGOs, who leave after ensuring that by using the local people they
were able to save the beautiful flamingoes—a conservationist act that protects ecotourism.
In this way, the movie underscores how Western conservationists often channel their
money and energy for developing tourism that will attract tourists from abroad, yet
contribute to the man–nature dichotomy that harms not only humans but also nature,
leading to some sort of harmful compartmentalization.
Such compartmentalization and perpetuation of imbalanced conservative practices, accord-
ing to Guha, are justified by using the tenets of deep ecology, particularly the fundamental
argument that the environmental movements must shift from an “anthropocentric” to a
“biocentric” perspective. However, Guha sharply points out that in advancing their wild-
erness crusade, the international conservation elites fail to understand that they are inadver-
tently catering to improving the quality of wildlife by neglecting survival needs of the
indigenous people. He continues to highlight two features that distinguish the environmental
movements of the Global South from those of their Western counterparts:
First, for the sections of society most critically affected by environmental degradation—
poor and landless peasants, women, and tribals—it is a question of sheer survival, not of
enhancing the quality of life. Second, and as a consequence, the environmental solutions
they articulate deeply involve questions of equity as well as economic and political
redistribution.
(Guha 1989: 77)
In this manner, the entire scheme of environmental protection is seen as a grand narrative
constructed and recycled to cater to neoliberal projects such as ecotourism. So, from the
vantage of Global South environmental critics, the question is not how one conserves the
environment but ultimately who would use it and who will benefit from it? As Joshi raises
the question from his novel, should it be the ecotourists who come from far-off places and
stay there for a while, or the indigenous people who live there forever and depend on the
environment for their survival?
In the movie Jal, in mocking, ridiculing and ignoring Bakka’s ingenious, uncanny yet
accurate instinct in predicting the hidden water resources, one notes the Western logocentric
mindset prevailing among the Russian NGOs as well as the local bureaucrats. Homi Bhabha’s
(1990) view that “Culture otherness is implicated in specific historical and discursive
conditions, requiring constructions in different practices of reading” (73) is relevant here.
Through the characters in the movie, the director Girish Malik and the writer Rakesh Mishra
underline how Western logocentrism cannot figure out the difference that lies in every
“other” cultural practice, particularly, in any indigenous one. That is why, in the backdrop of
global capitalism and unbridled economic development, the environmentalist approach
cherished by the privileged white deep ecologists from First World countries is incongruous
in solving the current phase of ecological crisis of so-called Third World countries like India
because of their distinctive material differences—mainly because First World countries, in
their rush to expand their environmental conservationists’ endeavors, underplay the

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inequalities that are within human society. In a sham of championing freedom and democ-
racy, they work under the burgeoning impact of capitalism.
Bruno Latour (2015), in this regard, is much concerned about the over-appropriation of
the image of the earth by the environmental moralism propagated by the West. He brilliantly
contends:
It is useless for the ecologically motivated activist to try shaming the ordinary citizen
for not thinking globally enough, for not having a feel for the Earth as such. No one
sees the Earth globally and no one sees an ecological system from Nowhere, the
scientist no more than the citizen, the farmer or the ecologist—or, lest we forget,
the earthworm.
(26)
So, the eco-authoritarianism emanating from the West overlooks the ecological embedded-
ness in the Global South context, which can only be restored by situating humans and nature
side by side, and not by separating them wide apart, which the dominant Western knowledge
often does.
In the same vein of thought, the social ecologist Murray Bookchin (1987) criticizes the
deep ecology that denotes the tendency of progressive Western countries such as the United
States to impose self-made environmental policies on Third World countries, leading to
“eco-brutalism.” He remarks:
Let us face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric, has
virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in
society and in social problems. It preaches a gospel of a kind of ‘original sin’ that
accurses a vague species called humanity—as though people of color were equatable
with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the
rich, and the exploited with their exploiters.
(Bookchin 1987)
Environmental development in developing countries like India is a kind of myth that in the
veil of altruistic project funding, First World countries hasten their own political as well as
economic prosperity, thereby further widening the rift between First World countries and the
Third World countries that they claim to make prosperous. Poor people of the disadvantaged
countries pay the price of living in the periphery and even have to sacrifice their lives to be a
part of the Western development project that followed, as Arturo Escobar (1995) conjectures,
“a top-down, ethnocentric and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as
abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of ‘progress’” (44).
A study of the history of development along with the rise of global capitalism will prove that
the interests of local people are ignored to make way for the profit of international trade. The
movie Jal itself is a testimony to priority treatment meted out to birds by the same NGOs and
government officers who refuse to offer any help to the local people.
Jal betrays the lacunae of the Western technological progress as it fails to resolve the water
crisis of a particular region, and what is more, its availability is based on the discrimination of
rich and poor, and between citizens within and outside the nation. The movie has vividly
depicted how people of developing countries are barred from having enough water and
people of rich nations are blessed to have more than enough. Indigenous people are left to
live in undesirable places because they are non-whites, poor, ethnic and jobless. There is also
confrontation between global knowledge and local knowledge as the NGOs fail to solve the
water problem in the Kutch by applying the universal principle to everywhere. Their myopic

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vision deters them from looking beyond a certain fixed ethos that may not suit a country like
India. Trapped in the prism of their idealist notions, they fail to realize the fragility of the
situation. In Jal, the NGO solves the water problem of the birds without resolving the water
crisis of the local communities.
The principle of certain “developmentalism,” strongly founded on racial biases, and the
implicit arrogance of First World neoliberalism (Huggan and Tiffin 2006: 703), has been
controversially seen in the context of postcolonial environmentalism. Postcolonial ecocriti-
cism, in its attempt to probe more deeply into the materialistic realities of colonized
countries, confronts issues that involve exposing the hypocrisies of the former colonizers in
relation to conservation and different environmental policies that often “has disastrous
consequences in the third world” (Curtin 2005: 5). Nonetheless, the purview of postcolonial
ecocriticism is not anti-development but to support counter-development strategies fostered
by indigenous knowledge of the earth, which is completely ignored by the dominant
structure of Western education (Huggan and Tiffin 2006: 27). An appropriate strategy is to
complement native instinctual wisdom with scientific knowledge and developmental
technology.
Jal further exhibits the confrontation between European scientific knowledge and indi-
genous instinct. Bakka’s knowledge of hidden sources of water in the desert is ignored after
the arrival of the Western water digging machine. Ultimately, all confrontations fade away by
yielding to a synthesis between the two when Bakka, with his instinct, finds the source of
water and the machine digs it out. But then again, Bakka remains in shadow without getting
acknowledgement for his efforts. Jal, thus, calls for a proper synthesis of global and local
knowledge. Unfortunately, modern nation-states, instead of doing away with these inequal-
ities and injustices toward the weaker section, increase the disparities under the banner of
capitalism. Sovereignty and freedom are futile when people are still under the shackles of
capitalist and neoliberal policies that never work for humanity in general.
The global crisis of water further augments deep-rooted gender-based inequalities pre-
dominantly present in postcolonial countries. Women are responsible for arranging water for
their households, and children, in the process, face hurdles that lie therein. With the children
on one hand, and their biological vulnerability on the other, women are doubly disadvan-
taged than the men, who perpetuate the naturalization of female bodies that could be shared
and used by them according to their capabilities. Vandana Shiva has rightly pointed out that
“the violence to nature, which seems intrinsic to the dominant development model, is also
associated with violence to women who depend on nature for drawing sustenance for
themselves, their families, their societies” (Shiva 2014: 11). In Jal, the pregnant wife of
Bakka is forced to succumb to the lust of Bakka’s rivals just to quench the thirst of her
unborn baby. In order to save her from being raped, Bakka’s lover offers herself to satisfy
the lust of the rival man. The sheer hypocrisy and cruelty of male domination over the
female body is crudely exposed when, despite his kinship with the woman, the man in the
movie barely clears his intention of exploiting her sexually for a few drops of water. Jal, in
fact, lashes out at European modernity along with its evil compatriots such as capitalism,
neo-colonialism, and patriarchy. Thus, Jal and The Last Jet-Engine Laugh prove how the
rights over water are decided with monetary power and technological dexterity, and other
socio-ethnic and gendered hallmarks. Together, they foreground the necessity of a true
green economy based on holistic principles and interconnectedness that aims to form a
dialogue with the environment by the inclusion of the indigenous knowledge system, the
participation of women, and a humanitarian scientific enterprise for protecting the dimin-
ishing biodiversity.

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Works cited
Barnard, Mason. “Ecotourism’s Hidden Cost: ‘Green’ Tourism’s Colonial Toll.” Harvard International
Review vol. 35, no. 2, Fall 2013, pp. 8–9.
Bassey, Nnimmo. “Foreword.” Toxic Futures: South Africa in the Crises of Energy, Environment and Capital by
David Hallowes. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011, pp. vii–ix.
Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. Routledge, 1990.
Bookchin, Murray. “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement.”
Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project nos. 4–5, summer 1987. http://dwardmac.pitzer.
edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/socecovdeepeco.html. Accessed 30 July 2018.
Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. Routledge, 2003.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American
Culture. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.
Curtin, Deane. Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
Dados, Nour and Raewyn Connell. “The Global South.” Contexts vol. 11, no. 1, 2012, pp. 12–3. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/41960738.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making & Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton
University Press, 1995.
Guha, Ramachandra. “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World
Critique.” Environmental Ethics vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 71–83.
Guha, Ramachandra. “Prime Ministers and Big Dams.” The Hindu. http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/
prime-ministers-and-big-dams.html. Accessed 13 August 2018.
Guttman, Anna. The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Heise, Ursula K. “Afterword: Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Question of Literature.” Postcolonial Green:
Environmental Politics and World Narratives, edited by Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt. University of Virginia
Press, 2010, pp. 251–58.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2006.
Joshi, Ruchir. The Last Jet-Engine Laugh. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.
Ki-Moon, Ban. “Inaugural Address,” Asia-Pacific Water Summit, Statements and SG/SM/11311-ENV/
DEV/960. 3 December 2007. www.un.org/press/en/2007/sgsm11311.doc.htm. Accessed 22 July 2018.
Latour, Bruno. “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics.” What is
Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment, edited by Albena Yaneva and Alejandro
Zaera-Polo. Ashgate Publishing Company, 2015, pp. 21–32.
Mahurkar, Uday. “Rann of Kutch Turns into Mass Grave for Migratory Flamingos: Isle of Death.” India
Today. May 24, 2004. www.indiatoday.in/magazine/environment/story/20040524-migratory-bird-
flamingoes-dying-in-flamingo-city-island-in-rann-of-kutch-due-to-lack-of-planktons-growth-
because-of-increase-salinity-in-water-789995-2004-05-24. Accessed 31 July 2018.
Malik, Girish, director. Jal. Produced by Oneworld Films Pvt. Ltd. 6 October 2013 (BIFF), 4 April 2014
(India).
Mukherjee, Pablo. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Pirzadeh, Saba. “Children of Ravaged Worlds: Exploring Environmentalism in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship
Breaker and Cameron Stracher’s The Water Wars.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
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Roos, Bonnie and Alex Hunt, eds. Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives. University
Press of Virginia, 2010.
Roy, Sarah Jacquett. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. University of Arizona
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Shiva, Vandana. “Anthropocene: From Eco-Apartheid to Earth Democracy.” 26 May 2013. www.
nextnature.net/2013/05/from-eco-apartheid-to-earth-democracy/. Accessed 3 August 2015.
Shiva, Vandana. “The Gendered Politics of Food.” Vandana Shiva Reader. University Press of Kentucky,
2014, pp. 9–14.
Slovic, Scott, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds. Ecocriticism of the Global South.
Lexington Books, 2015.
Vacca, Roberto. The Coming Dark Age. Translated from the Italian by Dr. J.S. Whale. Panther Books Ltd, 1974.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. Verso, 2006.

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 21
COWS, CORN, AND
COMMUNICATION
How the discourse around GMOs
impacted legislation in the EU and the
USA

Annka Liepold

Introduction
“You are what you eat”—through food consumption we are all tied into the global food
production network. But does it matter with what technology our food was produced? Are
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) better or worse than conventional crop varieties?
How do GMOs impact human health and the environment? Globally, genetically modified
(GM) crops are on the rise. The global cultivation has increased from 1.7 million hectares in
1996 to 185.1 million hectares in 2016, representing about 12 percent of the global crop
land.1 However, only a limited number of plants are commercially available in a GM version
and the global distribution of GMOs grown is very uneven, with a limited number of
countries growing the vast majority of the world’s GMOs. The United States (US) is the
global leader in growing GMOs. Corn is the number one cash crop in the US and over 90
percent of the 2017 corn harvest was genetically modified2—which is one third of the global
GM corn production, worth around US$43.7 billion.3 The European Union (EU) offers a
very different picture: the individual member states either grow no GMOs at all or only a
very limited percentage.
The discourse around GM crops is embedded in a technology–nature–culture triangle.
Crops modified through biotechnology are planted on fields where they interact with the
surrounding nature and are then consumed by humans. The core question in the debate
about GMOs is, “are genetically modified crops safe?”—and this question is discussed
differently in different countries, depending a lot on their cultural understanding of risk.
When is a plant or a technology considered safe? Safe for whom? Looking at the differences
in the communication around the risk of GM crops in the EU vs. the US, we can see the far-
reaching impact of environmental communication. It helps to explain why the same research
about the risks and benefits of GMOs available to legislators and experts around the world has
resulted in very different legislation in the EU and the US.4 If it is not the facts speaking for
themselves, it must be the way the stakeholders talk about them and evaluate them.

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Bruce Williams and Albert Matheny (1995) say that “discourses cannot be analyzed solely
on the rhetorical level because they are systematically connected to patterns of political and
economic power”5—the debate around GMOs exemplifies this entanglement of environ-
mental communication with politics and the economy. Looking at the discourse around
GMOs allows us to see the far-reaching impacts environmental communication can have.
Understanding which parties are involved, what stance they take—and realizing that strong
stances are not necessarily based on strong evidence—show us how powerful communication
is a tool for shaping actions. The discourse around GMOs also demonstrates how much
regional factors can influence the debate: specific local events can greatly impact and change
the discourse in the affected region.

Short introduction to plant breeding

Plant selection and breeding is one of the oldest forms of human tinkering with nature. The
goal is to create a plant with a higher yield, which is more resistant against stress impacts in its
environment, such as pests. First, this was achieved through selecting the plants that possessed
the desired qualities to replant them in the next growing season. Around 1900, agronomists
started experimenting with plant hybrids: inbreeding and then cross-pollinating two varieties
of one plant to achieve higher plant vigor in the offspring plant generation. It took until the
1930s until agronomists found a way to produce hybrid seeds that could be produced in an
economically feasible way, but once they did, hybrids spread quickly.
Corn was the first widespread hybrid crop. While the commercial spread of hybrid maize
in the 1930s and 1940s was celebrated as an agricultural success story—higher yields, fewer
losses due to pests or weather extremes—the introduction of GM maize and other GM crops
in the 1990s was and continues to be much more controversial. Genetic modification is the
latest technique to alter the genes of plants. Even though the goals have stayed mostly the
same—to increase the yield while making the plant more resistant to external stress factors—
genetic modification has sparked many more controversial debates than previous breeding
techniques. There are various ways to genetically modify crops, ranging from inserting new
genes via a bacterium to the CRISPR/Cas-method.6 The terms “genetic modification,”
“gene editing,” “biotechnology,” “bioengineering,” and “genetic engineering” all refer to
some form of altering the DNA of a plant. I will use the terms “GM” and “GMOs,” but the
described discourse includes all forms of genetic modification.
Supporters of GM technology say that it is just a different way of creating new plant
varieties (similar to selection or hybridization) and that the effects of the introduced genes on
the plant and the environment are thoroughly tested and therefore as safe as any other
breeding technique. Critics, however, point out that most of the introduced genes are
originally from bacteria or another plant and are worried that the introduction of alien
genes can cause either unforeseeable long-term effects and/or foreseeable resistances. They
argue that any inbred resistances will eventually spark a resistant variety of that pest or weed,
which then is immune to regular herbicides and pesticides. These varieties therefore are
referred to as “super-weeds” or “super-pests.”7
I argue that one of the reasons why GMOs are more disputed than previous plant
innovations is because the introduction of GM technology fell in a new era of understanding
and evaluating environmental risks and chances. It was the first plant breeding technology
introduced after the emergence and rise of a new environmental movement in the 1970s with
a more conscious environmental understanding. With the emergence of ecological awareness
came the understanding of our surroundings as complex and connected eco-systems in which

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one imbalance can cause far-reaching effects due to the interconnectedness of species.
Agriculture is one of the main ways in which humans use their environmental surroundings.
New queries and thoughts arose that had not been taken into consideration during the
introduction of earlier plant breeding techniques, such as the well-being of insects and
surrounding plants. This is an important fact to keep in mind when looking at the debate
around genetically modified plants.

GMOs in the US
The United States is the global leader both in growing and producing GMOs. Various
institutions and companies throughout the US were key drivers in the research and develop-
ment of GMOs. The reason why the US holds such a stronghold in developing GM plants
and food products is because of a favorable legal framework for companies: in the 1980
landmark Supreme Court case Diamand v. Chakrabarty,8 the US Supreme Court ruled that
genetically engineered microorganisms can be patented. This ruling paved the way for
biotechnology being a lucrative field of research, as patents ensured companies could make
money off of their expensive research investments to produce genetically engineered
organisms.
The first successful genetic modification of a plant was reported in 1983—a tobacco plant’s
genome was altered with a foreign gene to create an antibiotic-resistant phenotype.9 The first
genetically engineered food to be granted a license for human consumption was the FlavrSavr
tomato. Calgene, the producer of the FlavrSavr tomato, submitted the application for the
license in 1992 to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which granted it in May
1994. Even though the tomato’s success was short-lived (it was only available until 1997
before it was taken off the market again), other crops proved to be much more commercially
successful, particularly corn, soybeans, and cotton. The harvest value of the most important
cash crop in the US, corn, was US$47.5 billion in 2017.10 According to the National Corn
Breeders Association, 92 percent of the US corn planted in 2017 was genetically modified.11
With a share of over 90 percent of the corn planted being genetically modified, GM corn has
become the new norm in the United States, replacing regular hybrid corn.12
In the United States GMOs are regulated in each respective department, not through an
overarching institution.13 Plant GMOs fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of
Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration. The US treats GM plants
according to the principles declared in the 1993 report on “Safety Evaluation of Foods
Derived by Modern Biotechnology: Concepts and Principles” by the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 1993).14 The report suggests assessing
the safety of a new food derived from genetic modification by comparing it with its
conventional counterparts that have been proven safe in regular use, causing no harm to
humans or the environment. This principle is called “substantial equivalence” and only new
traits introduced by genetic modification need to undergo testing, not the whole plant itself.
Plant producers have to prove that the newly inserted genetic material is safe under the
current testing methods. Even though the FDA deems this method to be sufficient, Clare
Herrick (2005) criticizes that the US “adheres to the absence of evidence of risk equates no
risk doctrine.”15
The fact that the FDA deems foods from GM plants “substantially equivalent” to non-
GMO foods is the reason why the FDA keeps upholding the principle that GMO foods do
not need to be labeled. Several proposed pieces of legislation (statewide and federal) failed
because the FDA argued that labeling GMO-based foods that are “substantially equivalent” to

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non-GMO foods would fall under false and misleading labeling of foods and would implicitly
suggest to the consumers that the two products are different when, under the FDA’s
understanding, they are not. It is interesting to note that US consumers, however, are
strongly in favor of labels on GM-derived foods. In the last ten years, in various polls the
percentage of US consumers favoring clear labeling of GM foods was usually over 80 percent,
or even 90 percent.16
On one section of their website, the FDA provides “Consumer Info About Food from
Genetically Engineered Plants” (last updated April 2018). The FDA chooses to use the term
genetically engineered (GE) and, explaining to consumer what this is, they say:
Crop improvement happens all the time, and genetic engineering is just one form of
it. . . . Humans have been modifying crops for thousands of years through selective
breeding. Early farmers developed cross breeding methods to grow numerous corn
varieties with a range of colors, sizes, and uses.17
This suggests that genetic modification of plants is as “natural” and safe as improvement
through selection or hybridization. As one of the key players in the US regulation of GMOs,
framing the technology in such a manner is an important part of justifying the FDA’s stand on
categorizing GMOs “substantially equivalent” to non-GMOs and dismissing labeling on
GMO-derived foodstuffs.

Anti-GMO movement in the US

The acceptance of GM crops in the US is much larger than in the EU. Nonetheless, there is
also an anti GMO-movement in the US. The main arguments and fears that drive the US
anti-GMO movement differ substantially from the EU anti-GMO movement, which is
mostly concerned about the potential negative effect on human health and the uncertainty
of future unknown effects. The US movement was largely spurred by John Losey’s 1999
article “Transgenic Pollen Harms Monarch Larvae,”18 which suggested that genetically
modified Bt corn might negatively impact the growth of monarch butterfly larvae and even
lead to a higher mortality rate among the larvae. In a lab setting Losey and his team had
dusted milkweed with pollen from Bt corn and fed monarch larvae with it and compared the
results with milkweed dusted with regular hybrid corn pollen. Monarch butterflies exclusively
feed on milkweed, which is often found near cornfields, so this study alarmed environmen-
talists, who feared that Bt altered corn might dramatically reduce the number of monarch
butterflies. As the monarch butterfly is endemic to the American continent and (with minor
exceptions) does not appear in Europe, the fear of losing the monarch butterfly was (and is) a
predominantly American fear. The concerns about the monarch butterfly were triggered by a
small-scale study in a lab setting,—which Gray (2004) calls “soundbite science”19—but have
resulted in a large-scale public outcry. Since then various follow-up studies have shown that
only one specific Bt strain (used in Losey’s study) has such drastic effects on monarch larvae
and that other Bt corn pollen has no negative effect on the development of the monarch
larvae.20
However, to this day the monarch remains a symbol of the anti-GMO and anti-multi-
national seed corporation movement. According to Diahanna Lynch and David Vogel, the
monarch butterfly is “a public symbol of the environmental hazards of GM crops.”21 In 2015,
the musician Neil Young released the album “Monsanto Years.”22 The album cover is a
collage, including a depiction of a farmer couple in the pose of the famous “American
Gothic” painting by Grant Wood. The woman on Neil Young’s album cover has a monarch

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butterfly hovering in front of her belly, while next to the couple a field is sprayed with what
appears to be toxic chemicals. Neil Young, an outspoken critic of GMOs, uses the monarch
butterfly in his critique of the agro-company Monsanto.
In the US GMOs are anchored in both agriculture as well as in business practices of large
seed and chemical suppliers. Because GMOs are deemed “substantially equivalent” to
conventional crops, they are often not labeled when they end up on the shelves of super-
markets. However, there is an active anti-GMO movement in the US. It is mostly focused on
what effects GMOs could have on the environment.

GMOs and the anti-GMO movement in the EU

Unlike the US, which in the 1980s and 1990s through court cases and laws found its stance
on GMOs, the European Union did not develop a stance on GMOs until the late 1990s. In
1993 the EU made the precautionary principle a guiding principle of its environmental
policy.23 This risk assessment principle was later used for various other regulations, among
them for the adoption of GMOs. In 1998 the EU approved the first GM plant to be
cultivated commercially—MON180, a Bt maize plant resistant against the European corn
borer. This first approval suggested that the EU would take a similar path as the US when it
came to the use of GMOs.
Other GM crops were in the review phase but after this first approval, the EU
implemented a de facto moratorium of GMO approvals. So what had happened? Various
factors impacted the legislators’ change of mind—one of them being that in the 1990s Bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as “mad cow disease,” broke out in the
United Kingdom (UK) in 1996 and spread to France and throughout the EU, resulting in the
slaughter of over 4.5 million heads of cattle. This was one of the—if not the—largest food
scandals in the EU in recent decades and upset consumers and disturbed their trust in the EU
food safety authorities. Authorities had first reassured consumers that BSE would not affect
human health; however, this turned out to be false. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal brain
disorder which can be triggered by consuming BSE-infected cattle, was the cause of death for
at least 177 people in the UK and over 50 people in the rest of Europe. As this disease has a
long incubation time, the human deaths happened all throughout the late 1990s and 2000s—
whereas BSE among cattle was controlled much more quickly after the 1996 outbreak.
The anti-GMO movement in Europe started in the UK—the same country that had
suffered harsh losses from BSE. Food sociologist Nigel Williams (1998) observed that
BSE was a watershed for the food industry in this country. For the first time people
realized that merely attempting to ensure a culinary end product was safe to eat was
not a good enough approach. We had to look at the entire process by which food is
produced.24
The environmental organization Friends of the Earth was one of the core drivers of the anti-
GMO movements. They used the anxiety still prevalent among consumers when releasing
their first press release in April 1997, announcing, “After BSE, you’d think the food industry
would know better than to slip ‘hidden’ ingredients down people’s throats.” Framing GMOs
in the context of BSE allowed the environmental activists to tap into consumer fears even
though GMOs have nothing to do with BSE—but the BSE outbreak caused a loss of faith in
the EU food safety institutions and questioned the soundness of scientific reassurances about
other foodstuffs deemed as “safe”—such as GMOs. GMO opponents were able to draw
parallels to the storyline of the BSE scandal: the innocent consumer falls victim to the interests

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of politicians and large corporations who cover up the risks involved in producing the food
that ends up on the consumer’s plate. Alluding to the deaths caused by BSE and Creutzfeldt-
Jakob disease fueled fears among consumers, even though not one single case was known in
which a human’s health was negatively affected by a GMO. In the EU the anti-GMO
movement in the early days was almost entirely based on concerns for the safety of human
health.
The environmental organizations found a strong ally among the British royals: in 1998
Prince Charles said that “this kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that
belong to God, and to God alone.”25 The strong coverage of the anti-GMO movement in
newspapers combined with the campaigning efforts of environmental groups led to a strong
consumer plea for supermarkets not to sell food products containing GMOs. In March 1998,
Marks & Spencer was the first supermarket to announce that it would eliminate all genetically
modified ingredients from its shelves after receiving hundreds of letters from worried
customers. Other supermarkets soon followed suit. Food and agricultural writer Daniel
Charles (2001) said that in Europe, “consumer power had overrun government regulation”26
and forced lawmakers to adjust. The far-reaching impacts of the discourse and actions around
GMOs can be seen as an example of the constitutive power of environmental
communication.
In 2003, the EU passed a new regulatory law for GMOs. This law was the first law since
the de facto moratorium that opened up a pathway for GMOs to get approved for use in the
European Union. GMOs are considered “new food” and have to undergo extensive, case-by-
case, science-based evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) based on four
criteria: safety, freedom of choice, labeling, traceability. The EFSA then reports to the
European Commission (EC), giving them either a recommendation for authorization or
recommendation for refusal, and the EC—in case of a positive evaluation—submits the
proposal to the Section on GM Food and Feed of the Standing Committee on the Food
Chain and Animal Health, which needs to accept it. Only then will a new variety be formally
adopted by the EC. However, the so-called “safeguard clause” allows individual member
states to ban individual (approved by the EC) varieties for “justifiable reasons,” such as that
the variety may cause harm to humans or the environment. In 2015 several member states
used this clause, among them Germany, France, and Poland, to opt out entirely of growing
GMOs in their countries.27
Because growing GM crops is now legal in the EU, the EC introduced so-called “buffer
zones” to ensure the safe co-existence (without cross-pollination) of GM and non-GM crops.
The buffer zones are regulated by the individual member states, which has resulted in very
different interpretations of what is considered a “safe” distance: in Sweden a 15-meter buffer
zone suffices, whereas Luxembourg requires an 800-meter buffer zone.
Unlike the US, where the FDA opposes labels on foods containing GMOs, in the EU
labeling is strictly required for any products containing more than 1 percent GMO-derived
ingredients. The reasoning behind this is that the EC wants to “ensure clear labelling of
GMOs placed on the market in order to enable consumers as well as professionals (e.g.
farmers, and food feed chain operators) to make an informed choice.”28 However, there is
one big gap in the system: even though most member states restrict or fully opt out of
growing GMOs and the EC imposed a strict labeling law, meat producers often feed their
animals with imported grains, frequently GM corn or soybean. The meat of these GM grain-
fed animals does not need to be labeled as GM meat.
Because of the restrictions in many member states, as well as the consumer demands to
buy GM free food, there are very few GM crops grown in the EU. The anti-GMO

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movement was strong enough to impact legislators. Consumer fears were largely fueled by
the BSE scandal, which led to a distrust of food authorities in the EU. Because of the pressure
of activists and consumers, politicians adopted a more restrictive stance on GMOs.

Posterchild of evil?
GMOs—and especially GM corn—for many have become the iconic posterchild of “evil” in
agriculture. For protest against legislators or seed corporations selling GM seeds and herbicides
and pesticides, such as glyphosate, the use of a corn costume or a poster depicting an evil-
looking ear of corn is common practice. Corn lends itself well as it is a globally important
field crop and a large percentage of it is genetically modified (unlike wheat or rice).29 Corn
represents “big ag,” and therefore much of what protesters oppose: large-scale monoculture
farms, multinational seed corporations, and the industrial use of a field crop. The German
word “Vermaisung” (“cornification”) is used to criticize the sprawl of corn, mostly used for
industrial purposes, leading to the destruction of the landscape. On the other hand, the
manifold uses of corn are what its supporters praise it for: the multipurpose plant can be used
as animal fodder, as ethanol—a re-growable resource to fuel cars—in industrial products, or in
biofuel energy plants. Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer Robert Fraley (2018) sees GM
corn and other GMOs as an important part of “sustainable and integrated innovations on the
farm.”30
When GMO critics talk about food derived from GM sources, they use rhetoric tools to
create negative associations. Using words such as “Frankenfoods” (a mashup word of
“Frankstein” and “foods”) is likely to bring up associations of an experiment gone completely
wrong. It also implies the danger of scientists tinkering with a living organism that is better
left untouched. The powerful negative image of “Frankenfoods” has worked well for
protesters, even though human consumption of GMOs has been proven safe again and
again.31
In the context of environmental communication, the instrumentalization of language and
information (or the lack thereof) has greatly impacted the way in which the discourse around
GMOs was led.

Conclusion
In June 2016 about one third of the living Nobel Prize winners signed an open letter to
Greenpeace saying they “misrepresented their [GMOs] risks, benefits, and impacts, and
supported the criminal destruction of approved field trials and research projects.”32 They
pointed out that “there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome
for humans or animals from their consumption.”33 Just one year earlier, a study confirmed
that neonicotinoids, a herbicide often sprayed in combination with GMOs, is highly addictive
to bees and presents a “sizable hazard to foraging bees.”34 This goes to show that the risk
debate about GMOs is still ongoing and engages a wide array of stakeholders, from scientists
to farmers, politicians, and the general public.
Most scientific discoveries do not spark an intense and emotional public debate. The
science behind GMOs is also complex, yet somehow a great majority of the general public
and politicians have developed a stance on the issue and choose to be either “pro-GMO” or
“anti-GMO”—often without quite understanding how a genetically modified plant is
produced, how it differs from a hybridized or open-pollination variety, and what the
potential risks and benefits are.

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On the one hand, GMO supporters get branded as “pro-agrobusiness” and are accused of
supporting the interests of multinational seed corporations over the interests of small-scale
famers and environmental health. On the other hand, GMO opponents are labeled as “anti-
science” people refusing to accept GMOs as the latest technique for improving plants. Both
sides of the debate lead a very emotional battle.
Because GMOs are used for a wide array of purposes, labeling can be difficult. Particularly,
GM corn and soybeans often only end up in food indirectly as meat from animals fed with
GM crops or as a food byproduct like starch. Labeling in these cases is much less regulated
(both in the EU and the US) than when a food is directly derived from GMOs—therefore
people often do not know if they are consuming a genetically modified product. When GM
crops are used as ethanol or in biogas energy plants, labeling is neither required, nor do
people care as much as the product does not end up on the plate and therefore the concern
for human health does not apply. Environmental concerns, however, still apply when
growing GMOs for industrial purposes.
GMOs have been commercially grown for almost 30 years now. Nonetheless, the
discourse around whether they are safe and should be grown and consumed is still not
settled. By now they have been pretty thoroughly proven to be safe for human consumption
—which was the main driving argument of the European anti-GMO movement (where to
this day GMOs play only a marginal role). The debate around safety is only partly based on
scientific evidence—also because certain factors like unknown long-term effects cannot be
measured or calculated easily. However, when asking “safe for whom?,” we are only just
starting to understand in which ways non-human actors—such as insects or other organisms
in the ecosystems in which GMOs are grown—are affected. It will be interesting to see if at
any point this debate will be settled or whether this remains an open discussion based on
different value sets of what is considered “safe.”
The discourse around GMOs exemplifies the power of environmental communication and
its entanglement with politics and the economy. The fact that the legal systems in the EU and
the US regulating the use of GMOs are so different can—to a large part—be traced back to
the risk discourse around GMOs.

Notes
1 Williams (1998).
2 USDA (2017: 29).
3 National Corn Growers Association (2017).
4 Obviously scientific research itself is often a discourse and there is no such a thing as completely
objective research with clear results that automatically results in uniform international legislation.
Nonetheless, certain scientific results have resulted in similar legislation around the globe, e.g.
restricting alcohol consumption for car drivers for safety reasons or restricting tobacco for minors to
protect their health.
5 Williams and Matheny (1995: 66).
6 CRISPR is an abbreviation for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,” a
family of DNA sequences in bacteria. The sequences contain snippets of DNA from viruses that
have attacked the prokaryote. These DNA sequences form the basis of the CRISPR/Cas9
technology with which crop strains can be genetically modified.
7 Gilbert (2013: 25).
8 Diamond v. Chakrabarty. US Supreme Court. 16 June 1980.
9 Horsch et al. (1984).
10 National Corn Growers Association (2017).
11 USDA (2017: 29).

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12 It should be noted the GM corn varieties are still usually based on hybrid varieties, in which a
genetic trait is inserted.
13 Plant GMOs are regulated by the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service under the Plant Protection Act. GMOs in food, drugs, and biological products
are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic
Act and the Public Health Service Act. GMO pesticides and microorganisms are regulated by the
Environmental Protection Agency pursuant to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide
Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act. The form of regulation varies depending on the type of
GMO involved.
14 OECD (1993).
15 Herrick (2005: 289).
16 Center for Food Safety (2018).
17 US Food and Drug Administration (2018).
18 Losey et al. (1999), Lynch and Vogel (2001).
19 Gray (2004: 8).
20 Pellegrino (2018: 9).
21 Lynch and Vogel (2001).
22 Young (2015).
23 Jordan and O’Riordan (1995).
24 Williams (1998).
25 Prince Charles of Wales (1998).
26 Charles (2001: 238).
27 Busemann (2015), Center for Food Safety (2018).
28 European Commission (“GMO Legislation”).
29 Cotton and soybeans are also often genetically modified, but less often used as symbols in protests.
30 Fraley (2018).
31 Pellegrino (2018: 9).
32 Nobel Laureates (2016).
33 Nobel Laureates (2016).
34 Kessler et al. (2015: 74).

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Center for Food Safety. U.S. Polls on GE Food Labeling. Center for Food Safety, 2018, www.centerfor
foodsafety.org/issues/976/ge-food-labeling/us-polls-on-ge-food-labeling.
Charles, Daniel. Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food, Basic Books, 2001.
Diamond v. Chakrabarty. “US Supreme Court.” 16 June 1980.
European Commission. GMO Legislation. ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/legislation_en
Fraley, Robert T. Coming Soon: Better, More Sustainable and Integrated Innovations for the Farm, 2018,
monsanto.com/innovations/research-development/articles/farm-innovations/
Gilbert, Natasha. “A Hard Look at GM Crops: Superweeds? Suicides? Stealthy Genes? The True, the False
and the Still Unknown about Transgenic Crops.” Nature 497 (2 May 2013): 24–27.
Gray, Alan J. “Ecology and Government Policies: The GM Crop Debate.” Journal of Applied Ecology 41.1
(Feb 2004): 1–10.
Gray, Tim (ed.). UK Environmental Policy in the 1990s, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995.
Habeck, Martina. “Europe’s New Rules on GMOs.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1.8 (Oct
2003): 400.
Herrick, Clare. “Cultures of GM: Discourses of Risk and Labelling of GMOs in the UK and EU.” Area
37.3 (Sept. 2005): 286–94.
Horsch, Robert B., et al. “Inheritance of Functional Foreign Genes in Plants.” Science 223 (1984): 496–98.
International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). “Global Status of
Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2016.” ISAAA Brief, No. 52.
Jordan, A. and T. O’Riordan. “The Precautionary Principle in UK Environmental Law and Policy.” UK
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Kessler, Sébastien, et al. “Bees Prefer Foods Containing Neonicotinoid Pesticides.” Nature 521.7550
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Levidow, Les. “Precautionary Uncertainty: Regulating GM Crops in Europe.” Social Studies of Science 31.6
(Dec 2001): 842–74.
Losey, John E., et al. “Transgenic Pollen Harms Monarch Larvae.” Nature 399.6733 (1999): 214.
Lynch, Diahanna, and David Vogel. Apples and Oranges: Comparing the Regulation of Genetically Modified
Food in Europe and the United States. Council on Foreign Relations, 2001.
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Nobel Laureates. Laureates Letter Supporting Precision Agriculture (GMOs). 2016, supportprecisionagriculture.
org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html
OECD. Safety Evaluation of Foods Derived by Modern Biotechnology: Concepts and Principles, OECD, 1993.
Pellegrino, Elisa, et al. “Impact of Genetically Engineered Maize on Agronomic, Environmental and
Toxicological Traits: A Meta-Analysis of 21 Years of Field Data.” Scientific Reports 8.1 (2018): 1–12.
Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology. Guide to U.S. Regulation of Genetically Modified Food and
Agricultural Biotechnology Products, Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, 2001.
Prince Charles of Wales. “The Seeds of Disaster.” Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1998.
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science.time.com/2013/05/14/modifying-the-endless-genetically-modified-crop-debate/
Williams, Bruce A., and Albert R. Matheny. Democracy, Dialogue, and Environmental Disputes: The Contested
Languages of Social Regulation, Yale University Press, 1995.
Williams, N. “Plant Genetics: Agricultural Biotech Faces Backlash in Europe.” Science 281.5378 (1998): 68–71.
Young, Neil. Monsanto Years, Reprise, 2015.

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 22
SCIENCE, WONDER, AND
NEW NATURE WRITING
Rachel Carson

Saskia Beudel

Author Rachel Carson returned to the idea of wonder again and again across her writing
career. According to her long-time editor at Houghton Mifflin, wonder was a theme “about
which she felt very deeply” (Brooks 1972: 201). Her biographer suggests that “wonder and
awe were, for her, the highest emotions” (Lear 2009: 284). Carson’s small posthumously
published book in the nature-study genre, The Sense of Wonder, further attests to her
fascination with this phenomenon. The text was first published as an article under the title
“Help Your Child to Wonder” in The Woman’s Home Companion in 1956. It was written
after the publication of her bestselling book The Sea Around Us and before she began work on
Silent Spring in 1958. It can be seen, then, as one of her mature works produced in the two
interstitial years that marked a transition from her ocean-focused literature to her formation as
a “writer-activist” who helped mobilize new socio-environmental movements (Nixon 2011:
14–16; Buell 1998: 645–656; Lewis 1991: 5, 14).
In the final summer before her death in 1964, the new writing project she most wanted to
undertake was the expansion of “Help Your Child to Wonder” into a book “on the value
and necessity of a sense of wonder in the modern world” (Lear 2009: 246). Even though the
article was republished posthumously as The Sense of Wonder, she ran out of time to extend
the text and it remains in its original state. We can only guess at how she might have
developed her ideas. Intriguingly, her shift to the more activist writing of Silent Spring, for
which she is best known today, did not eclipse her dedication to the less conspicuously
activist concept of wonder.
What, then, more specifically was wonder for Carson? How did it function in her efforts
to communicate to broad public audiences both the beauty of the “universe about us” and
scientific knowledge of that world (Carson 1952: 94)? Might her idea of wonder help us
engage questions of environment and narrative in our own era?
For Carson, wonder was many things: an ethical orientation; a mode of enchantment; a
method of analysis demanding a special kind of attention to ecologically driven relations; a
mode of critical intervention into more conventional practices of science that separate subject
and object in experimentation and have proved environmentally disastrous (not least, atomic
science and its ethos of mastery over nature); and a pathway to a sense of individual wellbeing.
It was also a powerful communicative tool linked to a kind of “pre-emptive activism,”
discussed further below. It lay at the heart of her efforts to reanimate the field of nature writing

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and pioneer a new type of literature that “may well be a force working toward a better
civilization” (Carson 1952: 97).

Wonder and new forms of nature writing

When Carson was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for excellence in nature writing for
The Sea Around Us in 1952, she chose that moment to emphasize the importance of wonder
at a gala ceremony in New York. The Sea Around Us was immensely popular in Carson’s
lifetime and attracted a host of literary prizes, including the National Book Award for
Nonfiction.1 Amongst an abundance of accolades, the John Burroughs Medal “was the one
award Rachel Carson coveted” (Lear 1998: 93). Awed and honored as she was to be linked
to “immortal” literary predecessors including Thoreau, she nevertheless used the moment “to
make some trenchant criticisms of the parochial attitudes of nature writers” (93).
Carson recognized the kind of science writing she undertook as both belonging to a
cherished tradition of nature writing and as striving to pioneer innovations in the “field of the
natural sciences” (Carson 1952: 93–94). She happily acknowledged her debt to nature writers
including Henry Williamson, Henry Beston, Richard Jefferies and H.M. Tomlinson (Stoll
2012); and she kept a copy of Thoreau by her bedside. At the same time, she aimed to forge
nothing less than a new form of literature, knowledge and thought more suited and responsive
to her own times. She threw out a challenge to writers of her generation:
Yet if we are true to the spirit of John Burroughs, or of Jefferies or Hudson or
Thoreau, we are not imitators of them but—as they themselves were—we are
pioneers in new areas of thought and knowledge. If we are true to them, we are the
creators of a new type of literature as representative of our own day as was their own.
(Carson 1952: 94)
This ambition required breaking away from traditions embodied by her predecessors who
“represented the contemplative observer of the world around us” (Carson 1952: 94; Killings-
worth and Palmer 2000: 186–187). Central to Carson’s very public provocation was the
notion that a new generation of writers was producing its work during a time of escalating
destruction. She belonged to a broader “postwar preservationist reaction against the [atomic]
bomb” (Fiege 2007: 579). As for many of her peers, the splitting of the atom “violated an
ethical code . . . that obligated mankind to understand nature before manipulating it” (579).
While knowledge of environmental damage such as resource depletion, pollution and land
degradation was all too familiar to Carson, nuclear science presented an unprecedented scale
of threat to parts of the world that had seemed inviolate—“the clouds, and the rain and the
wind” (Carson 1995: 248; Lockwood 2012: 123; Mauch 2013: 202; Buell 1998: 649–650).
She was concerned, too, about increasing urbanization and people living their lives out of
touch with the natural world as a source of knowledge, wisdom, strength and comfort
(Carson 1984: 45, 88). “Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own
creation,” she claimed (Carson 1952: 94).
Present-day global environmental change scientists2 recognize the middle of the twentieth
century as the departure point for what they call the Great Acceleration, understood as a
conglomeration of increased human activity across a range of socio-economic, technological,
agricultural and industrial spheres. Taken together with population growth and attendant
increased resource consumption, carbon emissions and land clearance, the Great Acceleration
represents “the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world
in the history of humankind” (IGBP).

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Attuned to this massive transformation, Carson suggested that wonder had a special role to
play. She stated at the ceremony in New York:
But it seems reasonable to believe—and I do believe—that the more clearly we can
focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less
taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are
wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
(1952: 94)
For Carson, wonder belonged particularly to the world of the natural scientist. On more
than one occasion she cited Swedish oceanographer Otto Petterson as an exemplar of the
impassioned scientist whose curiosity and intense love of life and the mysteries of the
universe remained unabated across a lifetime. Carson noted his profound enjoyment of
“every new discovery concerning the world about him” (1984: 89; Carson 1954: 159–160),
an appreciation that followed him to his deathbed, where it kept him company and gave
him solace to the end.
Because of this close interrelationship between wonder and scientific enquiry, writers such
as herself, trained in the sciences and whose “relation to technical scientific writing has been
that of one who understands the language, but does not use it” (Carson 1944), had an
obligation to introduce non-scientific audiences to a world natural scientists knew to “be full
of wonder” (Carson 1952: 95).3 A vital part of her role as a writer, then, was to not only
translate but also facilitate the same mode of fascinated engagement with and curiosity about
“the world about us” for non-specialist and non-scientific audiences. This was not merely a
matter of communicating or popularizing science. While Carson can be described prior to the
publication of Silent Spring as an “old school . . . ‘educator’ of a grateful public curious about
science but left in the dark by the professionalization of scientific research” (Killingsworth and
Palmer 2000: 187), her authorial role, I would like to suggest, was more complex than this.
To write for a general non-scientific readership hungry for “knowledge of their world” and
“to absorb the facts of science” (Carson 1952: 96) was not merely to educate and inform. It was to
invite an audience “as varied as the passengers in a subway” (96) into the dynamic and
participatory process of wonder. Carson’s idea of wonder was bound up in a form of mobilization
and public engagement I would like to call pre-emptive activism (different from but no less
important than the more overt activism of Silent Spring). To understand this better it is worth
looking more closely at the role of wonder in scientific enquiry.

Wonder and science

There are at least two different schools of thought on the role of wonder and science—
wonder as part of an open-ended, ongoing enquiry into the world, and wonder that needs to
be “occluded” or overcome in the process of securing more stable intelligibility. On the one
hand, as Michael W. Scott (2013) notes, it has often been argued that science “seeks to
displace wonder with knowledge” and that astonishment is “inimical to science” (860, 863).
Drawing on Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Strange Wonder (2011), he points to a long history in
Western thought that ascribes to the “view that wonder, once it has stimulated thinking,
ought quickly to be banished by means of ever-increasing understanding of what things are
and how they work” (861). Spokespeople for such a view include Aristotle, Descartes, Francis
Bacon and Adam Smith. In this vein, Bacon referred to wonder as “broken knowledge” to be
fixed by knowledge proper (Hepburn 1984: 137).

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Scott suggests that some recent anthropologists locate this same view in contemporary
scientific work where, they believe, a sense of astonishment “is so conspicuous by its absence”
(862–866). An absence of wonder (so understood) in formal scientific method, scholarly
scientific publications and discourse aligns with a broad history of the role of wonder in
science. While wonder played an accepted role in European science in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, as a prompt to more “rigorous” investigation, the Enlightenment
“relegated wonder to the margins of the scientific enterprise” as formally irrelevant to more
supposedly detached methodologies (Fiege 2007: 581–582). As Anna Tsing (2011) observes,
passionate immersion “in the lives of the nonhuman subjects being studied” was once allowed
to natural scientists “mainly on the condition that the love didn’t show.”
On the other hand, the absence of wonder in formal scientific discourse does not preclude
its expression when stories of scientific discovery move into the public domain; nor does it
rule out its existence in scientists’ thought, experience and teaching. Timothy Morton (2018)
argues against the presumed detached methodologies of the modern scientist.
To collect data, you have to be receptive. . . . You need to care. A global warming
scientist needs to care enough about global warming for her to set up the experi-
ments that find out about it in the first place.
(121)
While care and wonder are not necessarily the same thing, Morton makes the almost common-
sense point that motivating forces to collect, analyze and interpret scientific information are
hardly dispassionate. Hepburn observes that scientific enquiry has long been “stimulated and
sustained by wonder, by the attentive, questioning, baffled but appreciative stance of the
person who wonders” (1984: 131).
In addition to acknowledging wonder as part of an underlying force that impels scientific
inquiry, Hepburn argues further that wonder need not necessarily be eclipsed in the quest for
knowledge. Instead it might, in certain instances, be deliberately sustained in a process he calls
the “stabilizing” of wonder towards a “steadier, perhaps permanently available response to what
is apprehended as worthy of wonder” (1984: 133). He identifies a number of varieties of such
wonder, two of which are relevant to this discussion. First, wonder is not undermined by causal
explicability. Here, rather than displacing wonder, explicability is a necessary condition. In this
category, Hepburn uses the example of wonder aroused by the discerning of intelligible patterns
in nature, which has been a main motivation in scientific enquiry (141). Second, he notes a
form of wonder that “does not see its objects possessively: they remain ‘other’ and unmastered.”
This form of wonder “dwell[s] in its objects with rapt attentiveness”—and one is filled with a
sense of appreciation and gratitude for the object’s existence (134–135).
Carson’s sense of wonder fits with these conceptualizations—it is an appreciative, heigh-
tened sensory and affective state leading to a quest for scientific knowledge that enhances and
sustains further wonder rather than closing it down.

Carson and an enduring sense of wonder

The Sense of Wonder provides insight into this interplay between wonder and scientific inquiry
as an outward directed and open-ended force. Lisa H. Sideris (2015) notes that this small
book belongs to a long lineage of educative literature produced by proponents of the
“nature-study movement” (84–86). As a child Carson was held in the thrall of the move-
ment, which became popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an
antidote to the supposedly stunting effects of modern life on children’s sensibilities and their

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moral, physical and spiritual development (Fiege 586). Her mother read her seminal texts
from the genre, and took her into the Pennsylvanian landscape to experience nature at first-hand
(Lear 2009: 16–18).
In keeping with tenets of the movement, Carson’s book encourages adults to take children
outdoors to engage with nature on an intimate and experiential level: to look, smell, listen,
feel. She believed that wonder and affinity with nature were innate or “inborn” (1984: 45)
and thus invoked sets of practices aimed at awakening, cultivating and sustaining wonder.
“Exploring nature . . . is learning again to use your eyes, ears, nostrils and finger tips, opening
up the disused channels of sensory impression” (52). Direct sensory and, where possible,
haptic engagement with plants, earth, animals, insects, sky, water, stars, moon, weather, the
waxing and waning of light and dark, opens “avenues of delight and discovery” (66). Carson
is careful to elaborate pathways between such emotional responses and subsequent knowledge
formation:
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and
the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. . . .
Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the
new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish
for knowledge about the object of our emotional response.
(45)
Carson’s statements suggest both a mode of “enchantment” (Bennett 2001) and a strong
alignment with modern science’s quest to understand the causes of things or to undertake
“investigation into the unknown” (Oreskes 2003: 699). Things of the world—weather,
planets, natural processes (tides, seasons, diurnal patterns), flora and fauna, geological
objects—trigger a flood of affective responses. They are enchanting if, as Jane Bennett
argues, “to be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid
the familiar and the everyday”—it involves participation “in a momentarily immobilizing
encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound” (2001: 4–5).
Carson insists that this moment of captivation and enthrallment with the everyday natural
phenomena that surround us leads inexorably, as it were, to scientific inquiry and knowledge
formation. The object of wonder with its power to strike, shake and transfix, to arouse
sympathy, pity, admiration or love then prompts the questions what, how and so on, leading
eventually to knowledge of that object. Wonder here takes on the familiar role as prompt or
stimulus for ever-increasing understanding of what things are and how they work, discussed
earlier. However, Carson conveys a process of open-ended wonder rather than the linear
trajectory whereby wonder functions as a trigger to be displaced by more dispassionate
methodologies and well-ordered knowledge. “There is always something new to be investi-
gated. Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one,” she wrote (1954:
159). For Carson, the natural world is an inexhaustible source of wonder—there is no single
piece of knowledge attained that can close down the ongoing interlinked process of
wonderment and scientific inquiry.
Here wonder might be described in Scott’s words as an “enduring source of new
beginnings of thought and world-making” (2013: 867). A sense of wonder prompts the
quest for knowledge, which for Carson leads to fresh wonder, and for each subsequent
mystery solved another of even greater proportions and intrigue looms. This form of
wonder that opens up inquiry and then, importantly, sustains limitless questioning and
tireless knowledge formation, aligns with an open-ended wonder identified by Ruben-
stein in Plato’s thought.

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Rubenstein draws a sharp distinction between a Socratic and Aristotelian conceptualization of

wonder. For Plato’s Socrates, wonder is the beginning of thought, arising precisely when
“something that seemed reasonable and self-evident becomes strange and unsupportable”
(Rubenstein 2011: 4). Wonder strikes when the unquestionable is thrown into question.
According to Rubenstein, Socratic wonder keeps problems, inquiries and assumed knowl-
edge unresolved: the rigorous investigative thinking prompted by wonder “keeps proposi-
tions provisional, open-ended, and incomplete” (8). For Aristotle, though, and for a
Western philosophical and scientific heritage more broadly, wonder is something to be
“cured” (Rubenstein 2011: 12). As already noted, wonder in this version goads inquiry but
is occluded by progressive knowledge formation. So although Aristotle, like Carson, found
that every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one, it is worth noting that
for Aristotle this was a sequential process, “wondering at higher and higher things until he
has worked his way back to the moon, the stars, and finally, the First Cause” (Rubenstein
2011: 12). In this way, wonder finally eliminates itself and seeks final resolution—and is
quite different from Carson’s evocation of a sense of mystery that expands its scope due to
the inexhaustibly intriguing physical nature of the world around us.
Rubenstein identifies two disturbing corollaries of an Aristotelian urge toward resolution
of the abounding uncertainty of Socratic wonder. First, the “progressive eclipse of wonder
is . . . related to a certain will toward mastery, even toward divinity: by comprehending the
source of the wondrous, the thinking self in effect becomes the source of the wondrous”
(2011: 16). Sideris locates this form of internalized wonder in responses made by atomic
scientists to their development of the atomic bomb.
Here one wonders at the way in which hypothesised entities turn out to correspond
with or predict reality . . . the object of wonder . . . is not nature itself but the mind
brilliant enough to have bridged the gap between its own inner workings and the
structure of reality beyond.
(Sideris 2015: 91)
Second, according to Hannah Arendt’s critiques of wonder, excessive and inward-turning
wonder can lead to disengagement with the “real world” and its socio-political and inter-
personal obligations (Rubenstein 2011: 21). In stark contrast to both these critiques, Carson
keeps her gaze turned insistently outward at what she called “a world of complex physical
nature” (1984: 45). Further, her notion of wonder is implicitly political. For Carson, wonder
does not stop with knowledge formation. It leads to an ethical orientation.

Wonder as a corrective to destructive urges: pre-emptive activism

As we have seen, Carson proposed that a sense of wonder propels a richer and deeper
“understanding of the world about us” (1952: 96). (She uses this expression “the world
about us” repeatedly rather than the more generic or cumbersome term “nature” that has
prompted so much critique in the humanities.) But if wonder stimulates the wish for
knowledge about the source of our emotional response, the process does not stop here.
Sideris suggests that for Carson, wonder ultimately grounds “one’s moral character and sustain[s] a
compassionate concern for life” (Sideris 2015: 85). It engenders “humility and reverence” (Sideris
2008: 241).
Is this the wholesome check to a lust for destruction claimed by Carson at the gala
ceremony in New York? She does not spell out the steps involved here. In The Sense of
Wonder she does conclude with the question:

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What is the value in preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder, this
recognition of something beyond the boundaries of human existence? Is the
exploration of the natural world just a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of
childhood or is there something deeper?
(Carson 1984: 88)
She answers her own question by saying she is “sure there is something much deeper, something
lasting and significant.” But she turns here in this account to the wellbeing of the wonderer.
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the
earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their
personal lives [they will] find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
(Carson 1984: 88)
This involves both aesthetic appreciation and a reassuring reminder of one’s place in the larger
scheme of things—deep time and systems at a planetary scale (tides, currents, seasons), which
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2016) describes so well as those humbling stories that “make us aware
that humans come very late in the history of the planet, which was never engaged in readying
itself for our arrival” (394). For Carson, consideration of the long and wondrous history of the
Earth over deep time helped put into perspective human problems and soothed humanity’s
shaken faith in itself (1952: 96). “There is something infinitely healing,” she wrote, “in the
repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the
winter” (1984: 88–89). Writing in the mid-twentieth century, under the shadow of atomic
science but not yet under the shadow of anthropogenic global environmental change, she
could take recourse in the “eternal verities” of seasonal patterns (the unfurling spring bud, and
so on) in ways not possible in our own day.
Her larger claim for wonder (beyond individual wellbeing) as a check to destruction and as a
“force working toward a better civilisation” is more implicit than explicit. What can be said is that
once wonder is triggered and enlivened through attentive hands-on and sensory engagement
with the world about us, it has the potential to foreclose or nullify the urge for destruction. If
an object or “thing” of the world about us (Bennett 2010: 1–2) has the power to arouse
passionate curiosity, sustained attention and attainment of not just facts (data) but knowledge
and wisdom surrounding that object, by default, Carson implies, one is unlikely to want to
destroy that same object. In this regard wonder is “non-exploitative, non-utilitarian”—it
seeks to “affirm and respect” and also forge compassion for other beings (Hepburn 1984:
146). There is a “life-enhancing character of wonder, appreciative and open, opposed to the
self-protective and consolatory,” writes Hepburn, and it is very much “other-acknowledging”
(144, italics in original).
We might understand wonder, then, as a form of “pre-habilitation” rather than “rehabi-
litation” in response to urgent environmental problems—to borrow language from the realm
of trauma studies (Grey 2018). It pre-empts and forestalls anthropogenic environmental
destruction before it occurs. As scientist Pep Canadell (2017) observes,
few people understand that the climate problem is unlike any other environmental
problem we’ve had in the past in so far as, usually we trash something, we pollute to
death, people might die, then we pour in the billions and we kind of fix it to an
extent. To the extent that we feel happy enough.
The idea of wonder breaks the logic of this remediation mindset, which apart from any other
concerns, is no longer applicable in our new situation. It suggests, instead, that through

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reverence, humility and compassion, one is unlikely to trash and pollute in the first place.
Wonder is thus linked to an ethics whereby enhanced “receptivity to the impersonal life
that surrounds and infuses us . . . will enable wiser interventions into that ecology” (Bennett
2010: 4).
Given the multivalent capacities of wonder, a new generation of writers were beholden to
create new literary forms as an inclusive and civic gesture that would ensure that the
“pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world, are not reserved for the
scientists” (Carson 1954: 160). Carson suggests here a democratization of science. In her
aim to pioneer new literary forms in the field of the natural sciences, the evocation and
stimulus for non-specialist audiences of wonder (more usually the privileged experience of
the scientist) was bound to a larger socio-environmental responsibility—as a force work-
ing towards the greater wellbeing of humans and the nonhuman world alike.

Wonder, imagination and writing

In the creation of her literary work, this aim involved prodigious acts of synthesis of
scientific information, which was then stripped of its technical language. Lawrence Buell
(1995) understands Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the
Sea to be propelled by the idea of the sea as “a mysterious domain beyond human
control” (290). He characterizes these works as “evocatively descriptive prose poems that
approach their subjects as an intricate green world of beautiful integrity” safe from
humanity’s plundering and subduing hand (291). Similarly, Rob Nixon alludes to
Carson’s sea books as celebrations of marine life written in a lyrical voice (2011: 311).
These works are, however, as much celebrations of scientific discovery as they are lyrical
paeans to a world apart.
As a writer, Carson consulted, absorbed and integrated vast amounts of scientific research
ordinarily spread across diverse sub-fields. These extended well beyond her own training in
biology, bringing together the work of “scientists whose writing was often so specialized that
it seldom appeared in the same journals and so impermeable that it seldom reached the
public” (Hamilton Lytle 2007: 5–6). Her methodology created “an intellectual ecology for
her books . . . a broad, synthetic, mutually dependent” form of research based on the careful
construction of “networks of correspondents” (Hamilton Lytle 2007: 5–6). Sörlin’s (2013)
description of Carson as a “concerned syntheticist” who was “fearless of disciplinary
boundaries” is a vivid and useful summary of her writerly capacities (20).
Carson took recent wartime and post-war findings in oceanographic studies seriously
enough to await their publication as once-classified material slowly made its way into
government reports. (Military and intelligence-related funding, research and equipment
often involved “some of the highest levels of secrecy in history” (Cloud 2003: 630)).
Carson wrote to friend and supporter William Beebe, explaining that she wanted her new
book, The Sea Around Us, “to reflect some of the new concepts of the ocean which that
research has developed” (Brooks 1972: 110). By 1948, enough of this material had finally
appeared in the public domain for her to progress. “I believe I consulted, at a minimum,
somewhat more than a thousand separate printed sources,” she wrote (qtd. in Brooks 1972:
111). In addition, she corresponded with oceanographers all over the world and personally
discussed and sought feedback on the book with many specialists (Carson 1953: v; Lear
2009: 120). She mined these “kernels of fact” from a plethora of “often dry and exceedingly
technical papers of scientists” in order to “weld” them into her profile of the sea (qtd. in
Brooks 1972: 111). This process took over ten years.

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For the reader’s sake, Carson was very much concerned to convey fascination and passion
for her subject. Carson wanted to demonstrate that her real interest was not with “‘pure’ or
abstract science, but that I am the sort who wants above all to get out and enjoy the beauty
and the wonder of the natural world, and who resorts only secondarily to the laboratory and
library for explanations” (Carson 1951). This statement belies the depth of strenuous work
undertaken “in the library,” which she described elsewhere as the backbone to the book
derived through “plain hard slogging” (Brooks 1972: 111).
Carson insisted on a very particular fusion of scientific accuracy and vivid imagination,
which was quickened in a strikingly visual way by scientific fact. When reflecting on her time
spent conducting research at the famous Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole,
Massachusetts, she wrote
that was when I first began to let my imagination go down through the water and
piece together bits of scientific fact until I could see the whole life of those creatures
as they lived them in that strange sea world.
(n.d.)
Of the eel she wrote: “in a flash I see a vivid picture of the strange places that eel has been—
places which I, being merely human, can never visit” (Carson n.d.). Her writing relies upon,
to some extent, direct experience through fieldwork and paying sustained and rapt attention
to particular places and the forms of life they hold (as we have seen). Through scientific
information, though, it also extends its reach imaginatively to realms well beyond the bounds
of direct human experience.
Unlike most American nature writing, which uses first-person narration as its favored
mode (Morton 2018: 198) (delivered by “the contemplative observer of the world around
us”), Carson’s books barely contain the “I.” In one of the few passages in The Sea Around Us
that uses personal narrative, she writes:
Every part of earth or air or sea has an atmosphere peculiarly its own, a quality or
characteristic that sets it apart from all others. When I think of the floor of the deep sea,
the single, overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of
sediments. I see always the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above,
flake upon flake, layer upon layer—a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of
years, that will go on as long as there are seas and continents. For the sediments are the
materials of the most stupendous “snowfall” the earth has ever seen.
(1953: 74)
Through such vivid imagery, a kind of “deep and tremulous earth-poetry” (Powys qtd. in
Carson 1953: 74) triggered through scientific fact but charged with her desire to convey the
beauty of the natural world, she invited an audience as varied as passengers on the subway to
imagine and appreciate for themselves the everyday wonders of the world around us.
To conclude, Carson recommended pedagogical practices to stimulate and nurture wonder
in children, through hands-on experience in the outdoors. Wonder would serve the
individual in good stead, ensuring a sense of wellbeing through recognizing one’s modest
place in a larger system “beyond the boundaries of human existence.” More than this,
wonder played an integral role in her aim to forge nothing less than a new form of
literature—a new form of nature writing—in response to the particular pressing circumstances
of her time. A sense of wonder in the face of phenomena of the everyday natural “world
around us” would lead to the quest for scientific knowledge of that world. This combination
of affective, appreciative response coupled with scientific inquiry and understanding was a

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“force working toward a better civilization”—it stymied a lust for environmental destruction.
We can understand her sense of wonder, then, as a form of pre-emptive or anticipatory
activism. Her writing distilled, synthesized and communicated complex scientific knowledge
from across a range of disciplines in order to impel a sense of wonder in broad non-scientific
audiences.

Notes
1 The Sea Around Us was released in July 1951 and by November had sold 100,000 copies. When it
won the National Book Award for Nonfiction the following year, it sold another 100,000 copies.
The Sea (as Carson dubbed it) remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 86 weeks, attracted
a host of further literary prizes and has been translated into 28 languages.
2 According to the American Geophysical Union, “Global Environmental Change addresses large-scale
chemical, biological, geological, and physical perturbations of the Earth’s surface, ocean, land surface,
and hydrological cycle with special attention to . . . human-caused perturbations, and their impacts on
society.”
3 All excerpts from the Rachel Carson Papers at the Beinecke Library, Copyright © 2019 by Roger
Allen Christie. Reprinted by permission of Frances Collin, Trustee.

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Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2010.
Brooks, Paul. The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work. Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American
Culture. Harvard University Press, 1995.
Buell, Lawrence. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 639–65.
Canadell, Pep. Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project, a Core Project of the International
Research Initiative Future Earth. Interview with Saskia Beudel, 4 August 2017.
Carson, Rachel. “Carson to Quincy Howe,” 31 May 1944. Rachel Carson Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, 1944.
Carson, Rachel. “Rachel Carson to Catherine Scott,” 21 January 1951. Rachel Carson Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, 1951.
Carson, Rachel. “Design for Nature Writing.” Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, edited
by Linda Lear. Beacon Press, 1952, pp. 93–97.
Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. Readers Union, Staple Press, 1953.
Carson, Rachel. “The Real World Around Us.” Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, edited
by Linda Lear. Beacon Press, 1954, pp. 147–63.
Carson, Rachel. “Biological Sciences.” Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, edited by Linda
Lear. Beacon Press, 1956, pp. 164–67.
Carson, Rachel. “Preface to the Second Edition of The Sea Around Us.” Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing
of Rachel Carson, edited by Linda Lear. Beacon Press, 1961, pp. 101–9.
Carson, Rachel. “The Pollution of Our Environment.” Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson,
edited by Linda Lear. Beacon Press, 1963, pp. 227–45.
Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. Harper & Row, 1984.
Carson, Rachel. “Letter to Dorothy Freeman.” 1 February 1958. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel
Carson and Dorothy Freeman, edited by Martha Freeman. Beacon Press, 1995, pp. 248–49.
Carson, Rachel. “Memo for Mrs Eales on Under the Sea Wind.” Rachel Carson Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, n.d.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable.” New
Literary History 47 (2016): 377–97.
Cloud, John. “Introduction: Special Guest-Edited Issue on the Earth Sciences in the Cold War.” Social
Studies of Science 33.5 (2003): 629–33.
Fiege, Mark. “The Atomic Scientist, the Sense of Wonder, and the Bomb.” Environmental History 12.3
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Grey, Geoff. “Creative Sharing: How That Might Look in a Defence Force.” Writing and Empathy
Symposium, University of Canberra, 15 June 2018.
Hamilton Lytle, Mark. The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental
Movement. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hepburn, R.W. “Wonder” and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighboring Fields. Edinburgh
University Press, 1984.
IGBP. “Great Acceleration.” International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Accessed 15 February 2017.
www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie and Jacqueline S. Palmer. “Silent Spring and Science Fiction: An Essay in the
History and Rhetoric of Narrative.” And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,
edited by Craig Waddell. Southern Illinois University Press, 2000, pp. 174–204.
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Lear, Linda. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
Lewis, Victor. “Rachel Carson Remembered.” Race, Poverty and the Environment 2.1 (1991): 5, 14.
Lockwood, Alex. “The Affective Legacy of Silent Spring.” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 123–40.
Mauch, Christof. “Commentary: Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962).” The Future of Nature, edited by
Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde. Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 201–3.
Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological. Pelican, 2018.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Oreskes, Naomi. “US Navy Oceanographic Research and the Discovery of Sea-Floor Hydrothermal
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Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. Columbia
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Sideris, Lisa H. “The Secular and Religious Sources of Rachel Carson’s Sense of Wonder.” Rachel Carson:
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Sideris, Lisa H. “Forbidden Fruit: Wonder, Religious Narrative and the Quest for the Atomic Bomb.”
Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond,
Sigurd Bergmann and Bronislaw Szerszinsky. Routledge, 2015, pp. 83–98.
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 PART III

Non-Western environmental
communication
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 23
DESIGNING THE
COMMUNICATION OF
TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL
KNOWLEDGE
A Noto case study

Yuki Masami

This chapter is a part of my ongoing research on discourses of satoyama, agrarian environments

consisting of several different ecosystem types such as rice paddies, streams or irrigation water
channels, woods, and human villages.1 Similar to American wilderness, Japanese satoyama has
been the object of economic exploitation, romantic and/or nationalistic idealization, and
environmental conservation. In a past essay included in the journal Poetica’s special issue of
Japanese ecocriticism edited by Japanologist David Bialock and ecocritic Ursula Heise, I discussed
how satoyama has been socially and aesthetically appropriated, proposing three categories of
satoyama discourses: satoyama-as-landscape as framed by an outsider’s point of view, satoyama-as-
place as lived by local residents, and satoyama-as-zone based on the fact that rural agrarian and
economically waning environments tend to be used to host hazardous businesses such as nuclear
power plants and industrial waste sites. Pointing out that satoyama had been romantically idealized
as a place where humans live in harmony with nature while at the same time being neglected and
left behind in the nation’s economic development, I concluded the essay as follows:
The critical examination of discourses on satoyama . . . suggests that we should be
paying more attention to satoyama as place. However, since a place is a lived
environment, and characteristically those who make their living in rural satoyama
hardly write about their lives, there are challenges to discussing the lived experience
of satoyama. And yet this should not be taken as a sign of intellectual impasse;
rather, I believe it is more productive to develop such an awareness into a sense of
responsibility, which should be the basis for the work of a continuous examination
of individual and societal views of the environment we live in.
(Yuki 2014: 61)
Recognizing that satoyama-as-place is a challenging research topic since it cannot be fully
examined only from the conceptual viewpoint of an academic, I will examine in this chapter

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satoyama-as-place, where practice, knowledge, and a way of life are not clearly separated. As
an analytical tool, I will employ the idea of “traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK), which
gives some transparency to the place-rooted, close, and complex relationships among residents
as well as between humans and the environment.2 TEK involves different layers of commu-
nication—between humans and nonhuman beings, between humans and the environment,
between local residents and outsiders, and between local residents within a community. In
order to avoid imposing academic views and ways of thinking, I will focus on specific
practices being developed in a village on Noto Peninsula, Japan, and examine how non-
native individuals communicate with native residents as well as their lived place with an
enhanced sense of cultural and environmental awareness toward a more sustainable life.
This chapter consists of three parts. First, I will briefly explain the physical and social
geography of Noto, the site of this chapter’s case study, and discuss Noto’s satoyama from an
ecocritical perspective. Then I will examine an example of a successfully sustained platform of
learning TEK in Noto organized by non-native residents, who have facilitated communica-
tion between outsider participants and the traditional village community and environment.
Finally, I will examine how such sustained place-based learning activities are designed in a
way in which to connect outsider participants, new residents, and native villagers, and to
collectively stimulate their personal engagement and communication with the environment.

Deep Noto, the Dark Pastoral, and TEK

It is easy to recognize the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture on a map of Japan. On
Japan’s main island Honshu, the Noto Peninsula sticks out into the Japan Sea and looks like a
bent left thumb. With the surrounding sea and thickly forested inland, Noto Peninsula,
especially the remote northern area called Oku Noto [Deep Noto], is abundant with natural
resources including fish and wood. Agriculture has been a main industry as well. In short,
most of Deep Noto is designated as satoyama. Deep Noto also has nurtured a traditional craft
culture utilizing the local natural environment and is known especially for traditional
lacquerware in Wajima and pottery in Suzu. Rich in natural and cultural resources, however,
Deep Noto is not thriving. Rather, it suffers from a rapid decline in population—especially
that of young people—due to the nationwide economic shift from primary industry, and has
been losing its economic, cultural, and environmental sustainability.
With waning place-based traditional culture on the one hand and a stagnant economy on
the other, Deep Noto has similar characteristics to what Heather I. Sullivan (2017) calls
“Dark Pastoral”—a concept referring to both “nostalgia for idealized rural landscapes
occupied by peaceful folk seemingly in harmony with natural cycles but always already lost”
and “the darkness of our rapidly growing knowledge about industrial cultures’ tainted tactics
when accessing and using ‘natural resources’ and the standard obliviousness to the resultant
waste” (26). Having pastoral features such as a rural life rooted in a particular place, satoyama
demonstrates a version of the pastoral. As satoyama shares the ambiguity of the pastoral
landscape, I would call Deep Noto the “Dark Satoyama,” a version of the Dark Pastoral. The
darkness of modern industrial culture projected on satoyama is recognized, for instance, in the
fact that Wajima, a rural city in western Deep Noto, is likely to have a final treatment site for
industrial waste which is being imposed upon it. The darkness cast on satoyama is also visible,
albeit subtly, in the fact that Deep Noto was designated as a UN-sponsored site of Globally
Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) in 2011 due to a shared sense of crisis of
“the traditional farming practices being abandoned and endemic species and breeds being
lost” (FAO). Throughout this chapter, I will discuss Deep Noto through the lens of Dark

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Satoyama, which urges us to avoid sentimental projection of an idealized picture of good old
Japan onto a seemingly bucolic rural landscape.3
While socially exploited—as a proposed site for an industrial waste dump site, for instance
—and largely neglected, Deep Noto has attracted those who are inspired to pursue an
alternative way of life and to learn the placed-based knowledge of sustainable life, or
“traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK), which is being maintained, albeit barely, by the
remaining elderly residents. TEK is a useful concept to examine satoyama-as-place because it
refers not only to knowledge as content or the thing known but also to ways of knowing or
the process (Berkes 2012: 8). In his Sacred Ecology, a widely-read book on TEK, Fikret Berkes
provides a detailed mapping of different views of the contested term, explaining differences in
perception of what “traditional,” “ecological,” and “knowledge” mean respectively between
scholars and indigenous people, how the concept has been debated, and the usefulness of
TEK in a modern society. Carefully considering such issues, Berkes provides a working
definition of TEK as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive
processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living
beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment” (2012: 7, italics in original).
There are cultural and educational activities which aim to revitalize the TEK of Deep
Noto; the most systematically-operated one is Kanazawa University’s Noto Satoyama
Satoumi Meister Training Program. Since its inception in 2007, the Noto Meister Program
has offered classes on the scientific and traditional knowledge of the local socio-cultural
environment, fieldwork of farming, fishing, and forestry, and networking opportunities with
local residents. The program has attracted approximately 280 individuals in the first ten years,
some from within Ishikawa prefecture and others from as far as Tokyo, out of whom 165
trainees have graduated (as of March 2018). One of the graduates is Hagino Yuki, who
launched a learning community called maruyama-gumi [Team Maruyama] in 2010 with her
husband Kiichiro. It is their activity that I will examine as a case study of the communication
of TEK in a modern context.
Team Maruyama has coordinated loosely organized monthly activities, which are designed
to bring TEK to participants’ awareness. The design and operation of their activities, which I
will examine later, help stimulate personal awareness of TEK, develop participants’ interest in
the local socio-cultural-ecological environment in which TEK is embedded, and enhance the
desire to learn more from those who know the environment as well as the environment itself.

Team Maruyama and its spatial and cultural location

Maruyama is the name of a local round-shaped forested hill (maru means round and yama
means a forested hill or a mountain; see Figure 23.1), located in the small township of
Ichinosaka, within the rural city of Wajima. Maruyama, the surrounding rice paddies, and a
stream and a creek running through the area are the classic elements of satoyama, from which
local residents used to supply everything they needed for a self-sufficient life—water, rice,
beans, vegetables, firewood, and wood for building, to name just a few. As is the case
everywhere in Noto, Wajima suffers from depopulation: the number of residents has
decreased by 20 percent in the last ten years and it is about 27,000 (as of April 2018). The
percentage of aged people (65 and older) has been increasing, making up approximately 40
percent of the population. The same tendency applies to Ichinosaka, having fewer than 200
residents in 75 households (as of 2014). Ichinosaka is the base for Team Maruyama and is
described as follows in their brochure:

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 Yuki Masami

Figure 23.1 Maruyama, rice paddies, and mountains in Ichinosaka. The white roof at the lower left is the
Haginos’ house. © Team Maruyama

Until the 1970s, many people in Ichinosaka village grew rice around the Maruyama
area. Before modern agriculture expanded, the rice paddies of Maruyama were small
and worked by hand. Moving between small fields, the farmers would also tend
small vegetable patches, collect firewood and rest at water springs. Even the berms
that separate the paddies were used to plant soybeans and adzuki beans.
(Hagino Atelier 2012: n.p.)
The quoted passage shows that Ichinosaka is typically satoyama.
Organized by Mr. and Mrs. Hagino, Team Maruyama has been developing a loosely-knit
yet durable network of those who share an interest in the cultural and ecological knowledge
practiced in Deep Noto. The Haginos are not native to the place; they “moved from Tokyo
and cleared land on a forested hill near Maruyama to build [their] own home” (Hagino
Atelier 2012: n.p.). What made them decide to settle in Deep Noto is the significance of the
lessons of Satoyama living—wisdom from the rich natural setting and other farmers
[they] meet every day. The farmers know when to do, where to do, what to do,
and how to do in order to live in balance with their natural and social settings.
(Hagino Atelier 2012: n.p.)
In other words, TEK shared and practiced in Ichinosaka attracted the Haginos. Settled in, the
Haginos play the role of catalyst to facilitate others’ personal awareness of TEK as they
themselves experienced it and decided to move in because of it.
Perhaps modesty is the word that most clearly describes Team Maruyama. Having attracted
nationwide attention, as it is exemplified by their being chosen as a winner of the Biodiversity
Action Award hosted by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment (MoE) in 2014, Team

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Maruyama is modest in publicizing their activity. No official public announcements of their

monthly events are issued except for an event page on Facebook. And yet, on the second
Sunday of each month, ten to thirty people gather to the Haginos at the foot of Maruyama;
some are new residents, some come from the prefecture’s capital Kanazawa, which is an
hour-and-a-half drive away, and others visit from as far as Kyoto, Tokyo, and even overseas.
The Haginos seem to keep a low profile in public, perhaps because they are simply too busy
to promote their activities: Kiichiro works as an architect and teaches full time at the
University of Toyama, and Yuki multitasks as a designer, essayist, environmental educator,
and food creator. But if it is their intention to keep a low profile, what does it imply? A
possible interpretation is that they hoped for their learning community to develop sponta-
neously among participants at a personal level, in a bottom–up manner. Also, their attitude
might reflect their effort to be accepted by local “native” residents who, as is the case
everywhere in rural Japan, live a close and complex relationship with each other and often
cast a curious yet suspicious eye on newcomers.
Born and raised in Tokyo, Hagino Yuki and Kiichiro are locals but not natives of Deep
Noto. Their first encounter with the place was in 1997, shortly after they ended a three-and-
a-half-year stay in Philadelphia, where Kiichiro studied architecture as a Fulbright graduate
student. As is often the case, living outside Japan provided the couple a lens through which to
see Japanese culture anew. Upon returning to Japan, the Haginos visited Deep Noto to learn
about traditional handmade paper, which Yuki had become interested in during their stay in
Philadelphia. The couple was also attracted by the remote satoyama as an educational
environment for their children to learn about traditional rural life. Since then, the Haginos
had spent every summer in Deep Noto, even after they moved to the United States again in
2001. Primarily as a place to raise their children, however, the couple eventually decided to
move to Deep Noto. They rented an old traditional house in Wajima, then moved to their
current house, designed and built by Kiichiro, near the forested hill of Maruyama in 2009
(Hagino 2008: 6–7).
The location of their dwelling seems to reflect their position as new residents who are
willing to learn the placed-based knowledge from the villagers and share the knowledge with
other non-native individuals who are interested in TEK. In the agrarian satoyama environ-
ment, it is often the case that houses are next to each other along streets, forming a defined
residential area at the center of the village, which is surrounded by rice paddies and vegetable
gardens. The Haginos’ house is located not within the community but on the outskirts of the
village. The spatial periphery, however, does not necessarily imply the psychological distance
from the community. Considering that the Haginos make an effort to build good relation-
ships with the villagers from whom they intend to learn TEK, the physical distance should be
translated as the new residents’ sense of humility toward, rather than alienation from, the
traditional village community.
Walking from the Haginos’ residence away from the center of the village community lies
the rice paddies and woods of Maruyama, and their house serves as a convenient observation
point from which to see the villagers in a context of farming. Local farmers pass by the
Haginos’ house every time they go to work in rice paddies or the woods. From the large
living room windows the Haginos can see them and get an idea of when, what, and how the
villagers do in the rice fields around Maruyama. In this way, the location of their residence
allows the new locals to avoid being fully involved in community-related nuisance and
primarily connect with the native villagers in terms of relationships with the environment.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, the choice of having a home midway between the
traditional community and the forested hill seems to imply the Haginos’ intention to learn

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both from the local native people and the local ecosystem: the former materializes the cultural
knowledge and practice, while the latter offers a field of more familiar science-oriented
learning. In other words, the location of their home signifies the couple’s intention to learn
TEK not solely from the local community but by means of using the science of ecology in
order to achieve a more concrete and felt understanding of knowledge. Also, a scientific
approach helps prevent idealization of the place-based ancient knowledge. Thus the location
of the Haginos’ residence, which is the base of Team Maruyama, invites a perspective which
allows them to recontextualize TEK in a modern social environment.

Designing the activity for communication

It is not only the spatial and cultural location of Team Maruyama that makes TEK more
accessible to non-native, mostly urban, individuals. Team Maruyama’s activity suggests how
to design a platform for an individual’s felt understanding of TEK. Their monthly events
consist of regular and seasonal activities. Regular activities include the monitoring and
observation of plants and aquatic creatures around the Maruyama hill (see Figure 23.2) and
communal locavore lunches that are cooperatively prepared by the participants (see
Figure 23.3). Chopping firewood in the Haginos’ backyard is occasionally added. Seasonal
activities, as listed below, focus on hands-on experiences of works which used to be practiced
on a communal basis and now are managed mostly by the elders:
April: preparing a seed bed
May: sowing soybeans
June: planting soybean seedlings in the berms that separate rice paddies
July: planting adzuki bean seedlings in the berms

Figure 23.2 Monitoring and observation of plants around Maruyama © Team Maruyama

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August: cutting weeds on the berms to protect the bean plants (see Figure 23.4)
September: securing the habitat next to rice paddies for aquatic insects
October: tending soybeans
November: harvesting and threshing soybeans
December: Aenokoto ritual for welcoming deities of rice paddies4
January: no activity due to heavy snow
February: Aenokoto ritual for sending off deities of rice paddies
March: Workshop on making soy sauce (using the beans grown and harvested by
Team Maruyama the previous year) at a local brewery; bottling soy sauce made two
years before; locavore lunch of local eggs on locally grown rice with the team-made soy
sauce
The loosely organized activities with flexible time schedules encourage the spontaneous
involvement of each participant according to their own interest and at their own pace. While
walking along Maruyama, for instance, some participants are eager to find plants and creatures
on the list of threatened species, and others are absorbed in talking with a young rice farmer
who moved to Ichinosaka to launch natural farming. After the morning monitoring, the
group goes to the Haginos’ house and prepares lunch. Here, too, each individual is
encouraged to do what they find helpful. Some start cracking the shells of walnuts that
Yuki harvested in the wood of Maruyama the previous fall, some are in the kitchen rinsing,

Figure 23.3 Locavore lunch in the living room © Team Maruyama

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Figure 23.4 Soybean plants in the berm after the weed-cutting (photo by the author)

peeling, and cutting the vegetables grown nearby, some arranging dishes and cups, and those
who are exhausted lean back on a couch and take a nap. Along with the sound of pots and
pans, conversation and laughter reverberates throughout the open space of the kitchen and
dining/living room.
Some characteristics of the monthly events have come to be visible during the eight years
since the launch of Team Maruyama. Among them, I will examine the following three that
specifically concern the design of the communication of TEK: blending scientific knowledge
of ecology into traditional knowledge, learning through the senses, and communication
through food.

Blending scientific knowledge into traditional knowledge

The monitoring of the ecosystem around Maruyama was originally started by the Biotope
Research Group in Wajima in 2009, a year before the launch of Team Maruyama. The activity
was a part of the MoE’s “monitoring sites 1000 project.” With plant ecologist Ito Koji and
insect ecologist Nomura Shinya, the group members held a regular monitoring of the local flora
and aquatic fauna, the results of which were sent to the MoE. The satoyama of the Maruyama
area is rich in biodiversity with more than 400 identified species of plants and aquatic insects (Ito
and Nomura 2015: 20). The monitoring project was taken over by Team Maruyama when it
was launched in 2010. Walking along rice paddies and the forested hill, Ito and Nomura are
concentrated on finding and identifying plants and aquatic insects, those on a list of threatened
species in particular, explaining their ecological significance in the natural and cultural
environment in the Maruyama area.

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The scientific approach of the monitoring helps set a foundation for learning TEK in a
context of modern life and for engaged participation. However enjoyable, just simply walking
in the countryside likely makes an individual remain an onlooker to whom local villagers
would cast suspicious looking eyes. In fact, in order to avoid a possible conflict with the
villagers, the Haginos do not accept those who just want to come to see the rural landscape;
the couple look for those who are willing to engage themselves in learning from the place.
Also, the participants are required to wear a Team Maruyama wooden tag to avoid being
regarded as intruders. Since the scientific knowledge, as I mentioned earlier, is more
accessible than TEK for the participants, who are mostly in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, learning
the local plants and insects gets them interested in and closer to the satoyama environment.
Scientific knowledge of the environment inspires not only the local and outside younger
generations but also the elders of the village. The following story that Ito Koji, plant ecologist
and associate professor at Kanazawa University’s Noto school, told me at a monitoring session
will explain this. Several years ago, Ito found an endangered plant species called suzusaiko
(Cynanchum paniculatum (Bunge) Kitag) on a berm between a farm road and a rice field. In
order to have the rare plant species protected, Hagino Yuki decided to talk to a local elder,
who owns the land where the plant was found, about how rare and special suzusaiko is, asking
him not to cut it down when he cut the grass on the berm. This brought the local farmer a
realization of the scientific value of, and a sense of wonder about, his familiar place, as well as
a resultant sense of responsibility to protect suzusaiko. The farmer started to keep a careful eye
out for suzusaiko, putting a long wooden stick next to the plant whenever he finds one as a
sign for attention. This story illustrates how science and tradition create the mutual commu-
nication to achieve the shared aim.

Learning through the senses

Team Maruyama’s monthly activity encourages the participants to physically engage them-
selves with the environment. During a three-hour monitoring and observation in the
morning, they walk around the hill of Maruyama at a slow pace with frequent stops for
close observation of plants and insects. Needless to mention Henry David Thoreau’s maxim,
walking stimulates our senses. With the heightened senses, one can start being aware of
aspects of their surroundings which were previously unnoticed. The process of being familiar
with the biodiversity of satoyama inspires the desire to know more about it and to share the
excitement of discovery, both of which lead to engaging communication with the environ-
ment as well as fellow men and women.
Learning through the senses helps one understand the environment at a personal level.
Watching, touching, and often playing with the plants they have found, the participants in
Team Maruyama ask the researchers to identify their discoveries, eager to know more about
them. Affection, or personal connection, to biodiversity emerges. It should be noted that the
explanation of plants and insects given by the researchers together with Hagino Yuki is not
mere scientific information but blended with their cultural significance. They explain, for
instance, what is edible or poisonous, why particular plants found in the rice fields of natural
farming do not exist in conventional rice fields, and which green plant is used to mix into the
mochi rice cakes that the whole community enjoys in the winter. Many plants in the Maruyama
area are included in the prefectural and MoE’s Red List. Ito writes in his essay that, when he
started to monitor the local flora as a plant ecologist, his main concern was how to preserve
threatened species, and that the several years of regular contact with the environment of
Maruyama made him aware of the significance of the villagers’ role in maintaining the

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local biodiversity (Ito and Nomura 2015: 21). Biodiversity around Maruyama, Ito explained
during a monitoring session in the summer of 2018, would have been lost without the local
farmers’ regular practice of cutting weeds and shrubs at the edge of the forested hill. For the
farmers, this is a custom, a part of necessary maintenance for their ancestral land. But from the
ecologist’s point of view, it is an important means with which to protect biodiversity,
preventing all the hill from being shady and providing a place for plants which prefer sunlight.
The realization of an ecological role of communal customs made the scientist aware of the
importance of place-based cultural practices. As the scientific insight stimulates the villagers
with a renewed sense of wonder and responsibility towards the biodiversity of their place,
cultural knowledge and practices make the scientist realize the important role of farmers’
management in protecting biodiversity.

Communication through food

Food is an important element of the communication of TEK. Food is not just something
grown, caught, and prepared for us to eat; it includes uncultivated plants in the wood and
field, if edible. The on-foot monitoring and observation provides the participants with a
concrete knowledge of edible plants. The word “concrete” should be emphasized because
learning something concretely is not the same as accumulating information. Taking a look at
a printed field guide, we can discern which plants are edible. Without an accompanying
sensory experience, however, such information most likely remains nothing more than a fact
from a book, something stored only in the head.5
In addition to physical experiences such as touching and tasting a plant, a place-related
story invites a sensory contact with what is local. David Abram (1997) eloquently discusses
the significance of a story in environmental communication in his classic book titled The Spell
of the Sensuous. Abram claims that a story that makes sense literally “enliven[s] the senses” and
“release[s] the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to
renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world” (1997: 265, italics in original).
Information rarely reaches the senses while a story can, and it is perhaps because information is a
fixed fact, complete and finished, whereas a story, when it makes sense, involves a process in
which a listener gets closer to the narrated reality. Berkes explains that TEK refers to “ways of
knowing (knowing, the process),” as well as to “information (knowledge as the thing known)”
(2012: 8). A story activates the process, “knowing,” which is a necessary element of TEK.
Team Maruyama’s locavore lunches have a lively atmosphere in which the participants
share stories of their local environment through food. Some dishes are made collaboratively
by the participants, using local vegetables, tofu, and fish that Hagino Yuki prepared before-
hand. Other dishes, also made of locally grown produce, are brought by the participants.
Since the participants are from different places and each brings dishes using their local
produce or product, the local-themed lunches become a platform on which to share different
stories of different localities.6 As people share stories of where and how they live through the
local food, many layers of locality are added to the learning community of Team Maruyama,
inspiring a sense of connection, which may lead into a spontaneous sense of responsibility to
one’s place and beyond.
To conclude, I would like to sum up the overall design of Team Maruyama. I have
examined that the location of Team Maruyama, its base being the Haginos’ residence, is
spatially and culturally designed to bridge between tradition and science, natives and non-
natives, and humans and the environment. Invitingly designed monthly activities encourage
each participant to get involved at their pace and according to their interest, stimulating

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spontaneous personal-level learning. Perhaps openness is a keyword that describes the design
of Team Maruyama. The group is open in nature. Aside from the Haginos, Ito, Nomura, and
Kiichiro’s architect trainees, there are few regular members, and this loose network suggests
Team Maruyama’s open attitude to anyone who is interested in place-based cultural and
ecological knowledge. The openness also characterizes the architectural design of the
Haginos’ house. There are no walls in their two-storied house, which was built of local
wood; the spacious first floor of the living/dining room and the kitchen allows adults and kids
to move freely, thereby facilitating interaction with each other. This architectural openness
suggests Team Maruyama’s open perspective from which to see the native and new villagers,
outside visitors, and the satoyama as what Aldo Leopold called plain members of the land
community. Such openness should not be translated as optimism; it rather signifies a gesture
of responsive action against the pervading capitalist consumer society.

The author would like to thank Hagino Yuki and Kiichiro for their willingness to share their
thoughts and provide the photographs of Team Maruyama.

Notes
1 Satoyama is the Japanese term that refers to “socio-ecological production landscapes” (and “seascapes”
is added if the term is used together with “satoumi”) that “have created complex mosaics of different
land use types, and contributed to both human well-being and biodiversity” (IPSI). I have questioned
if the word “landscape”—one that inevitably implies an outsider’s point of view—is appropriate to
use for the definition of satoyama and discussed it in Yuki (2014). According to the International
Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative, the socio-ecological production environments of different
ecosystem types maintained by residents have different names in different countries, such as dehesa in
Spain and ahupua’a in Hawai’i. Emma Marris (2011) refers to ahupua’a as a sort of ideal picture of
what she calls the “rambunctious garden” in which different baselines for different purposes are
introduced and the environment is sustained in a less imposing and more sustainable manner (170–
171). Because of the similarities in the land use with ahupua’a, it should be interesting to discuss
satoyama as a version of the rambunctious garden and contextualize it in a larger environmental
discourse.
2 Being aware of a scholarly claim that “traditional” in TEK should refer “specifically to indigenous
form of knowledge” (Menzies 2006: 7), I use the word “traditional” in a way that is explained by
Fikret Berkes, who cites what the Inuit participants at a conference describe as traditional knowledge:

there was a consensus on the following meanings: practical common sense; teachings and
experience passed through generations; knowing the country; being rooted in spiritual health;
a way of life; an authority system of rules for resource use; respect; obligation to share;
wisdom in using knowledge; using heart and head together.
(Berkes 2012: 4)

These apply mostly to the “native” villagers in Deep Noto, who take pride in and responsibility for
maintaining each family’s and the community’s ancestral land and forest.
3 The gap between an idealized image and the reality of Deep Noto has been discussed from different
approaches as well, including that of media content. See Scherer and Thelen (2017).
4 Aenokoto is a local agrarian ritual practiced in Deep Noto and was designated as a UNESCO
Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009 for its unique and exemplary Japanese agricultural tradition.
Aenokoto is performed twice a year: one is in December after the harvest, with a main aim to
“welcome the spirit of the rice paddies into the home with feasts and thankful offering”; the second
one is performed in February to “send the spirit out into the fields for another year’s harvest”
(Hagino Atlier 2012: n.p.). Team Maruyama performs the ritual, too, as part of their monthly events.
Their Aenokoto is slightly different, in that it regards the insects and plants in and around the field as
the spirits of the rice paddies. With this “new understanding of traditional Aenokoto,” Team

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Maruyama recontextualizes the traditional ritual as a special occasion at which to pay respect to the
biodiversity of Maruyama (ibid.).
5 Now that we live in the complex global food system, I am aware of the importance of information,
that of food politics in particular, for environmental communication. As it is explained in the
introduction to the special issue of food, culture, and the environment in Environmental Communica-
tion, “food” itself is “a complex set of land use and labor practices, corporate structures, public policy,
plant and animal genetics, and human health impacts” (Opel et al. 2010: 253). Being informed of and
communicating on these issues is necessary to make the less problematic and more sustainable food
environment possible. What I suggest is that information deprived of the sensory understanding is not
sufficient for the communication of TEK.
6 When I joined a monthly event in the summer, I brought two bags full of basil I picked that morning
in my garden. The participants are expected to inform Hagino Yuki of what they will bring so that
she can arrange the day’s menu, and my basil was planned to be used for pesto and Thai-style gaprao
rice. While rinsing and tearing basil leaves, I was talking with the fellow participants as well as Yuki,
who were working on different preparations. In response to their questions regarding how to grow
basil well, I told them that basil is one of the few things that can survive in my garden, which is
adjacent to the wood and subject to occasional raids by a troop of monkeys. Then the conversation
started to focus on monkeys, discussing that monkeys often come to vegetable gardens in satoyama of
southern Ishikawa where I live, whereas that is not the case in Deep Noto. After a couple of years of
monkeys’ raids, I gave up growing vegetables that monkeys prefer, such as tomatoes, sweet potatoes,
and eggplants, and decided to have something I found monkeys show no interest in, such as basil.
Trivial and not necessarily related to traditional knowledge, my story nonetheless helped visualize
where I live and gave others some sense of the locality of place.

Works cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage
Books, 1997.
Berkes, Fikret. Sacred Ecology. Third edition. Routledge, 2012.
Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. GIAHS: Globally Important Agricultural Heritage
Systems. www.fao.org/giahs/en/
Hagino Atelier, editor. Aenokoto. Maruyama-gumi, 2012.
Hagino, Kiichiro. “Tokyo → Philadelphia → Noto.” Shintoshi 62.5 (2008): 6–7.
Hagino, Yuki. “Okunoto no mukashinagara no kurashi wo saihakken [Rediscovery of Traditional Life in
the Deep Noto].” 7-Eleven Foundation’s PR magazine Midori no kaze [Green Wind], 2015. www.7mi
dori.org/katsudo/kouhou/kaze/meister/28/index.html
Hagino, Yuki, and Ito Koji. “Tochi ni nezashita manabi no ba maruyama-gumi no katsudo wo toshite
[Some Thoughts on Activities of Team Maruyama, a Place-Based Learning Community].” Journal of
Rural Planning 33.1 (2014): 49–51.
“International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI).” https://satoyama-initiative.org/about/
Ito, Koji, and Nomura Shinya. “Satoyama shuraku no sizen to bunka, kurashi ni manabu komyuniti [A
Community Learning from Nature, Culture, and Life in a Satoyama Village].” Shizen-jin 44 (2015): 19–21.
Marris, Emma. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. Bloomsbury, 2011.
Menzies, Charles R., ed. Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management. University of
Nebraska Press, 2006.
Opel, Andy, Josée Johnston, and Richard Wilk. “Food, Culture and the Environment: Communicating
About What We Eat.” Environmental Communication 4.3 (2010): 251–254.
Scherer, Elizabeth, and Timo Thelen. “On Countryside Roads to National Identity: Japanese Morning
Drama Series (Asadora) and Contents Tourism.” Japan Forum (2017): 10.1080/0955803.2017.1411378
Sullivan, Heather I. “The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene.” German Ecocriticism in the
Anthropocene, edited by Caroline Shaumann and Heather I. Sullivan. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 25–44.
Yuki, Masami. “Analyzing Satoyama: A Rural Environment, Landscape, and Zone.” Poetica 80 (2014):
51–63.
Yuki, Masami. “Satoyama gensetsu no chiseigaku [Topology of Satoyama Discourse].” Satoyama to iu
monogatari [Narratives on Satoyama: Dialogues of the Environmental Humanities], edited by Yuki
Masami and Kuroda Satoshi. Bensei, 2017, pp. 3–35.

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 24
COSMOPOLITAN
COMMUNICATION
AND ECOLOGICAL
CONSCIOUSNESS IN LATIN
AMERICA1
Miguel Gutiérrez’s Babel, el paraíso

Roberto Forns-Broggi

One of the most urgent problems facing worldwide environmentalism is effective communication
among cultures. How can we adopt a planetary focus on ecological consciousness without also
developing local community concerns? We have to rethink the way in which global networks
shape cultural agents. There will be no respect for difference if we do not overcome abuses
and if the focus stagnates on the restrictions that do indeed exist in nationalisms and localisms.
In order to understand communication among cultures and to take advantage of the
concept of solidarity, we must pay attention to the cultural mediators that have successfully
built bridges between cultures. In this particular context, an ecological consciousness would
counter our collective indifference to climate systems, glaciers, forests, pink dolphins and
ants. Humans have no desire to listen to the non-human world when it warns us of what is
happening to it and to us. One sharp observation by Jorge Marcone (2013) about the
emerging ecological thinking in the last novel by Peruvian writer and ethnographer José
María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba, el zorro de abajo (1971) [The Fox from Up Above and the
Fox from Down Below (2000)] points out the pending task in Hispanic studies to read texts
from ecological perspectives. Arguedas’description of the modernization of the city of
Chimbote offers a precursor depiction that consciously employed elements of presently
emerging ecological and sociocultural understandings of environmental justice. It also offers
a very creative way of communicating the crash of traditional Andean knowledge by that
modernization, which in the words of Sean Cubitt (2017) can be understood as a commu-
nications common:
We have surrendered the greater part of our communications media to advertising
and trade. Very little of a communications common is left, and much of that is taken
up, understandably if disturbingly, by political and religious factions driven by

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desperation and exclusion, and by the cries for help of the isolated and stressed
created by the destructions of the common good.
(13)
In Latin American societies, we need to invent new means of communication with the natural
world. The anthropological and literary work of Peruvian author José María Arguedas (1911–
1969) is a key precursor to present mountains, rivers, trees, and animals such as donkeys and
guinea pigs as active participants of vibrant but threatened communities. Ecological communica-
tion is not just about speaking with a rich and abundant literature and media on environmental
issues, but also about an awareness of its materiality, something that is almost omitted in the
theoretical production. Even though Arguedas’s writing is not completely strange to new media,
an environmental thought needs to be woven with a media aesthetics that communes with and
through our planetary commons. Arguedas’s work is emblematic of that eagerness to commu-
nicate from a zealous, difficult-to-translate perspective. The figure of the translator is key in
ecocriticism’s development insofar as it aspires to be planetary. In that sense, all of the efforts to
translate ought to be a mutual, rather than a univocal, response in the service of a dominant
language, of lenguicide that necessarily creates poverty, of a monolingual culture that
originates in the fear that denies and destroys the verbal flower. Sadly, this is what happens
with Spanish as it has come to dominate many of the indigenous languages such as Mayan,
Totonac, Quechua, Aymara, Mapundungun, or any of the Amazonian languages. Ecocriti-
cism, therefore, should take advantage of Arguedas’s legacy. The Andean Castilian Spanish
that Arguedas forged did not imply a clean, uncontaminated translation of the other language;
on the contrary, the politics of impurity or mistura between Castilian and Quechua indicates
that the role of the translator is to serve as a bridge between two cultures. Translation is an
arduous task, the result of a creative process by which the primary cultural affects and
perspectives are not censured, but adapted or respected through delicate and earnest lines of
egalitarian communication.
This heartfelt alliance, founded on the communication between people or groups from
different nations and cultures, serves as an excellent model to apply to the ecological realm. But
this international exchange occurs only when cultural forms of identity establish their sense of
belonging beyond the local and national levels, by imagining how the global perspective frames
local and national contexts. These forms of global identity embrace what has been learned through
culture, but do not anchor their highest values in just one place; they are open to other traditions in
the wider and more mobile context of migrations and other displacements, of global economic and
communication networks. These cultural forms respond to the formidable challenge from a very
lucid critique of North American environmentalism that Ursula K. Heise has formulated in Sense of
Place and Sense of Planet (2008): we must visualize how to support ecologically the defense of the
non-human world and the defense of the socio-environmental movement for social justice, not
merely from our ties to local places, but also through our ties to territories and systems that can only
be understood with relation to the planet as a whole.
One image that in some way makes me think about the possibility of using the global
from the local vantage point comes from the documentary La Guerra por otros medios [War
By Other Media] (2010), in which the Surui defend their territory from deforestation by using
Google Earth, and without ever leaving the interior of the Amazonian jungle. The image is not
meant to be exotic, but rather a powerful example of how the Internet affords eco-cosmopo-
litan possibilities for building a network of communities that fight to defend their principles of
sustainable life, unlike the lack of fight of the generally passive urban citizens, characterized by
their complicity with the “system.”

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 Cosmopolitan communication

I consider Miguel Gutiérrez’s novel Babel, Paradise (1993) to be a twist on the theme of
intercultural imagination as cosmopolitan communication. Although the term “cosmopolitan”
is typically associated with a first-world elitist perspective, there is a new use of the word in
critical parlance that can be seen in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989),
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North or in films such as Dirty Pretty Things directed
by Stephen Frears (2002) or The Edge of Heaven directed by Fatih Akin (2007). Insofar as
this new type of cosmopolitan communication does not fail to take into account either
cultural diversity or inequalities of class or of income, we could link it to the theme of
environmental justice. Gutiérrez’s novel includes environmental reflections through the
narration, but drives his storytelling on how to reconcile the universal humanism of
the narrator, “el invitado,” with the nationalisms and racial prejudices of the “reservation.”
This “invitado,” the traveler who speaks to the assembly, and tries to live the utopic
communication with other members of a harmonic commune, the alternative community,
is a clear alter ego of the author. Although the novel raises doubts about the possibility of
cosmopolitan communication, it also attempts a new version or experience of it, which
ultimately fails. This is one main reason I think this imperfect novel fails in its attempt to
overcome racial and national limitations and exclusivism. Even though this novel still is
waiting to be translated in other languages than Spanish, its first edition from 1993 is sold
out, and it was republished in 2015. Miguel Gutierrez (1940–2016) reflected on many
occasions about this novel, because it was written from a three-year visit to China in 1976–
1979 (Ángeles 2007), and also from a very painful and long process of ideological deception
with the collapse of the socialist block in Eastern Europe and the USSR, with the
institutionalization of the political course of Deng Xiao Ping after Mao’s death in China,
as well as in Peru with the downfall of the Shining Path (Gutiérrez 2000: 71). If we
consider Babel, el paraíso a satirical parable about socialism, power, and communal living, is
this type of intercultural communication naively utopic? I believe it is more ironic, much
like the short film more or less contemporary to these other works: The Music Tree (1994),
co-directed by Sabina Berman and Isabelle Tardán. A brief re-reading of Gutiérrez’s novel
alongside a study of the short film could serve to ponder the limitations of this utopic
concept and to seek out alternatives, especially since both the novel and the film redefine
utopia by means of a fiction concerning communication.
In The Music Tree, the child protagonist endeavors to learn to play the violin from an
itinerant teacher who reads her thoughts and shows her a tree that produces music, while
illuminating its foliage. The girl is overcome by a great desire to play music barefoot in the
Tabasco jungle. In spite of the fact that the film’s magical realism can feel a bit anachronistic,
the final scene of the girl playing music by stepping rhythmically on the planks of a wooden
bridge leads us to contemplate the act of communication as emanating from the body itself
and to thus lay the foundation for an ecological perspective.
Gutiérrez’s novel is a tale of cosmopolitan communication in the guise of the narrator’s
political intervention in an international assembly in the Empire, supposed communist China.
No proper names are used in the entire tale. The narrator, a Peruvian traveler, regales the
assembly with a series of tales that capture his audience’s attention. In the speech, he proposes
to live in solidarity in the midst of authoritarian societies and to be able to communicate with
other cultures within the context of hegemonic languages. This position of the character is
emblematic of those who are sympathetic to the socialist cause and follow the social change
beyond the official socialist leaders and bureaucrats. So the AQ character who had the
sympathy of the narrator is a clear homage to those revolutionaries who have no place in
fiction, and neither in life, those who choose art instead of arms, those for whom heroism and

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faithfulness do not agree with the rigidity and decline of the socialist bloc. Through his own
experiences, the traveler in Babel discovers something similar to what Ann Diller calls the
ethics of care, a key aspect of the foundation of her pluralistic, egalitarian pedagogy.
Gutiérrez’s novel coincides notably with the egalitarian aspect of feminist discourse, although
the protagonist is a researcher who specializes in Amazonian language and even though the scene
of his multicultural encounters is not a classroom but rather a fine hotel called “Hotel of the
Friendship,” and also “Reservation.” The anthropologist James Clifford (1992) doesn’t manage to
free the bourgeois hotel from its history as a site of European practices and meanings that are
associated with the literary, the masculine, the middle class, the scientific, the heroic and
the recreational (106). Gutiérrez perhaps succeeds in raising the theme of communication
above any gender, class, racial or national determinants. The hotel is employed in the
novel so that certain utopic possibilities of communication can be realized. I am referring
to the post-traumatic values of intercultural communication that the traveler accumulates
as a fleeting utopic behavior, values that tend neither toward war nor abuse but that avoid
the cultural alienation that is part and parcel of hierarchies, obedience, control and
discrimination. The novel’s setting in an empire that has declared itself to be revolu-
tionary allows the traveler’s experiences to suggest a critique of authoritarianism and to
reveal the imperial system’s weakness.
But I want to insist on the positive vision of what the novel foreshadows. Gutiérrez
underscores at least two crucial points that tend to be associated with non-governmental
alternative movements: an effective intercultural dialogue and a healthy ecological conscious-
ness. Both the narrative frame of the dialogue in the assembly and the content of the traveler’s
adventures are a pointed critique of the Left’s political work in both Peru and China. José
Alberto Portugal (2000) has already written a very intelligent reading of this novel, under-
scoring the bitter bias of the imagination that sustains the novel as a satire of the socialist
utopia, which in other ideological contexts can be seen in some of Mario Vargas Llosa’s
novels. Although Gutiérrez contextualizes his novel within an authoritarian tradition of the
Left, he winds up enriching that very tradition by softening the authoritarian bent.
I want to emphasize the affirmative and celebratory aspect of the novel because I am
interested in the perspective that proposes to overcome the disorientation and unease of those
who still identify with that political tradition. The novel encourages the reader to identify
with the traveler to do the same, to communicate with other similar foreigners. It is a matter
of overcoming social isolation or becoming part of broader groups without jeopardizing any
individual principles that may belong to the anti-authoritarian traditions. In that sense
Gutiérrez is ahead of the political agents, given that his traveler character is an emblem of a
political subject who is able to act and to lead a process of intercultural communication. The
disrepute of the political parties and their failure to come to an effective articulation of social
movements has marked the 1990s as the anti-political decade and as the heyday of govern-
mental mafias. Nonetheless, Gutiérrez’s novel lays out a series of utopian proposals that are
not so easily recognized as such. And I believe that, in this way, his novel succeeds in
studying a key dimension of the collective unconscious on which he bases his community
praxis. In the past there was human conviviality that in the immediate present has been lost—
the main character admits to having suffered the loss of his family but without forswearing his
faith in cosmopolitan communication (Gutiérrez 1993: 12). The traveler lays the foundation
for what could be the true basis for a new humanism: the utopia of communication, his
unreal happy communitarian account, the practice of cosmopolitan communication.
The principle obstacle to cosmopolitan communication that Gutiérrez’s novel narrates is the
nationalism and ethnocentrism of the Assembly’s participants. Of course, these impediments are

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not only ideological nor do they stem from the tensions of migratory fluxes that shape
diasporic cultures. Effective intercultural encounters move the protagonist away from the
Spanish-speaking groups living in the Empire, thus he speaks of “the reactions of the people
in my colony to the friendly relationships and camaraderie that I had established with
friends of other races and nations” (Gutiérrez 1993: 38). The novel casts doubt on, in James
Clifford’s words: “the organic, naturalizing bias of the term culture—seen as a rooted body
that grows, lives, dies etc.” (101). Latin American cultural ethnocentrism consists of the
observation of differences based on one’s own values and norms, from an air of cultural
superiority that is symptomatic of the root problems of a lack of communication and
ideological isolation. It is a matter of a very healthy self-critical distancing with respect to
one’s own culture and political traditions. Isn’t this what ecocriticism requires: to dialogue
with different cultures from a planetary focus? The questions the protagonist asks determine
principles and norms that made international conviviality possible and reveal a mindfulness
that is attentive to virtual alliances. The coexistence of individual as well as collective
aspects allows us to understand how autonomy and interdependence are shaped into the
fundamentals of communication. The traveler feels a natural attraction for all that is not part
of his own tale. But his story is not merely fantasy or imaginative anticipation of the future,
since the conditions necessary to realize ideal communication are very concrete. The
connection is explicit in two passages from Gutiérrez’s (1993) novel:
There reigned a common sense of compatibility and solidarity, born, I assume, from
knowing themselves to be excluded from the other communities of Reservation.
(47)
The norm—the implicit norm—on which our own community was based (allow
me to repeat it) was solidarity without any other limits but respect for privacy and
free will. Human kindness, communication and understanding, dedication and
openness to the request for affection and desire, and why not, my friends, help and
attention if one of our own needs it without violating the sovereignty of one’s own
decisions, these were the forms of conduct that governed our relations.
(201)
Now this narrative language may sound like communications theory, but it never abandons
tangible examples even when the traveler mentions that the formation of the groups had
nothing to do with racial, political or religious factors (47). Then, the traveler explicitly
formulates the principle on which their conviviality stood: “accepting individuals just as they
are” (49). The narrator not only makes use of memories from his school days to stress his
frustration over his permanent objective of communicating with others, but also formulates a
utopia of communication:
I never lost the hope of achieving open communication, without which you
abdicate of a part of yourself. I would tell myself: someplace in the world there
must exist an ideal space where it is possible to satisfy human desire for commu-
nication, understanding, and tolerance. That explains the enthusiasm with which I
speak about my experience at the Empire’s Reservation. Does my enthusiasm make
sense to you?
(67)
On one level of reading, when the traveler speaks of his enthusiasm, his “infinite luck in
finding the kingdom of utopia” (70) corresponds to an ironic or satirical distancing with respect

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to the rigid notion of utopia. The level of communicative consciousness is very high because
the narrator not only is ready to observe and interpret cultural differences from the others’
perspective, but he also is willing to suspend his own judgment of being necessary, since it is a
question of framing the process of communication in an egalitarian circuit, eliminating any sort
of power play:
If they don’t impose any conditions on you and you don’t have to pay any tribute to
be admitted into the community, then you are ready to give yourself up entirely and
to donate all that you have. I, at least, propose to be supportive and caring, cordial,
respectful and tolerant.
(70)
The certainty of inclusion not only explains the absolute complicity lived without fear of any
kind, but also plots out the emotive process that is necessary to be much more conscious of the
different elements in the process of communication. In that sense the awareness of changes and
what works from alternative points of view during the process of communication—what
Miguel Rodrigo calls cognitive competence—plays a decisive role in both self-knowledge
and cultural knowledge. Cognitive complexity leads to a deftness of interpreting in a less
rigid and more adaptable fashion. The traveler also possesses an emotive intercultural
competence that is produced when one is able to project and to receive positive emotional
answers before, during and after cultural interactions (Rodrigo n.d.). Tolerance functions to
productively assimilate ambiguity and uncertainty. Empathy is also indispensable for feeling
what others feel. The traveler expressed his curiosity for knowledge, for learning about
other cultures; also his willingness to break down any barriers to change whenever and
however necessary. Empathy is also a desire to know oneself and to reconstruct one’s
identity, which according to the narrator’s critical stance toward Latin Americans, turns out
to be a recognition of oneself in other cultures.
Another mechanism that the narrator reiterates is his ability to compose stories in his desire
to deepen the bonds of friendship and of trust. Depending on the listener, the traveler is able
to adapt his way of communicating to the needs of his interlocutor, as he did with all those
who made up his exile community, including his New Zealander colleague: “taking up the
only topic about which he was truly passionate: engineering as applied to the construction of
daring designs all of which were difficult to execute” (Gutiérrez 1993: 78).
Careful non-verbal communication is the first step in successful intercultural communica-
tion. According to Stella Ting-Toomey (1999), a positive synchronic interaction facilitates the
development of quality intercultural relations. Communicative adaptability requires cognitive,
affective, and behavioral competence, which defines the willingness and commitment to learn
about other cultures and their subjects. It also defines the desire to understand, respect and
support cultural identity and the ways in which we communicate with others, and to do so with
sensitivity and care (Ting-Toomey 1999: 141). The main protagonist of Babel, then, seems to
employ the non-verbal component with extreme caution, always making his extraordinary
capacity for adaptation and connection patently obvious, just as he used to with his African
friends and others with whom he shared a passion for music. Amid questions about how to erase
social inequalities, how to understand the most noble as well as the most atrocious human acts,
how to unmask the heroes of the past, this main character expresses his doubt with regard to the
utopia of communication: “Was it possible to change life from the ground up so that conviviality
and completely open human communication could be achieved?” (Gutiérrez 1993: 192).
The traveler narrator configures and absorbs a concrete utopia into this experience of
friendship among intercultural communicators—many of the members of this exile community

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were translators. This implies a sort of symbolic exchange that seems to me to be particularly
pertinent. This traveler cherishes his memory of the liveliness of the utopia and embodies a
series of creative tendencies that he probably learned from his many friendships. He cultivates a
sense of curiosity and interest in his immediate surroundings; he looks at problems from all the
perspectives that he can; he always keeps in mind the complexity and differences among groups
and cultures; he is sensitive to different situational peculiarities that might occur; he orients
himself according to the present as indicated by his five finely tuned senses; he cultivates joy
and delight in his daily interaction with others; and he practices divergent thought and lateral
learning (Ting-Toomey 1999: 268). Thus the narrator specifies the mechanism for this
projective transformation in his memory where the figures of his companions in exile (“the
lines of the body, the texture of the voice, human obsessions, qualities of the spirit”) will
accompany him like “benevolent beings” whom the traveler “could invoke in moments of
fatigue, tedium or hopelessness” (Gutiérrez 1993: 203).
The exposition of cosmopolitan communication in Babel is neither a theoretical phe-
nomenon nor a universalist platform, but rather a praxis that is attentive to the cultural
context and values that are involved in the process of concrete communication. On this
point the traveler takes pains to explain that the utopic does not presuppose a change of
nationality or the complete adaptation to another cultural reality. The narrator exchanges
the notion of space as something external, separate from the actors of communication, for a
fluid notion that implies interaction and communion among these same actors. In other
words, the individual believes that he can avoid the destiny of his discredited political
community, by imagining that, henceforth, the best defense for the individual is not found
in the national collective, but perhaps in the system of solidarity of his immediate
community. Where he will most clearly find it is in an individual way of establishing
relationships:
I have tried through succeeding approximations to give you the most faithful and
concrete idea possible of what a terrestrial paradise, or if you prefer, as I said before,
the kingdom of utopia can be. I know the spatial connotations that both terms give
off make their comprehension somewhat difficult, but their existence does not
allude to a specific territory, zone, region, country, continent, island, but rather to
a circle of relations in which communication, union, and understanding of both
body and soul are possible, without which any proposal for an open humanism
would be illusory.
(Gutiérrez 1993: 204)
A radical concept of communication is proposed between the lines here, and it has the advantage
of overcoming the impasse of using a common language and of achieving convenient and just
alliances. In international communication, the use of a common language—predominantly
English and French, and to a lesser degree Spanish—covers up the fact that communication
among representatives of all humanity is inhabited, by intercultural definition, by the invisible
presence of prescribed representations and values associated with the principles, basic ideas
and visions of the world. Cultural interpretations of these concepts are rarely made explicit in
international meetings or negotiations. The final surprise in the traveler’s tale—that each
member of that utopic community spoke his own language—does not detract in any way
from the communicative proposal, since the contents of the communication were always
highly contextualized to allude to the dynamic of following a dominant language and to wind
up being dragged along in the wake of its values and representations. The contextualization
essentially is given through body language that serves to lay the foundation for the affinities

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and sympathies that form friendships and other relational ties that bind us to other humans. It
is undeniable that the exaggeration helps to understand the perspective of international
cooperation as a mutual education about people’s potential to use certain abilities and talents
in their own creative ways. If one wants to take advantage of this intercultural approach to
which we find ourselves privy in the twenty-first century, the traveler’s utopia is an enviable
precedent and an illuminating foreshadowing of the understanding and communitarian union
of perfect making:
There was never a misunderstanding. We never argued to impose our own way of
thinking on others. And that is why harmony and solidarity always reigned. Thus, as
I told you at the beginning of my intervention, the confusion of languages, far from
being a condemnation as in the myth of the Tower of Babel, can be the essential
factor in union and understanding. The basis for our new humanism as we have
debated in this meeting.
(Gutiérrez 1993: 224)
The implausible fable of the traveler also intrigues me on account of another key to
communication that is much more difficult to explain. Throughout Gutiérrez’s novel,
many encounters are founded on non-verbal artistic symbols—a painting, a piece of
music, a drawing, a landscape, etc.—which foreshadow the conditions of fluid existence
and a certain disposition to communicate interculturally. The first example is a painting by
an Australian friend, which refers to essential attitudes, such as an “almost religious respect”
for certain herbs and plants used by the Indigenous—that displace racial considerations for
an ethnic identification. The traveler understands that his friend identifies with the
painting’s indigenous woman “in peaceful harmony with the universe” (Gutiérrez 1993:
101). The traveler’s observations about his physical environs denote a sensitivity toward the
goal of urban health in contrast with the pollution and violence of the native habitat (144),
despite the fact that healthy ecology demands certain sacrifices such as putting up with the
smell of manure, which helps increase agricultural production (145).
Several trips to green zones reinforce the playful tone with which the traveler demarcates
the utopic community of exiles. Each connection refers to a different landscape, for example
the desert steppes of the Australian filmmaker, that the sensitive traveler somehow makes his
own. Sometimes he uses the vegetation of various Peruvian geographic regions as his referent:
lignum vitae, the luxurious vegetation of the jungle, the groves and woods between the Jalca
(high-altitude grasslands in Peru) and the Andean Puna, the eucalyptus trees (176). The
interesting thing is that he exposes his interiority to the projections of those other landscapes
that also hold a special fascination for him and his sensibilities. In his visit to the Botanical
Garden, the traveler is moved by his African friend’s tenderness:
I was touched upon recognizing among the trees from the high, colder zones, such
as firs, pines, and birches, a Peruvian pepper tree and an Andean coral tree and a
breadfruit tree and two Pará rubber trees in the section of the garden dedicated to
tropical and subtropical flora. Nevertheless my tenderness was nothing in compar-
ison to the emotion that overtook my colleague from the Congo and his three
sisters when they discovered a tree that is native to the hot African plains. It was
called the baobab, my friend told me wiping his tears away. . . . He continued
speaking to me in that reverent tone about the tree, relating to me so many stories
and legends, that I would have listened to with more attention if the guy from
Buenos Aires hadn’t been so near to us, since he ruined the experience of the

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Botanical Garden with his jokes. “But this is a disaster, che!,” he said to them, “I
was hoping to find the Tree of Knowledge here!”
(Gutiérrez 1993: 169–70)
The Argentine’s joke serves as a sort of comic relief, but also to point out the very globalized
weakness of not listening to others, let alone to trees. These millennial beings rise up like an
extension of the traveler’s positive collective experience. The trees are not valued as property,
pollution reducers or temperature moderators, but simply as strong affective ties whose
impact on the psychology of those who visit the empire is one of serenity and peace
(Dwyer et al. 1994: 137, 140). The visit to the “perfumed glade” during the excursion
through the “Mountains of eternal mist and light” leaves a profound mark on the traveler’s
consciousness, and he allows himself to be carried away by the magic of the name and by his
insatiable curiosity. The trip to the forest is another example of detailed descriptions,
exaltations of the soul and, at times, an incursion into unconscious terrain. At no time does
the traveler take these experiences in the forest as a soapbox from which to proclaim any sort
of ecological activism or to pontificate on a theory as if he possessed some privileged
knowledge of an incontrovertible truth. But the ecological consciousness should not be
understood as moral pressure exercised by the decline of the planet, but rather as an alliance
of undeniable strategic importance for the traveler’s utopic purposes:
Seeing the Hindu master with an acacia flower in his hand, I told myself that the
perfumed glade wasn’t a metaphor for an ideal, symbolic or imagined space but the
naming of a reality that could be enjoyed from the attentiveness of a vigil.
(Gutiérrez 1993: 178)
The traveler’s very significant departure after nearly four years in the Empire cannot be
explained only as a “call of the wild” that the traveler says he feels which draws him back to
his country to continue his labor as a linguist. Neither is it a phobia for the authoritarianism and
weaknesses of empire that tend to irritate the narrator in Babel. It is rather a matter of aptitude
and of proving himself in the landscapes of his childhood and of a new life, since he felt
“Serene, at peace with myself, finally sure that I was a man who was fit for friendship, for
confidence, for solidarity and human co-existence” (Gutiérrez 1993: 216).
The recognition of new contexts for positive interaction must pass through alliances
with nature, what Enrique Leff (2004) calls a “dialogue of saviors” (paragraphs 68–114): to
reintegrate oneself by means of alliances and relations that can be carried out in integrative
cultural structures, such as the love for trees. It is a matter of an ecological consciousness
that redefines the displaced political subject to a level of his personal transformation and that
expands this subjective component to other collective dimensions, the social imaginary.
This expansion is important to note: it is social in the Assembly and in his professional role
as a linguist; it is also an exploration of the real unconscious from the problematic of the
body and of social repression; it has a relational and symbolic dimension (Kidner 1998: 66).
Gutiérrez’s novel, in all its impurity and imperfection, is an exercise of the ecological
imagination about the utopia of cosmopolitan communication.
This could very well be the root of a type of communicative interaction in tune with a
political ecology that validates environmental wisdom. As Eduardo Gudynas (1998) points out,
the traditional themes of the Left, such as social justice, quality of life and social liberation, could
not be achieved if environmental components were not incorporated into the ideology (38). In
the 1990s, Gutiérrez made a powerful first step toward that convergent movement in the Latin
American context. In the present, the novel Babel, el paraíso is still attracting new readers.

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Note
1 Published with permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Reynoso),” en Ciberayllu, January 31, 2007. www.ciberayllu.org/Ensayos/CAL_SocialismoNovela.
html Consulted Aug. 14, 2018.
Arguedas, José María, The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. translated by Frances Horning
Barraclough, edited by Julio Ortega, and critical essays translated by Fred Fornoff. University of
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Berman, Sabina y Isabelle Tardán, dirs. El árbol de la música. México, 1994. 15 min.
Cartoy Díaz, Emilio, y Cristian Jure, Dirs. La guerra por otros medios [War by Other Media]. Argentina, 2010.
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Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson,
and Paula A. Treichle. Routledge, 1992, pp. 96–116.
Cubitt, Sean. “Carbon Bonds: Coal Economics and Aesthetics.” In Ecological Entanglements in the Anthro-
pocene, edited by Nicholas Holm and Sy Taffel. Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 3–16.
Diller, Ann. “Pluralisms for Education: An Ethics of Care Perspective.” www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-
Yearbook/92_docs/Diller.htm Accessed July 23, 2011.
Dwyer, John F., Herbert W. Schroeder, and Paul H. Gobster. “The Deep Significance of Urban Trees and
Forests.” In The Ecological City. Preserving and Restoring Urban Diversity, edited by Rutherford H. Platt,
Rowan A. Rowntree, and Pamela C. Muick. University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, pp. 137–50.
Frears, Stephen, dir. Dirty Little Things. UK, 2002. 97 min.
Gudynas, Eduardo. “¿Por qué la izquierda no lidera la discusión ambiental?” Cuadernos De Marcha 138
(1998): 34–39.
Gutiérrez, Miguel. Babel, el paraíso. Editorial Colmillo Blanco, 1993.
Gutiérrez, Miguel. “Interview by Francisca Da Gama.” Hispamérica 87 (2000): 65–80.
Gutiérrez, Miguel. Babel, el paraíso. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial/Debolsillo, 2015.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford
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Kidner, David W. “Culture and the Unconscious in Environmental Theory.” Environmental Ethics 20
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Leff, Enrique. “Racionalidad ambiental y diálogo de saberes.” Polis 7 (2004), Published Sept. 10, 2012,
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Marcone, Jorge. “Latin American Literature at the Rise of Environmentalism: Urban Ecological Thinking
in José María Arguedas’s The Foxes.” Comparative Literature Studies 50.1 (2013): 64–86.
Portugal, José Alberto. “Miguel Gutiérrez y Mario Vargas llosa: El amargo sueño de la utopia.” Quehacer
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Rodrigo Alsina, Miquel. “Elementos para una comunicación intercultural.” www.uv.mx/Investigacion/
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Rushdie, Salman. Los versos satánicos. Traducción de documentación y Traducciones, SL. Círculo de
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 25
COMMUNICATING WITH
THE COSMOS
Contemporary Brazilian women poets
and the embodiment of spiritual values
Izabel F.O. Brandão and Edilane Ferreira da Silva

The knowledge of spirituality communicates a complexity from the very start. Our under-
standing of the concept follows Karen Warren’s (1997) perception that sees spirituality as
one’s life, not as something artificially devised to fit one’s needs. Spirituality “is living one’s
life with understanding that one is intimately connected to all creation, all forces seen and
unseen . . . [It] is what holds us together against the forces of oppression” (31). This is to
clarify from the start our wish that the reader does not look here for an essentialist view of
spirituality. The notion of spirituality nowadays may lead to many different directions, and
yet, this very possibility is what opens up a holistic approach to life: “sometimes embodied in
nature and in the arts” (Sheldrake 2013: 3). Therefore, considering the Brazilian women
poets chosen for this chapter, their view of spirituality and God is not prescriptive. Making
that clear is relevant because of the complexity of this theme, for it is one of the possible
discourses which may be a fine marker of the interconnection between a feminist ecocritical
reading and environmental textualities, in that the values entailed here call upon a perspective
that tells us that the world is more-than-human,1 and that whatever we are we belong to a
Cosmos we do not always understand, or respect. Hence spiritual values are part of a search of
many writers.
Stacy Alaimo points towards the greatness of nature which we are all part of. Yet her
discussion of the materiality of the body does not consider the spiritual dimension of this very
body. This body, however, is both material and spiritual, be it in the human being or in
nature, and this delimits our own history: “What we are and what we become demarcate our
physical—material—, psychical and spiritual health” (Brandão 2017a: 971, n.15),2 and this is
also true for nature. More than matter, humans are other things too. And, here, the point is
our individual affiliations to religiousness, to spirituality, with no attachment to any religious
affiliation, even if in certain cases, such affiliation is more open towards the context of the
spiritual body. The openness of the concept of spirituality nowadays means that it “frequently
draws from different religious traditions” as an “alternative way of exploring the deepest self
and as the ultimate purpose of life.” Such is “an inner directed experience” (Sheldrake 2013:
5). This is how we read the poets we bring in this chapter. Our focus is on the search for a

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new pathway that relates spiritual values to one’s inner yearnings. This is not new, and yet
when these women poets include this search in their writings, in what way does it differ from
others?
One possible understanding of this search is via the connection between nature and
humans through the body, for example, which can be either empowering or destructive for
many women, if we speak within a cultural context. Denise Mitten and Chiara D’Amore
(2018) discuss about negative body images and how this can lead to a disconnection with
values that may include spiritual ones. Such values can be developed through a positive
relationship between women and nature, for being outdoors in nature, for instance, can
help women to develop a sense of empowerment, for we all need such a connection:
“from microbe . . . to the sun on whose light we depend” (108). Nature thus allows for
differences—big and small—and helps humans in their own self-acceptance as well as the
acceptance of the other, for the world is indeed more-than-human. We understand this along
Guattari’s (1990) definition of an ecology of human subjectivity (one of his three ecologies).
This kind of environmental communication implies what Soares (1999) sees as “[the]
awareness of the poetical Nature in ourselves” (16), i.e., what is spiritual in the poems
examined here is their language, and this discourse communicates a wish for a “global
[environmental] balance” (16).
Hilda Hilst (1930–2004), Helena Parente Cunha (1929–), Adélia Prado (1935–), and
Arriete Vilela (1949–), contemporary Brazilian women poets of an older generation, as we
read them, have attempted to answer for a spiritual yearning in their writing. We understand
that part of their writing calls for a spiritual reading of the world as regards the human
connection not only to the Cosmos itself, but especially to the inner self that strives to be
within this same connection. Their relationship to an idea of God in his/her multiple forms
leads to many roads. Theirs is a never ending, never answered search that includes a
philosophical and/or physical channeling; a material and/or abstract understanding; a meta-
morphic and/or human devising in which they question themselves, posing their under-
standing of their connection to this powerful life-force that is present in the universe of their
prose or poetry. One such channel is the body in/within nature which may empower (or
disempower) them. The materiality of the body is not always looked at in terms of spiritual
values, but our reading exposes how they develop such understanding: the word as a poetic
representative of God; the word as a channel of communication with the Cosmos. For them
the body may be understood as a fabric in which nature draws a connection, which is how
they feel spirituality to be. Each of them seeks a kind of “truth.” A material God, present in
the body (the body of the word); a transcendental God/Goddess integrated in/with nature;
the word as God. Understanding their language is understanding their universe.

Hilda Hilst: the Cosmos of the body and God’s crooked ways
Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst, born in Jaú, in São Paulo, is a well-known and much honored
Brazilian writer, who wrote poetry, prose and plays. Her oeuvre is translated into many
languages, apart from English. She studied law but gave the career up in favor of dedicating
her time to literature, having spent more than 40 years on her “mystical” small farm “Casa do
Sol,” in Campinas, where she wrote and met her artist and intellectual friends. Her ethics of
care with plants and animals was well known, and she hosted an uncounted number of dogs.
Many of her books deal with the presence of the more-than-human, death, eroticism, as well
as the tireless search for the manifestation of the sacred.

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In Poemas malditos, gozosos e devotos (“Damned, joyful and devout poems,” 1984), our
choice for this study, Hilst intersects the sacred, the profane, and the blasphemous, as the title
indicates. Her poems have Roman numbers as titles, and this generates, to a certain extent, an
idea of dialogue and progression that involves the triad that nominates the book. Thus, the
representation of spirituality appears in many poems as the search for a (male) god who always
seems to escape or hide “In sinkholes or summits, nomenclatures” (poem XVII). Thus we are
invited to understand Hilst’s divine as an idea, precisely as she states in one of her poems
about God:

It is of an Idea of God that I speak to you//

Mind that such idea
takes you
(422)

In poem V, a God Creator is mentioned, and because he owns “man,” this gives him
surpassing pleasure, even though this creature characterized like “Nothing” is always attempt-
ing a likeness to him as Creator. By writing the poem, Hilst becomes a Creator herself, but
this only materializes in the face of sleep (i.e, in the absence of this imprisoning god):

Sleep, impudent and created boy

Sleep. So that the poem comes about.
(412)

This God is the same who sent his son to be crucified, and nourishes himself with animals,
men and women—ironically qualified as “saints”—besides the blood of poets and children.
The suffering and submission of human, and more-than-human, creatures is the nourishment
of this sadistic god. Therefore, the irony here is towards the God who is a product of Judeo-
Christian religions. Hilst’s idea of God rejects the dogmatic religious discourse, and is directed
towards an unnamed, non-institutionalized Western God whose theophanic representation is
ambivalent, as poem II reveals:

He creeps and lurks

Levitates and feasts.
Is black. With golden light.
(409)

Such God, coated in light and darkness, good and evil, might appear heretical and
blasphemous to the Western hegemonic religious discourse. Conversely, it is aligned with
the Taoist dualistic understanding: the Universe possesses ambivalent and complementary
(yang and yin) forces. Their praxis safeguards the ad infinitum energetic movement that
maintains life. Good and evil, therefore, would be faces of the same God. This means the
refusal of the poetic persona for a connection with a deity that has a religious feature. Hilst’s
idea of God (her immanent spirituality), thus, comes from the book’s epigraph, from Simone
Weil: “To think God is merely a certain way of thinking the world” (408). Poem VIII reveals
more:

It is in this world that I want to feel you

It is the only one I know. What is left me.

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To say that I will know you profoundly

Without the blessings of flesh, in the beyond,
Seems to me a meagre promise.
(414–15)

What Hilst refuses is the rupture between the material world (from those incarnate) and the
spiritual world—from divinity and from the disincarnate spirits—as well as the conception of
the body as discarded matter by spirituality. Hence, the body is a “hierophantic locus,” a
place for the manifestation of the divine, in other words. However, the need for the
experience of the sacred in the world does not mean absolute annulment of a transcendental
possibility, as the poems unveils:

Feelings of the soul? Yes. Such can be prodigious.

But you know the delights of flesh
Of the fittings you have created. Of touches.
From the beauty of the stems. The corollas.
See how small and uncreative I become?
Stem. Corolla. These are rosy words. Yet they bleed.

If made of flesh.
(415)

For Mircea Eliade (1987),

religious man lives in an open world and . . . in addition, his existence is open to the
world. This means that religious man is accessible to an infinite series of experiences that
could be termed cosmic. Such experiences are always religious, for the world is sacred.
(169–70)
Hence, if the world was created by the gods, it is also sanctified. By the same token, the
archaic human being “finds in himself the same sanctity he finds in the cosmos” (165). And
considering his/her body—as well as his/her home—it is a microcosm. Hilst’s poem, in
dialogue with such primordial spirituality, sacralizes both the world and the body by unveiling
the desire for the incarnate deity, and in assigning the sexual authorship to this God. Sexual
relationship is among the religious experiences Eliade refers to whose spiritual character
became immortalized by Indian Tantrism, according to which woman becomes Prakriti
(nature)/Shakti (the cosmic goddess); and man is Shiva, “the pure, motionless serene spirit”
(1987: 171). Although Hilst does not identify the poetic persona (or the word) with Nature-
Energy (the poetic persona or the word), there is a sacred atmosphere surrounding the
suggested sexual intercourse. In his master’s thesis, “Kadosh e o Sagrado de Hilda Hilst,”
Carneiro (2009) argues that in Hilst there is a “co-essentiality between body and spirit,” and
that this can be a key to the reading of the poet’s oeuvre as a whole, “seeing the continuum
that exists in her work between her highest poetry and her most obscene prose” (71).
However, this does not mean that the poet is deliberately reading into Tantrism, or any other
specific theory, to support her poetic argument. Our reading of her poetry is one that
understands her way of communicating with the environment via the body and the spirit,
both discursively and in the terms expressed by Carneiro, as he discusses the Tantra
philosophy as one that sees “the satisfaction of the desires of the body as well as the meeting
with the wholeness of the spirit as [something that] can be co-occurring” (2009: 71).

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And yet such a carnal meeting becomes bloody if the sexualized image of stems and
corollas are converted into human matter. Although the poem claims a material and
humanized deity, a possible transcendental experience is still possible. The final verses—“But
let me love you, in this text/With the delights/Of a woman who only knows man”—
reinforce a mimicking of an immanent connection with the divine, but they are open to
another interpretation: of the poetic text as the only place in which such a relationship can be
admitted, evidencing the body as a cultural and poetic text (Bordo 1993: 288).
A distressing image of a poetic persona looking for a slippery and camouflaged God begins
the next poem (XIII). Such a search can actually be seen as a saga of the meeting with the Self
(Jung 1991). There are signs of such interconnection already present throughout Hilst’s works:
the parallelism between Man3 and God, both defined like Nothing. She does not acknowledge
herself in the woman who gets closer to the deity, when faced with the revelation that the Lord
is within herself (not without, as expected), like the apparently isolated landscapes. This is a God
entangled with the human and the more-than-human: there are different voices talking about
God while the poetic persona senses Him in her “shortcuts,” and doing what she feels He wants
her to do: going forward or retreating, if necessary. Other voices appear (“Some,” “Someone,”
“you, slut”) as (un)heard and distressful ones that confuse her path in search for God to reveal
Himself. So, her plea—“Grope me Lord”—indicates a physical need that reveals her blindness
towards what God is (or is not) for her. Despite His closeness—“You are so close”—the poetic
persona is only capable of sensing “the hollow/Bloated bushes filled with serpents” (418). The
voices tell her that what she cannot see nor distinguish is herself: “more girlish, see?/In some
sense older/Like someone returning from guerillas/Wood woman, daughter of Ideas” (418–
19). That is when the lyrical voice denies the other voices by saying:

It wasn’t you, slut. Because the Lord

Told her: Dust: I’m within you.
I’m all of this, hollow bush
And the serpent of verses of your mouth.
(419)

The serpent has two meanings here: a metalinguistic one, for it contradicts the denial of the
lyrical voice, that does not acknowledge herself in the Lord’s speaker, but it is of her mouth
that the verses come out; and a spiritual one, considering it as a symbol of power, related to
Kundalini from the Oriental tradition, i.e., of cosmic energy.
Other poems (like XVI) unveil the idea of self-knowledge as a predictable way for the
knowledge of God as it strips the poet by saying that his absence is, actually, the cause of the
ignorance of its in-depth self, that, here, can be considered as an extension of divinity; and,
also, a theophany that encompasses humans and more-than-humans. In this sense, vegetables
and flowers also disclose what God is: “For is it not said that you show yourself/By crooked
ways, in the small things?/You will show yourself in my vegetable garden/Perhaps changing
the fate/Of this me that only lives/Attempting seeding” (420–21). The poet needs to put a
face in God’s faceless being, somehow placing an irony in the saying that “man” is made at
His image: “Of this me who ages/Searching in her own face/And a lot through yours/That
to me would please/See face to face” (421). The result is a garden that is appreciated by
“those who go past” and ask her:

Are those God’s seedbeds?

I say yes for vanity

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Knowing the infinite

Of an infinite search
Of you and me.
(421)

Such God, passible of transformation into seedbeds and into the human being, is the opposite
of the sadistic God of the initial poems; the one who violated animals, women, children,
men, and poets. The understanding of an immanent spirituality that sacralizes the world and,
by extension, humans and more-than-human, requesting from the former a meeting with the
Self, and with the ethics that involves them, is vital for the scope of feminist ecocriticism, as
argued by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, whose understanding of the importance of
spirituality for ecology is rediscovering the “sacredness of life” for safeguarding preservation
of life on earth. For this to happen, we have to
perceive all life forms as sacred and respect them as such. This quality is not located
in other-worldy deity in a transcendence, but in everyday life . . ., in our imma-
nence. And from time to time there should be celebrations of this sacredness in
rituals, in dance and song.
(18–19)
We believe that such a perception of nature and the environment is, in Hilst’s poems, what
can be understood by the idea of communication with the Cosmos, even if this Cosmos is
made to the poet’s measure.

Adélia Prado: the divine in the small details

Adélia Luzia Prado Freitas is a well-known poet from Divinópolis, Minas Gerais, in the
southeast of Brazil. Her first book of poems, Bagagem (“Baggage”4), was published in 1976,
when she was 40, even though she wrote sonnets beginning in her adolescence. The
experience of the sacred is already present, above all because of her assumed Judeo-Christian
religiosity. Her O coração disparado (“Speeding heart” 1978) was awarded the prestigious
“Prêmio Jabuti.” Best known for her poetry, the poet is also a prose writer. Her poetry has
been translated into English, and adapted to the theatre.
Introduced to the North American academic world by Mary Ann Carter from Princeton
University in the 1980s, Prado became after that a source of many critical studies.5 For
Angélica Soares and other Brazilian feminist critics, her poetry deals with the woman question
through eroticism and religiosity. This includes the questioning of the patriarchal ideology
and the power of the word as a freeing expression. Everyday life is raw material for the poet.
For Soares (2002), eroticism has a renewed sense of the sacred for Prado, whose erotic
discourse results from the “destructuring reappropriation of religious elements through which
she communicates repression, and thus creates images of non-repression and the building up
of awareness for women” (79). The critic argues that when the woman is free to express her
eroticism, she is also speaking her mind as to how she sees her role in society as one of co-
construction: such are “features of the same process. The erotic self-knowledge takes to the
other and to the world; it is the awareness of the power to transform it with one’s own will”
(Soares 1999: 58). Although Prado claims to have no talent for activism, her poetry is in favor
of freeing female sexuality, for this is a libertarian practice (135).
Religiousness for her is a tool for women to be rid of oppression. The passion one sees in
Christ means its transformation into a feast, into physical and spiritual attraction. Hence, sex

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and religiousness are part of everyday life. “Jonathan” is her baptizing name for God. This
recurrence shows “the sense of the permanence of desire that crosses the [poet’s] religious and
erotic lyric poetry, that originates life” (134).
For Prado “art is mediation for divinity.”6 Hence “the source of Beauty is God, and this
gives me the beginning of an explanation. The rest is literature, human labor, fallible,” as she
argues in a statement for a literary supplement published in Minas Gerais.7 To examine her
poems necessarily will lead to some sort of connection intended with her understanding of
God. “Duas Maneiras” (“Two ways”), for example, from Bagagem, explores two forms of
connection with God. The poem is one stanza and 17 lines long, and begins like this:

From inside the geometry

God looks at me and causes me terror.
(72)

Geometry possesses very definite forms, sizes and positions. The constituted God under this
pattern, under non-transposable patterns, therefore, awakens terror in the poetic persona and
brings down on her “the hemiplegic incubus,” some sort of male demon that paralyzes the
dominated person, considering the outflow of energy. This creature who has a sexual
character attacks women (and men) in their dreams, aiming at sexual intercourse. Yet in the
poem, such an image may be linked to the need for alertness—against sleep in its metapho-
rical sense—in order to be able to act in the second way addressed by the poem. The poetic
voice, in the first way, calls for the mother, hides behind the door (where the father hangs his
dirty shirt), drinks fresh water (“sweet” as opposed to salty) and speaks “the words of prayers.”
There is no connection, or two-way relationship, between this God and the human woman.
The second way unveils God’s surveillance, but the poetic voice wins autonomy, and,
against a state of sleep and lethargy, which would favor the domination of the incubus, directs
her to transfer her thinking towards trifles, people and habits that do not belong in the
“geometry”: “cigarette brands,” “a man going out at dawn to worship the Sacred one,” “roll-
your-own tobacco,” “a country woman/with pequi basket,” “fruit made of scent and
yellow.” Instead of “the words of prayers,” which seem distant and meaningless, she addresses
a simple everyday routine, an immanent nature that allows a direct meeting, face to face with
God (something Hilst does not achieve):

When He realizes, I’m already in His lap,

I take His white beard,
He throws the world ball to me
I throw it to Him.
(72)

Instead of a powerful being, what the reader sees is a contact between an old man and a child
(not an incubus with a woman any more). The ball-in-movement is a free flow between the
immanent and the transcendent; or maybe even of one’s free will. The old man here is
analogous to an old father, or even the long lasting Judeo-Christian image of God as a white
bearded old man. Therefore sex seems to be out of the question, for it is transformed into a
different kind of play involving different roles.
“Um salmo” (“A Psalm”), from the same book, is a song of praise in which there is an
interrelationship between corporeity, eroticism and the experience of the sacred. This is a
short poem too: 17 lines and a single stanza. The poet assures that “Everything that is shall

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praise” God, which is explicit in the title and in the expression that ends the poem, “TE-
DEUM,” i.e., “I praise you, God.” In this sense, glorification begins in the human sphere:
the one “who sings,” “who takes the edge of your skirt,” “The boys,” but this limit of the
praise for the deity is soon surpassed when the poetic voice brings “the dogs,” “the unavoided
cats,” “the resurrected” (human or more-than-human), “the one that under the sun moves
and walks.” The complement is “the wagging of a tail, a meow/a raised ’and, shall worship.”
This means that in the poem, everything that lives is able to praise, and if anyone is capable of
praising, it is because she/he/it is connected to God.
For Alaimo (2008),
“nature” is always as close as one’s own skin. Indeed, thinking across bodies may
catalyze the recognition that the “environment,” which is too often imagined as
inert, empty space or as a “resource” for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy
beings, with their own needs, claims, and actions.
(238)
Prado’s addition to this is the potential to praise the divine. Thus to insert the more-than-
human in an anthropocentric relationship close to the human being (after all this being is
“distinguished” from the others because of her/his capacity for transcendence), the poem is
open for the debate as regards the spirituality of the more-than-human. Yet, further
development of such a perspective is out of the scope of this chapter, but it contributes to
the possibility of questioning: how to conceive the spiritual dimension and manifestation of
animals, plants and everything else beyond the human?
In the final verses, there is an image of communion between soul and body. The experience of
praise, of feeling God’s presence, manifests itself also in the materiality of things. The soul praises
by chanting; the body, by dancing. And yet, the verses “Wait for the irruption of joy” for “Our
soul desires,/our body craves/the full movement:/sing and dance TE-DEUM.” As we read them
carefully, they may confer a utopian character to the praise of God. Prado’s poems exercise a
communication with the environment/the Cosmos by means of her unique relationship with her
“existential territory” (the body, both material and spiritual) in connection with God.

Helena Parente Cunha: cosmic unity and the forest portal

Helena Parente Cunha—from Salvador, Bahia, but lives in Rio de Janeiro—turns 90 in
2019.8 Apart from her work as a writer, she is also a renowned scholar (emeritus professor)
who lectures at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and has written many publications
about women writers, Brazilian literature, and gender studies, among other research topics.
Her latest book, published in 2017, is called Hora de Fogo: poemas em combustão (“Fire time:
poems in combustion”), in which she expresses her concern with the environment. This, we
can argue, is a recurrent feature of the poet and writer, her “activism,” in the sense that
through her craft, she defends not only a connection with the Cosmos, but that human
beings need to learn to live their own spirituality, something to be gained from nature, and
her more-than-human context. Her previous book of poems, Impregnações na floresta—Poemas
amazônicos (“Impregnations in the Forest—Amazonian Poems”), is perhaps one of her points
of departure, for it relates to a spiritual journey the poet went through in the Amazon forest.
In this book the poet’s perceives the world as a place where each and every being (human
and more-than-human alike) is interconnected, forming a sense of wholeness, of unity. The
poem “Integração” (“Integration”) places the human being as an extension of the forest. Thus
her sense of spirituality is connected to energy. And this is enough. There is no need to resort

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to an anthropomorphized God, for everything that is in the forest is transformed in the “me”
of the poetic persona: the trees, the forest, a

world
for existing
more than
for having
the forest
being me just
forest
and me
(52)

Parente Cunha’s play with words shows her ability to build a language that communicates the
need for humans to learn and interact with the more-than-human world that the forest is,
with a difference. The contact with spirituality does not require the conception of another
world, but the (re)connection with the most primitive of the world where we live: the earth,
the forest, its elements and the traditional peoples (here, indigenous ones). As in “Victoria
Regia” (“Victoria Regia”9) and other poems of the Amazonian book, the understanding of
spirituality comes close to a cosmic conscience, the conscience of being a part of the whole.
“Victoria Regia” likewise shows the erasure of the conflict that separates humans and
nature with all her creatures. The movement expressed in the poem summons us to learn
generosity, and compassion, among other virtues, which may lead to happiness, or eudaimonia
(Lockwood 2012: 144). Such virtues have to become part of our nature. This is Parente
Cunha’s hope for the planet and those who are part of it. In the poem, an Indian woman
dives into the waters of the unconscious, “searching for [her] untouched home,” unknowing
of the way to “the perfect measure/to make a star.” Transformed into a flower and a star
floating in water under the moonlight, this primitive being is an anima mundi, connected to
the whole, and that is how the poet unveils such hope, and unity with the all.

Arriete Vilela: the word is God and God is poetry

On the eve of turning 70, Arriete Vilela—born in Marechal Deodoro, Alagoas—is the
youngest of the four poets examined in this chapter.10 Following the recurrent imagery of
her poetry, Vilela has just come out with her newest book, Intransitiva palavra (“Intransitive
word”), with 30 short poems dealing with the “Word,” her major creed. This comes four
years after the publication of Teço-me (“Reweaving myself”), a book that reframes O ócio dos
anjos ignorados (“The leisure of the forgotten angels”), whose core is “The love for the word,
a deadly passion” (Brandão 2017b: 397), and a “desperate attempt to look for the lost love—
human or otherwise—in the word.” (399). Teço-me does not show a change in relation to the
word, and maintains the theme of aggression,11 disclosing a crisis for the poet, who
seeks love, but her verses “deny the sap” and become “thorny branches”; they inflict
a “wound” and “bite themselves with canine teeth, sharp/. . . poisoned/by delu-
sional, fetishistic language.” The “Word” (with a capital “W”) becomes some kind
of tyrannical divinity, at whose feet, the poet will prostrate herself and “. . .beg for
the compassion of desire/the impulse of passion,/the barbed wire of a new love.”
(Brandão 2018: 399)

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So, the poet is in constant search for the end of conflict. Yet, because this is not possible, like
a lonely heroine seeking some grail, Vilela fights on: “The word is then obsessively,
oppressively, hunted as a prize for peace and freedom” (400).
The new book, however, discloses the immense ability of the poet to dive into her own
existence (real or fictitious) and emerge as a recreated creature, and if the Word is still her
eternal partner—her God (or Goddess)—this is sometimes felt with a certain resentment,
which demarcates a long-lasting conflict between her and her counterpart.
The idea of spirituality for this poet somehow discards the regular idea of a Judeo-
Christian God, which we find in Hilst or in Prado, and who, to a certain extent, is
transformed into a human creature, a lover or an old father, who is connected to the poetic
persona physically but also with a spiritual knowledge, be it made of flesh, blood, and oozing
pleasure (Hilst), or with the playful skills of a loving father who teaches by playing with his
children (Prado). Vilela, on the other hand, has no human God, unless the Word is
humanized, but that is not the case. In Intransitiva palavra, the poems are again numbered
(hardly a poem by Vilela is named), and Poem 2, for example, discloses the poet as a fertile
soil—there is no essentialism here though, or if we decide to see its work here, it is “strategic
essentialism” (Landry and MacLean 1996: 204)—where poetry plants its words and harvests
poems. But one cannot think that the poem comes without suffering on the poet’s part,
because even her roots are on display, which evidences this ordeal:

Poetry ploughs the dirt I am

Turns me the poetic soil, confers it
exposes my roots.
(11)

The next verse says that “Poetry” is “Beautiful and compassionate,” and because of this, “a
gore of moon,” “a sip of water from a waterhole,” and “a puff of breeze at dusk” is granted as
a gift to the poet. Such is a relationship in which love involves the human being (the poet)
and the word, nature (dirt, soil, roots) and the seed (the Word), nutritious images that,
beyond the sterility and possession that can occur in many a poem by Vilela, reverberate the
joy of rebirth. Poem 1 from Teço-me is but one example in which nature is aggressive: the
words come as thorns tearing the flesh, as already pointed out. Now what the poet reveals in
this rebirth is the poem (the poet) as fertilized soil (dirt, poetic soil) ready for the sowing of
the Word. Such indication reverberates a sacred territory, like the word of God, as in The
Bible. Moreover, the field of action in the poem comes from “Poetry,” for it reveals the poet
in her most precious images such as “water,” “waterhole,” etc. The exposed roots show her
profound commitment with poetry, for this is her “existential territory,”12 her sacred haven,
even if by writing she has those roots “exposed,” i.e., revealing her frailty as a human being,
for she cannot hide behind anything, nor can she disguise her feelings, or what she believes as
a creed; or the raw nerve of her life (again real or fictitious), expressed and exposed as the
Word incarnate; again used in capital letters and as an “open fracture.” Thus, the poem
reveals the connection between the poet as a woman whose body can be equated with the
earth that allows its soil to be ploughed, sowed and harvested. The revelation of all this is the
poem, her existential discourse displayed to us readers, no matter how torn and exposed she
may be.
Our concluding remarks point first of all to the openness of the concept of spirituality in
which we have devised this chapter. Our perception is akin to Loreley Garcia’s (2009) in
what she sees as the need to “reformat the concept of God”:

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Instead of a model of a God proposed by male conscience, alienated, exterior and

ruling over nature; the God of ecofeminist spirituality is the immanent source of life
that sustains the totality of the planetary community. God is not male or anthro-
pomorphic, but the source from which a variety of plants and animals sprout at each
generation, the matrix that sustains the vital interdependence between them.
(118)
The poets examined here escape from an imprisoning perception of God. They re-inscribe
the deity in a very particular kind of Cosmos. Adélia Prado accepts God within a Christian
tradition, but her spiritual values are located within a universe that is not “cosmic,” but that
renders women a haven where they may express their freedom and transgress within a
domestic space, making everyday routine an exercise in which God becomes a partner, not an
enemy. Hilda Hilst equates her craft with God’s own as Creator, and maybe here we could
say that both Hilst and Arriete Vilela risk becoming one in likeness with God, and yet Hilst
wants a God that is hers, as a deity but also as one who can be part of her life as a profane but
sacred God with a human face, and a material body. Vilela, on the other hand, wants God as
Word, and here the Word is Poetry, therefore, it is God, with a non-demarcated religious
connection, but full of loving meanings which we can place in a logic of a spirituality that is
in harmony with the human being and with nature. Helena Parente Cunha’s perception of
God is associated with the planetary order in that her view reweaves the human connection
with nature, placing the human being alongside nature, and its more-than-human counter-
parts in search of self-knowledge. Maybe the poet is idealistic and hopeful. Maybe being
nearly 90 makes her see the best in us. Finally, the image of a garden is relevant; Foucault’s
(1984) “happy, universalizing heterotopia” (6) appears in different ways for the four poets
examined here: a seedbed for Hilst, a poetic soil for Vilela, a yard where children play for
Prado, and for Parente Cunha, the whole of a forest.
As a concluding point, the poets examined here, with the possible exception of Helena
Parente Cunha, do not necessarily profess to write “spiritual poetry.” Their writing produces
a discourse that can be read as “spiritual” provided that the reader is open to read into their
writings such connection with spiritual values, as we did. This reading teaches us a commu-
nication with the environment/the Cosmos in a unique and separate poetic way that
reweaves an interconnection with the different dimensions allowed by language. We even
venture to say that this is not a trace of “Brazilianness,” something that would essentialize
their poetry. We could perhaps say that, following Jameson (1986), their language is
“national,” yet what they write follows specificities that escape literary (or any other)
constraints.

Notes
1 Stacy Alaimo (2008). The author connects the more-than-human world with her notion of trans-
corporeality, which “underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is
ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (238).
2 All translations, unless otherwise stated, are from Izabel Brandão.
3 The use of “Man” here is to be fair to the masculine being that is part of Hilst’s poetry.
4 The word “bagagem” in Portuguese carries an ambivalence which might be different in English.
While it means “luggage,” it also means the experience acquired in life. That is the implication of
Prado’s title, but this is lost in the translation.
5 See, for a whole range of academic works (master’s and doctoral theses) on the four poets examined
here, http://catalogodeteses.capes.gov.br/catalogo-teses/#!/ [Accessed 25 June 2018]. Some of
these works have been transformed into books.

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6 See www.tirodeletra.com.br/porque/AdeliaPrado.htm [Accessed 19 June 2018].

7 See http://apoesiadeadeliaprado.blogspot.com/2014/07/ [Accessed 19 June 2018].
8 In Brandão’s “Brazilian Women Poets on Gender, Nature and the Body,” a short biography of
Parente Cunha is provided. Her homepage lists 26 books published, among them poetry, prose and
essays (see www.helenaparentecunha.com.br/biografia/index.html [Accessed 21 June 2018]).
9 See Brandão (2017b) for an analysis of this poem.
10 Since there is a short biography of the poet Arriete Vilela in Brandão (2017b), for the sake of
this chapter we shall just point out that she holds a degree in Brazilian literature as well as an
MA in Brazilian literature. After retiring from the Federal University of Alagoas, where she
worked for more than two decades, during the 1990s, she has dedicated her life to writing as
well as teaching literature to groups of young people. She is interested in photography and has
held a number of exhibitions of her flower photographs, out of which she has designed
postcards and the cover of some of her books. See http://arrietevilela.blogspot.com/ [Accessed
20 June 2018].
11 See Brandão (2001 and 2017b).
12 The notion of “Existential Territory” comes from Felix Guattari and it means “a space of re-
singularisation of human experience” according to Soares (1999: 56). It is a place of resistance where
the subject is located.

Works cited
Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Material Feminism, edited
by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 237–64.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press,
1993.
Brandão, Izabel. “A poética da agressão em O ócio dos anjos ignorados.” Entre o amor e a palavra: olhar(es) sobre
Arriete Vilela. Catavento, 2001, pp. 185–95.
Brandão, Izabel. “A propósito de ‘Feminismos Trans-Corpóreos e o Espaço Ético da Natureza’, de Stacy
Alaimo.” Revista Estudos Feministas 25.2 (2017a maio-agosto): 961–74.
Brandão, Izabel. “Brazilian Women Poets on Gender, Nature and the Body.” A Global History of Literature
and the Environment, edited by John Parham and Louise Westling. Cambridge University Press, 2017b,
pp. 393–406.
Brandão, Izabel. “Afterword.” Women and Nature—Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment,
edited by Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey. Routledge, 2018, pp. 205–15.
Carneiro, Alan Silvio Ribeiro. Kadosh e o sagrado de Hilda Hilst. Master’s thesis. Universidade de Campinas,
2009. Available at: http://repositorio.unicamp.br/bitstream/REPOSIP/270179/1/Carneiro_AlanSil
vioRibeiro_M.pdf [Accessed 16 August 2018].
Cunha, Helena Parente. Impregnações na floresta—poemas amazônicos. Mulheres, 2013.
Cunha, Helena Parente. 2018 www.helenaparentecunha.com.br. Available at: www.helenaparentecunha.
com.br/biografia/index.htm [Accessed 21 June 2018].
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane—The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, 1987.
Foucault, Michel. (1984). “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/
www/foucault1.pdf. [Accessed 25 June 2018].
Garcia, Loreley. “Ecofeminismo: Múltiplas Versões.” Revista Ártemis 10 (2009 Jun): 96–118.
Guattari, Felix. As três ecologias. Translated by Maria Cristina F. Bittencourt. Papirus, 1990.
Henriques, J. A Poesia de Adélia Prado. 2018. Apoesiadeadeliaprado.blogspot.com. Available at: http://
apoesiadeadeliaprado.blogspot.com/2014/07/ [Accessed 19 June 2018].
Hilst, Hilda. “Poeta grava vozes dos mortos.” 1979. Available at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?
v=_gCrEITRXR4 [Accessed 21 June 2018].
Hilst, Hilda. Hilda Humana Hilst. 2002. documentário. Available at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?
v=4sxAJkkIgq8 [Accessed 21 June 2018].
Hilst, Hilda. Da poesia. Companhia das Letras, 2017.
Jameson, Frederic. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15
(Autumn 1986): 65–88.
Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Routledge, 1991.
Landry, Donna, and Gerald MacLean, eds. The Spivak Reader. Routledge, 1996.

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Lockwood, Jeffrey. “Afterword: Revolution: Does Ecofeminism Reject or Reflect Traditional Morality?”
In Feminist Ecocriticism Environment, Women, and Literature, edited by Douglas Vakoch, 123–35.
Lexington Books, 2012.
Mitten, Denise, and Chiara D’Amore. “The Nature of Body Image: The Relationship between Women’s
Body Image and the Physical Activity in Natural Environments.” Women and Nature—Beyond Dualism in
Gender, Body, and Environment, edited by Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey. Routledge, 2018.
Prado, Adélia. Poesia reunida. Siciliano, 1991.
Sheldrake, Philip. Spirituality: A Brief History. Wiley Blackwell, 2013.
Soares, Angélica. A paixão emancipatória. Difel, 1999.
Soares, Angélica. “O universo erótico-religioso de Adélia Prado.” Gênero e representação na literature—
brasileira, edited by Constância Duarte, Eduardo de A. Duarte, and Kátia da C. Bezerra. Pós-lit UFMG,
2002, pp. 70–81.
Vilela, Arriete. Obra poética reunida. Poligraf, 2010.
Vilela, Arriete. Teço-me. Poligraf, 2014.
Vilela, Arriete. Intransitiva palavra. CBA, 2018.
Warren, Karen J. (ed.). Ecofeminism: Women, Culture Nature. Indiana University Press, 1997.

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 26
WOMEN’S STREET ARTIVISM
IN INDIA AND BRAZIL
Shilo Shiv Suleman’s pan-indigenous
environmental movement
Aarti Smith Madan

Street art has been mobilized for time immemorial as a low-tech mode of mass communica-
tion and means of protest. Both iconographic and instrumental, it looks to aesthetics to
convey political messages to publics without access to other informational channels. In so
doing, street art can transform any urban surface into communicative media with the ability
to inspire emotion, teach the masses, and summon action.
If ecocriticism has historically been the lens through which to illuminate popular culture
and high art, it immediately offers something of value to understanding street art, which
began eponymously in the streets but has, in recent years, ascended onto museum walls. At
the same time, environmental communication studies also lends meaning to eco-graffiti
insofar as public art serves as a practical communication strategy linked to the sociology of
environmental movements; its theories allow us to apprehend both how individuals, groups,
and cultures perceive information as well as how they craft and disseminate environmental
messages to enhance the public’s engagement with and understanding of environmental
degradation.
Feminist street art in the Global South is a particularly ripe arena to examine the
convergence of these sibling disciplines. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which India
and Brazil have become the locus of enunciation for a pan-indigenous feminist environmental
movement that connects colonial legacies of violence against women as violence against the
divine mother earth; reclaiming public space thus brings to bear on two spatial projects of
liberation. I pay particular attention to the art, writing, and activism of Shilo Shiv Suleman, a
contemporary artist based in Bangalore who has quickly gained international acclaim for her
diversity of work, which ranges from giant installations at Burning Man to TED talks to
founding the Fearless Collective. With their murals and community-based art, this group of
visual artists denounces rape culture and gender violence and has done tremendous work
creating safe spaces across the Global South, including a collaborative project with the
indigenous women’s group Pelas Mulheres on the coast of Bahia, Brazil. The binational
collaboration, sponsored by FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund in September 2016, sought
to use art to reclaim a Tupinamba indigenous ancestral graveyard, which was taken by the

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Portuguese via the Catholic Church as part of their civilizing effort in the small town of
Olivença some 400 years ago. For the Tupinamba, the land is power; to lose sacred land is to
lose power. By examining the Fearless Collective’s aesthetic reclamation of Tupinamba
territory—and thereby hegemony—as well as Fearless Futures: A Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit
(2017), a 56-page open-source manual that emerged from their work in Brazil, this chapter
sheds light on the power of street art and participative ritual to undo centuries of injustice
against both women and environment. It will, furthermore, point to the ways that the
Collective’s work decolonizes knowledge and democratizes activism, making calls to arms
heard from and by all. The ecocritical reading that I embark on begins first with the
geocritical, in other words, with space and the ways in which it is only granted to certain
privileged peoples; colonialism and patriarchy intersect here, and at their junction we see that
whiteness and wealth determine state-sanctioned ownership, and in the absence of those two
qualifiers, men stake claim to all that is extra-official, be they female bodies or public space.
By looking to theories of decolonization and performance, I read the Fearless Collective’s
project as a form of land redistribution wherein women reclaim public space and, with that,
reclaim corporeal space.

The Fearless Collective: Brazil

How did the Fearless Collective come to be? As each of us vividly remembers, in
December 2012 the news ricocheted around the world: yet another young Indian
woman had been gang raped, but this time the sequence of events horrified even the
most desensitized. The 23-year-old woman, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was returning home from
an evening at the movies with a male friend—she was in a public space at night and that,
somehow, justified her assailants’ brutal attack, at least in their mind’s eye. The plight of
“India’s Daughter” prompted protests, marches, introspection, documentaries, and even
legislation in the form of several fast-track courts to handle rape cases. It also inspired a
movement to not only Take Back the Night—a new form of sexual assault activism that’s
taken off on college campuses across the United States—but also to take back the streets
for women, to denounce the intergenerational fear that has created a self-sustaining cycle
of violence perpetuated against women daring to set foot outside after sunset. The Fearless
Collective gelled shortly after the rape with the goal of redefining fear and femininity vis-
à-vis public art; by reclaiming, with arts, spaces otherwise deemed dangerous for women,
they aim to reframe the notion of fearless. But the core group of volunteers—founder
Shilo Shiv Suleman and Shalaka Pai, Aarthi Parthasarathy, Kasha Frese, and Aruna
Chandra Sekhar—and their 400-something artist assistants don’t just make art in under-
privileged areas. Rather, they teach both art-making and self-making to women and create,
in their words, “space to move from fear to love using participative art”—“We create
alternative, people-led narratives that engage personal histories, cultural and political
realities and tell stories of universal resilience through visual campaigning, workshops and
affirmative storytelling techniques” (“About Us”).
With their focus on educating women via street art and the workshop format, the Fearless
Collective has extended its model across Southeast Asia, and in 2016 Shilo Shiv Suleman and
Nida Mushtaq were even highlighted as the plenary speakers at the Forum for the Association
for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), a global, feminist membership organization
that has been working for over 30 years to achieve gender equality, sustainable development,
and women’s human rights worldwide. The 2016 Forum took place in Bahia, Brazil, and
what was astonishing was just how much street art took center stage as a mode to imagine a

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feminist future grounded in notions of sustainability—sustaining mother earth cannot be a

reality without sustaining women. And this notion holds especially true across the Global
South.
While in Brazil, then, part of the Collective’s task as a grantee of the FRIDA | The
Young Feminist Fund was to familiarize themselves with a postcolonial experience quite
different from their locus of enunciation in India. The photo-essay describing their Brazilian
project highlights some of their new knowledge as it sets the scene in the small town of
Olivença, a place described as “charmingly assuming” though its “winding streets and bridges
are full of histories.” These histories shed tears, for nearly 500 years ago Portuguese ships
breached the shores of Olivença, where the land bore witness to one of the largest massacres
of indigenous peoples in Brazilian history. The essay goes on somberly, describing how
“Legends speak of seven kilometers of indigenous bodies, laid side by side by side on the
white sand beach” (“We Protect What Protects Us”).
Imagine this.
Big sails being blown into by the wind towards land, they are looking for India,
instead they find themselves in a lush, verdant forest in Bahia. The Tupinamba—the
people of the land—are blessed in feathers, their skin painted with the ink of the
Guinea Pappo. Their gods have no form, no colour, but manifest themselves as a
feeling—“encantada” (enchanted), they are called. They grow cassava, sweet pota-
toes, tobacco. The land is sacred, and everything returns to it—including our bodies,
and the ancestors before us.
Descriptions of the Tupinamba fill the pages of Cosmographie Universelle, with
painted pictures of a shaman’s cape, woven of stars and feathers, adorning European
museums, but conveniently forget to mention the massacre, the exploitation, the
enslavement and the brutal acquisition of the Tupinamba territory.
(“We Protect What Protects Us”)
Ultimately it is this very land-based violence that the Fearless Collective aims to under-
stand, undo, and undermine at the intersection of art and performance. To this end, and
in collaboration with the local indigenous women’s rights group called Pelas Mulheres, the
Collective settled into Bahia for a seven-day workshop following the AWID conference.
Their joint objective was to reclaim an ancestral graveyard that had been appropriated by
the Portuguese vis-à-vis the Catholic Church—indeed, to re-sanctify a sacred space by
means of ritual. The binational collaboration spent their days learning about one another,
learning about the power of the sacred land and what it symbolizes for the Tupinamba—
protection, safety, healing. To rob them of their land is, at end, tantamount to robbing
them of these very essential qualities of their subjectivity. Their subject position in the
world is as much about their geo-location—the land from which they emerge—as it is
about their corporeality. Indeed, the body space of the Tupinamba is where they manifest
their connection to the land. Using a red paint mined from deep within a fruit called the
Guinea Pappo, the Tupi adorn their bodies while “[p]rotecting themselves from evil spirits
and healing the spirit within.” The ritualistic act allows for intergenerational transfer of
customs wherein the “village elders paint their daughters and their daughters paint the
elders.” This tradition of body-painting—and all the identity-building and confirming
accompanying it—became at once a subversive act under colonial rule; to protect
themselves and not draw unnecessary attention, the Tupi had to hide this unique form of
symbolic communication from their Portuguese rulers. Their form of corporeal textuality

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existed outside the realm of alphabetic writing and therefore posed a threat to the
colonizers, for whom “paper” served as a tool of subjugation. But what to do when the
subjects bore their own arms, ones entirely incomprehensible? Well—vilify, criminalize,
and prohibit the act as subversive and as one of insurrection. Fearless’s project in Olivença
was thus as much about reclaiming territories as it was about reclaiming corporeal
traditions; the photo-essay informs us that “the younger generation is remembering,
reclaiming and re-invoking the spirits as they paint their bodies with pride” (“We Protect
What Protects Us”).

Fearless after Brazil: a feminist cartographer’s toolkit

We see the recapturing of ancestral knowledge in the Fearless Collective’s Fearless Futures: A
Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit, which emerged following the booming success of Suleman and
Mushtaq’s 2016 AWID plenary. In late 2017 AWID partnered with the Collective to create
an open-source manual to be used across the globe for women of all walks to articulate
feminist futures, map existing solutions and narratives, and, in their words, encourage
“activists and organizers to suspend beliefs that no longer serve us and our movements,
release our fears, and imagine thriving communities and villages of love, justice and
democracy” (2). The 56-page manual bears all the traces of Suleman’s quintessentially
Renaissance skillset: the artistic, the literary, the scientific, the methodic, the speculative, the
fantastic all unite in an effort to heal and harness the “beauty that can be reclaimed in broken
spaces” (3). The Toolkit’s opening anecdote illustrates this emancipating possibility by aligning
gendered violence against both mother and mother earth, the latter represented as simulacrum
by the cartographer’s map. The featured mapmaker and victim is Suleman’s mother, while
the abuser is her father:
As a cartographer [. . .], [my mother] used to recreate old maps with a single-hair
brush and a diamond cutter’s eyeglass in the smallest room of our house, which was
barely big enough to fit her drafting table. [. . .] Sometimes at midnight, I would
stumble out of bed with heavy eyelashes and see her perched at her table as she
summoned rivers and mountains with her fingers: stepping out of one dream and
into another, I was in love. Here was a woman who could make a world. Toward
the end of her relationship with my father, I remember the night that he tore one of
her maps in anger. Continents lay scattered on the floor. We tried to piece it back
together, but in turn, the eventual severing of their marriage taught us that beauty
could be reclaimed in broken places. I eventually used fragments of those torn maps
in my art.
(3, emphasis in original)
In one fell swoop a man can destroy a world created by a woman. In the Fearless Collective’s
understanding of Creation and Creator, the creator is female—as is the future. I’d like to
pause on two instances of the Toolkit’s revisionist feminist history: the first appears on the
cover page with the epigraph, “you know my world was never flat” (10) (see Figure 26.1).
The second appears some 12 pages in: “all creation stories begin with water: for most this is
interpreted as a symbol of ‘Void’/for us, we see this as softness./Always start gentle” (12) (see
Figure 26.2).
Both instances aim to reclaim and rewrite masculine narratives and patriarchal Histories by
rounding out straight edges, by appealing to fluidity and softness, by conjuring new belief
systems that are collective:

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Figure 26.1 First instance of revisionist feminist history in Fearless Futures: A Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit

Collective imagination crystallizes into belief systems, which then form institutions.
However, in recent history, women’s voices are rarely woven into the creation of
the systems that influence the world. Now is the time to reclaim these spaces and
processes of collective imagination.
(6)
By beginning with a refutation of pre-modern man’s misguided belief in a flat Earth, the Toolkit
welcomes readers and participants into a world of feminine subjectivity but also sisterhood: “you
know my world was never flat” (1, emphases mine). The feminist opening the archive under-
stands right away that there is a shared history, one in which she is spoken to directly as someone
who always already understands what it means to be a postcolonial woman in a colonial man’s
world. The objective, here, is decolonization through an appeal to the complexities, curves,
crests, and complicities of imagining a future in which forgiveness is central to the project:
forgiving past Histories while imagining the possibilities of a feminist future. Rather than looking
at the origins as a void—an emptiness to be reckoned with or filled or overcome—the softness of
the water emerges here as a blank slate, a safe space to sketch the outlines, gently, of a desired
future rather than a demonized past. The Toolkit’s collaborative of authors reminds us through-
out that the possibility of a feminist future lies not in black or white but in grey, that there is no
good or bad but only believing, that thinking outside of the box is to rise out of it, imagining,
dreaming, visioning. Maps, for instance, appear at first torn into shreds by Suleman’s father, then
as objects that themselves tear into people and spaces, later as trusted digital devices that still,
somehow and despite their presumed objectivity, divide people:

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Figure 26.2 Second instance of revisionist feminist history in Fearless Futures: A Feminist Cartographer’s
Toolkit

Maps, though often seen as objects of wonder and adventure, have a good deal of
healing to do. Some have used them to carve imagined borders, (re)form nations,
and navigate territories that were not theirs. Finger flick ahead a few centuries: a
map guides me to my next meeting, informs me I’m late, and warns me against
traffic. I trust it. When I ask the same map to show me the route from Delhi to
Lahore it says: “No Way Found.” Our maps continue to be torn.
(3)
But what is striking about the “Foreword”—and it is a thread that weaves its way through the
Toolkit—is that Suleman presents the other side of the token, which is the way out of the
pejorative past. We learn about other mapmaking traditions that are emancipatory, such as
“Australian songlines,” which are oral maps of Indigenous Australian nations that are recorded
as songs, stories, dances, and paintings: “Indigenous people who have inherited their oral
maps from their ancestors navigate their lands by repeating the songs, which describe the
location of particular significant landmarks and sacred sites” (3). The emphasis, here, is on past
knowledge being harnessed and re-appropriated for future generations, tracing “stories into
our geographies, us[ing] poetry as a form of navigation, and invok[ing] a collective dreaming/
memory—intimately connecting people to their landscape as the carriers of those stories” (4).
Just as the earth revolves around the sun and seeks and creates nourishment from its energy,
so too do we harness the positive energy of our pasts, of our ancestors, to blast our way into
safe spaces that were previously outside the realm of possibility. In Suleman’s “Foreword,”
the ecocritical and geocritical converge in a spatial trajectory to reclaim “spaces for common

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ground and creation”—“Here is a process of using maps primarily as tools for activists to
recognize these lands as full of dreams and collective imaginings” (4).
At end, collaboration forms the core of the fearless vision of activism and existence: only
together, by engaging the inner child—which is our common ground despite any other identity
we might assume, be it “artist/activist/socialist/revolutionary/. . .”—can we build into existence
the earth we want to inhabit (5). This appeal to childhood also forms a central part of the
Toolkit’s mission, for children live in a constant suspension of disbelief, and that suspension often
hinges on understanding the land we live on and imagining what lies beyond it:
As children, we invoked creative spirits to guide us into visions of becoming
astronauts who explore the moon or geologists who study the motions of tectonic
plates. We used our imaginations to enter empathetic conversations with birds and
beast, color in the mysteries of the universe, and create safe spaces where kin could
hide during imaginary storms (and drink a cup of tea). The imagination has always
been an outlet for play and wonder, as well as a way for us to tap into the same
creative forces that cause bees to pollinate and telescopes to find distant galaxies.
(6)
Notice that the magic of imagination revolves around making sense of the terrestrial and the
celestial but also of protecting what grows out of the ground and also what descends from the
skies. In the Toolkit, both realms belong to the divine mother earth: daughters protect and
learn from their mothers and vice versa. And to do so in the face of unfathomable power
requires us to suspend our disbeliefs: we CAN stand hand-in-hand around a tree in rural
India, and we CAN save said tree from multinational corporations. To recall such moments
of literal intertwining between earth and woman is to underscore that sustainability is an
inherently feminist cause: women sustain life, we create life, we foster the links between
generations by sustaining traditions but also imagine, for our children, a future that is better
than our present: “Activism is a form of dreaming; we are on the frontlines fighting for a
world that does not exist yet” (7). The Toolkit posits a collective call to arms to suspend our
disbelief, to conjure a future where there is no fear—to rid ourselves of that fear that “came
to eat my children,” that fear that “poisoned my rivers, drowned my islands, sank its teeth
into my mountains, uprooted me by my silt” (8). This is a fearless future that scrawls graffiti
on our Ivory Towers, that cannot be understood via traditional academic inquiry: rather than
an individual academic writing and analyzing and fighting past demons with a pen, this a
collective project that focuses on a future of beauty, of collaboration, of change:
There came a time when we needed to articulate the world’s flaws so we could
break long silenced oppressions. Yet, as we focus on the forces that oppress us, there
is a danger of romanticising the past, appropriating pain, or becoming overwhelmed
in the struggle. Here is our request: this book is an exchange of lived experiences.
Your story, and mine. When we forgive our stories we allow them to slowly
dissolve into what is and what could be rather than what was. Forgiveness is a way
of making space in our fractured Atlas; it is an allowance of change, a reclamation of
beauty, and an expression of absolute power.
Everytime [sic] I forgive, I create space for possibilities.
(9)
The spatial is at the center of the Fearless project: the idea of space extends from public space
to personal space to dreaming space, from the narrow city streets to the high Ivory Towers to

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a utopic village of likeminded souls invested in similar emancipatory projects. History with a
capital H is the official History, the lowercase h is the people’s history, one that appeals to a
decolonial imaginary, but it still functions to document past travesties and injustices that have
informed our present human condition. But Fearless beckons us to imagine the FUTURE, to
step outside Histories and histories and instead forgive and create: “When we forgive our
collective histories, we allow ourselves to create our futures” (9). The first person plural
dominates this narrative, not about an us and them but rather an us and a we that can
collaborate to build a communal future that accounts for the capitalist now and a post-
capitalist utopia. The Toolkit invites activists to consider this utopic space: what kind of
currency might it use? How will public spaces be situated? What will family structures look
like? And most importantly for my purposes: how might we position ourselves vis-à-vis
natural resources?
Indeed, the earth and our engagement with it are central to imagining this “fantastical
feminist future,” and the images that accompany the text reflect a fearless future in
which women’s bodies reclaim the space of nature: a topless woman swimming in
the sea; an underwear-clad woman crouching next to a jaguar; a pair of friends sitting
on lily pads, one with a baby girl at her breast; a group of four women, two playing
instruments while the other two dance. The title of the page is “I miss the village I
never had: it takes a village,” suggesting that while the overwrought notion of village has
become all too common, all too many of us have never enjoyed such a privilege (see
Figure 26.3).

Figure 26.3 “I miss the village I never had: it takes a village”

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The process to build this village is straightforward:

(1) Suspend a disbelief: let it out

(2) Draw a border: so no fear comes through
(3) Make space for dreaming: write as much as you need, and if you need more space—reclaim it.
(4) Articulate: try not to get stuck in the issue or in thinking that your idea is too extravagant. Your
imagination still exists—let it find its voice.
(5) Fantasize: dreaming and resistance can go hand in hand. Allow yourself to fantasize.
(13)

Through their texts, street art, and rituals, then, the Fearless Collective helps recall a sort of literary
contraband. I borrow this term from Hannah Burdette (2014), who uses it to describe indigenous
oraliteratures and defines it as a “defense mechanism” that is “less against the law than it is prior to
the modern State,” a “mode of preservation of a society in constant flux” (275). If we superimpose
this notion on the Collective’s aesthetic practice as well as its emphasis on accessibility, we might
better understand the ways their emancipatory project invokes preservation and reclamation at every
turn: “They help suppressed voices and bodies to penetrate the walled lettered city not to conquer
it, but rather to expand and disjoint it, twisting its narrow, angular streets and scrawling graffiti on
its ivory towers in protest” (Burdette 2014: 275). With projects across the Global South—in India,
Pakistan, Brazil, Nepal, Indonesia and most recently with racialized and indigenous women on
unceded Coast Salish territories in Victoria, Canada—the Fearless Collective facilitates the use of
authentic, indigenous, and alternative modes of communication that unseat or displace dominant
and often Eurocentric forms of cultural production. Knowledge is thus displaced from its official
sphere, unyoked from its assigned and normalized uses, and ultimately circulated in other spaces.
Following Burdette’s line of thinking, then, Fearless rituals and their accompanying
aesthetic practice represent “not just an insurrection or an act of defiance but also a
transformative event, an indigenous in-surgence into spaces normally, and until recently,
confined to the whites, mestizos, and the West”—to men (Burdette 2014: 276). The
Collective’s understanding of space harkens back to a profoundly different phenomenological
approach to territory since, as performance studies scholar Diana Taylor (2007) tells us, for
pre-modern peoples, “the land was coterminous with embodied human experience” (1415).
Using an early Mesoamerican map as an example, Taylor explains that it,
unlike the familiar projection genre, is not about locating oneself physically but
about performing a history; footprints indicate the movement of the Aztecs as they
walked, carrying their gods with them [. . .]. The space in this map is all about
“practiced place,” in Michel de Certeau’s terms, meaningful only in relation to the
ceremonies that take place as the people travel—an animative.
(2007: 1419–20)
Melding these notions of animatives and contraband, I would like to pause on two Fearless
ceremonies that we have discussed so far and read them through this double lens: (1) the Tupi
intergenerational bodypainting ritual and (2) the “Atlas” prompts in Fearless Futures: A
Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit.
The sacred space of the ancestral graveyard belongs to the Tupi insofar as premodern
space, as Richard Kagen (2000) reminds us, “belonged to the people who inhabited it” (52).
The Tupi are thus located affectively and historically, intimately bound with the land not just
geographically; they extract the paint from the land and then elders paint daughters, daughters
paint elders, people are positioned past next to present, rather than fixed; the understanding of

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space thus requires a fully embodied form of engagement, and all the more so in a sacred
space meant to house the bodies of those who have already passed. In this way, the
experience of space cannot be removed from lived experience and behaviors because we see
an emplacement of bodies among bodies, of a genealogical and historical emplacement. To
take their sacred land is to displace legacies and traditions and behaviors that are inherently
tied to protection, which takes us, then, to the affirmation that emerged from the workshop
and came to be the project title: “Nós Protegemos O que Nos Protégé” (“We Protect What
Protects Us”). The affirmation appeals to indigenous cycles rather than Western linearity, not
“I protect myself” in a one-way, individualistic sense but rather “we protect each other” in a
two-way collaboration: “What protects us, we protect in return. The earth protects us, and
we protect the earth; Our culture protects us, and we protect our culture” (“We Protect
What Protects Us”). The image collaboratively painted in the reclaimed village center is,
therefore, two women inscribed onto a concrete circle. The younger girl wears the feathers
of her ancestors, her face adorned in the forbidden paint from the land, her eyes fierce as she,
Janus-faced, recalls and reclaims the patterns of her people, painted onto the skin of her
grandmother and there for all future generations to walk on and learn, a map of their past:
animative contraband. We see an appeal to the knowledge of our elders to recapture past
traditions, premodern ones, and thereby undo cycles of trauma to both women and
environment.
Similarly, the Toolkit’s “Atlas” seeks to preserve past knowledge while mapping the way to
a feminist future that is accessible to all. Decolonization is, at end, about making knowledge
creation and production a multilateral venture, about including all bodies and sexualities and
brains, be they situated academically or nonacademically; borrowing from Juan Ramos and
Tara Daly in their 2016 edited collection on Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures
and Cultures, the Fearless Collective’s approach seeks to horizontalize, rather than verticalize,
the relationship between theory and cultural artifacts (xv). The Toolkit thus begins with the
disclaimer “100% HANDMADE AND OPENSOURCE AND UNLIKE ANYTHING
YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE./print me/share me/distribute me and let people know
where to find me. (I am all yours)” (4). The very first “Atlas” prompt encourages activists to
account for sex in their village. Part of the task involves imagining how pleasure might
manifest for all bodies, how we might talk about, value, and represent sex. The second
prompt is an “inquiry into our natural resources (mountains), labor (factories of flowers) and
economies (bazaars)” (20). The introductory passage to this set of questions imagines a world
where autonomy is of the essence: you eat and drink what you like, you work and rest when
you like, you have sex when you like, all the while acknowledging that our resources—
namely water—are a gift from our mother, the Earth: “It is only ours to share. In this village,
we only share water, don’t sell it. Imagine: not selling water. Hahahaha” (21). This extract
comes from a spoken piece delivered by Coumba Touré at the 2016 AWID Forum; the
feminist future she envisions is one where we trade laughter, we make people smile, we make
and grow our food for the next seven generations. The hope, here, is that we care for
ourselves, our neighbors, our future neighbors: the collective extends beyond the immediate.
Thus the questions call us to ponder the very nature of natural resources: “In our village,
what is considered precious and why?”/“How do we give and what do we take? How are
natural resources used and distributed?”/“What defines our relationship to earth—extraction,
feeding, respect, interdependence?”
Through each component of A Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit, we notice its creators
straddling the worlds of academia and activism. The focus is always on space, but whereas
the former tends to couch itself in historical terms or in studies of past processes—change over

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time—the latter is forward looking and seeks a collective march into the future by coalescing
individual stories. This tendency weaves its way through the first two parts (“The Atlas” and
“The Book of Directions”) subtly, but in “The Glossary,” the mutually informative yet
nevertheless distinctive purposes become more explicit:
Feminist Cartography: the act of drawing maps with an eye on what must be
reclaimed and what is unwritten; an act of reclamation that focuses on re-defining
borders, boundaries, and the modern conception of nation-states. Feminist carto-
graphy is forward looking. It focuses on futures and potentials, grounding our maps
in our collective histories and individual stories.
In the academic space, Feminist cartography typically focuses on the evolution of
technology, specifically Geographic Information System (GIS), and its intersection
with geography and cartography. Feminist geographer’s [sic] hold that ‘. . . a map is
really only one person’s view of reality . . . whoever makes the map holds power
over what the world can and can’t look like.’
(53)
The Fearless Collective takes the power from the panopticon of the Ivory Tower and
relocates it to the downtrodden on the ground, returning to an indigenous way of mapping
where the foot—rather than the eye—is the defining body part (Taylor 1420). Taylor
reminds us that “the perspectivial vision of European maps places the now supposedly
disembodied viewer at the center, above, in control or possession, the master of vision
rather than a subject among subjects” (1420). But the Toolkit changes the perspective such
that the control and possession returns to dialogue and reciprocity. In fact, the names for
Fearless projects emerge after the fact, for they are an affirmation arrived at collectively;
knowledge is shared bilaterally rather than imparting, imposing, or—worst of all—saving. In
the most comprehensive interview of Suleman conducted to date, she delves into this two-
way street: “I centre a lot of the Fearless Rituals and workshops around emotional enquiries
that are universally relevant regardless of one’s context. . . . In a lot of our workshops, there is
no difference between a facilitator and facilitated” (Hussain 2018). She goes on:
We gather on the streets, wheatpasting and projecting images of ourselves, always in
radical openness. Very often this is both performance art and street art because the
communities we work with, like sex workers in Delhi, or transgender activists in
Indonesia don’t often engage with public space in this open way, but we make
room for radical reclamation of these spaces, opening room for Dialogue on every
level. Our permissions are always individually sought, and our message is always
affirmative.
(Hussain 2018)
The six-step methodology for the Fearless workshops moves from identifying the space to be
altered to the symbols that they want to engage with as they “use an alternative and
participative approach for people to tell their stories” (Hussain 2018). Note that the ritualistic
approach does not privilege writing as a primary source of communication; it thereby
democratizes knowledge and activism by telling a story—sometimes multiple stories—that
allow the actualization, stabilization, and rectification of relationships amongst people. The
orality, performance, and ritual of the workshops runs counter to Western sensibilities of
writing and knowledge and reappropriates a space of instruction unique to indigenous peoples
and democratic in its scope. All walks can receive the Fearless Collective’s knowledge and, in

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processing and performing it, create a new belief system: in making believe, they can—
eventually—make belief.

Works cited
“About Us.” The Fearless Collective, 2018, fearlesscollective.org/about-us/. Accessed 17 April 2018.
Burdette, Hannah. “Literary Contraband: Indigenous Insurgency and the Spatial Politics of Resistance.”
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 39.1 (2014): 273–301.
Hussain, Sara. “How Street Art Is Empowering Fearless Women to Reclaim Public Spaces.” Homegrown,
2018, homegrown.co.in/article/802371/a-fearless-womens-collective-is-breaking-gender-barriers-
using-street-art. Accessed 3 March 2018.
Kagen, Richard. Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793. Yale University Press, 2000.
Ramos, Juan and Tara Daly. “Introduction: Decolonial Strategies for Reading and Looking with and
against the Grain.” Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan,
2016.
Suleman, Shilo Shiv. “Foreword.” Fearless Futures: A Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit. Association of Women
in Development and The Fearless Collective, 2017. www.awid.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/
feminist_futures.pdf. Accessed 29 April 2018.
Suleman, Shilo Shiv et al. Fearless Futures: A Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit. Association of Women in
Development and The Fearless Collective, 2017. www.awid.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/femin
ist_futures.pdf. Accessed 29 April 2018.
Taylor, Diana. “Remapping Genre through Performance: From ‘American’ to ‘Hemispheric’ Studies.”
PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1416–30.
“We Protect What Protects Us.” The Fearless Collective, 2018, fearlesscollective.org/project/outside-the-
lines/. Accessed 18 April 2018.

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 27
NOVELIST AS ECO-SHAMAN
Buket Uzuner’s Water [Su] as requesting
spirits to help the earth in crisis

Pınar Batur and Ufuk Özdağ

Introduction
The contemporary Turkish writer Buket Uzuner has been working on a four-book series on
the nature, the myths, the history, and the culture of Anatolia in order to explore the
confrontation between everyday existence and awareness of the world around us. The first
three works in the series, Water [Su], Earth [Toprak], and Air [Hava], were published in 2012,
2015, and 2018. The last book, Fire [Ateş], is forthcoming. In her works, Uzuner focuses on
shamanic traditions, which evolved from the mythological traditions of Central Asia and
Siberia, specifically from the 11th-century Uighur document, Kutadgu Bilig [Wisdom of
Royal Glory]. Kutadgu Bilig, authored by Karahanlı Yusuf Has Hacib, was written to convey
an ideal vision of culture, politics, and the role of the ruler, along with the relationship
between individual and society as a whole to the ruler of Eastern Karahan, Tabgaç Uluğ
Buğra Kara Han Ebû Ali Hasan bin Süleyman Arslan (Hajib 1983). For Uzuner, the world
that the Kutadgu Bilig describes is a past that embraces the heroes of water and earth, air and
fire, such as Umay (goddess of fertility), Ülgen (creator), Gök Tengri (father of the sun), and
Su Ana (water mother), who represent the very essence of being as extensions of the cosmos
which we, caught in the web of modernity, can no longer evoke. Despite all the changes that
modernity has brought to the human imagination, Uzuner, in her work Water, argues that the
pull of the Earth and nature and myth is far stronger spiritually than any other force in the
universe, calling humanity to reclaim its own sense of being, the essence of our existence.
David Abram (1997), in “The Ecology of Magic,” argues that as “intermediaries between
society and earth, shamans ensure a proper flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape
to the human inhabitants but from the human community back to the local earth” (7).
Uzuner’s narrative is about a temporal and spatial journey led by a shaman, out of the world
of Kutadgu Bilig and the Turkic mythological past. Actually, Uzuner reinterprets the Kutadgu
Bilig and Turkic mythology as a guide to assert that this journey is a journey of the mind: a
journey from ignorance to awareness. The purpose of the journey is to mold one’s mind to
develop consciousness to find the truth in eco-wisdom for the future.
In the literature, Uzuner’s work has often been discussed in terms of the trajectories of
ecofeminism, linking feminist and environmental struggles. In this chapter, we argue that

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Buket Uzuner also strives to be an eco-shaman who will lead the reader into a maze of
spiritual associations, to take them on a journey to foster a new way of seeing the present, and
a new way of envisioning an alternative future, to save the Earth. She suggests that this
journey of the mind has its rewards: a new awareness of the depth of one’s own being close
to nature. This journey to new consciousness will redefine the individual’s place in the
universe, according to Uzuner. Yet, this journey cannot be achieved without gaining
alternative knowledge. Ultimately, Uzuner wants the reader to comprehend “Earth Ecologi-
cal Knowledge” within the context of eco-consciousness collectively. She seems to hope that
this collective awakening will lead to “eco-civilization,” the establishment of a civil society
formed in the mystic tradition of the Kutadgu Bilig and the mythological framework of the
Turkic past, but within present-day realities.
Environmental communications as a field concentrates on how information regarding the
environment originates, transfers and perpetuates images, understandings, cultures and policies
regarding the environment. A question for scholars is: does environmental awareness bring
environmental communication; or does environmental communication usher in environ-
mental awareness? The contentious debate on this topic is connected to understanding and
interpreting risk, the probability of harm to the environment and all the beings. Risk defines a
way to look at past and future, and as Ulrich Beck argued, risk is not knowing the risk (Beck
2007: 7). For the reader, understanding the past and the future of environmental problems to
conceptualize the environmental risk is pivotal to understanding Buket Uzuner’s novel Water.
Uzuner strives to convey the imminent risk surrounding the environment and the reader. She
wants to achieve environmental communication as an eco-shaman, an environmentally aware
guide to the reader’s journey into eco-consciousness. Throughout the pages of Water she
encourages the reader to see mounting evidence illuminating the path of eco-wisdom as we
follow the footsteps of the novel’s heroine, Umay.

Shamanistic variations and the world of the Kutadgu Bilig

Kutadgu Bilig was written as an epic poem of about 6500 lines. It is written in ancient Uighur
and was translated into Turkish in 1959. For the westernized Turkish reader, the Kutadgu
Bilig, meaning “wise knowledge that brings good fortune,” represents the Turkic past. When
it was written, in the 11th century, it was meant to be advice for the ruler, similar to
Machiavelli’s much later guide The Prince (2007). Kutadgu Bilig describes how to be a good
leader in a just society. The narrative of the poem is built around the tension among four
main characters—the king, the vizier, the sage and the mystic—and their competing positions
regarding politics, the ideal state, the just society and the terms of peaceful coexistence among
members of the society. Overall, the work as a whole is a guide to “civility” and the means to
establish a respectful and reverential society (Seker 2016: 37). While focusing on “real
politic,” the narrative also describes a Manichaean alternative in the mystical cosmos. In this
alternative world, the king and vizier represent the sun and the moon, and justice extends
from the harmony of the world. The didactic style of Kutadgu Bilig carries elements of Turkic
myths, as mentioned in the Orkhun Inscriptions. These earlier works, the Orkhun Inscriptions,
date back to the 8th century, and are carved in stone in Chinese and Orkhun-Yenisey script.
The stone monuments were raised in the Orkhun Valley of Mongolia to honor the golden
age of Turkic dominion in Asia, led by the brothers Kul Tigin and Bilge Khagan, two princes
who united the Turkic peoples of Asia. They were known as the founding fathers of early
Turkic political unity, coexistence and peace among Turkic people. Inspired by the teachings
of this previous era, Kutadgu Bilig also advocates respect and peaceful coexistence for the

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society’s well-being and longevity. For Uzuner, the well-being and longevity of society,
much as advocated in these centuries-old writings, depend on respect and peace, but not only
among the people but also with nature. Therefore, the well-being of the society is embedded
in the collective eco-consciousness and “Earth Ecological Knowledge,” defining the terms of
peaceful coexistence with nature, which set the foundations of the “eco-civilization.” The
question is whether the method of posing this model reveals Uzuner’s understanding of the
role and the influence of communication in environmental issues.
William Cronon, in his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1995), points out that the
imagination, community, and commitment are three crucial elements of the environmental
movement. The challenge is how to develop environmental awareness to assure the connec-
tion between these three parts, and how to perpetuate society’s commitment to the move-
ment to foster the intensity needed to strengthen the bind between them. Perhaps what is
needed is the sense of proportion, balance and harmony as guiding principles. Uzuner (2012)
believes that to foster such eco-politics, and to defy the grip of the “rational” world of
modernity, society needs ritual and magic, under the guidance of a seeker, a seer, a pathfinder:
a shaman. Uzuner says “the shaman was the World’s first environmentalist and organic healer”
(70). But, how does a shaman communicate?
Craffert (2008) observes that “shamanism encounters a worldwide distribution on all
continents” (197). Mihaly Hoppal (2012, 2016), who studied present-day shamans across
Northern Eurasia, Central Asia, and the Far East, points out that shamans are special in their
communities, acting as mediators between village and the world of spirits. Shamans are
considered “chosen” by their community. Their chief function is to transfer the inherited
knowledge of the past to the community members. Among Turkic peoples, particularly in
Siberia and Mongolia, the shaman is often a woman, an esteemed member of a community of
many related families. The shaman during the social ritual often meditates to journey to another
state of consciousness—she has the power to go into a trance. According to Hoppal, “it is this
very trance that legitimizes the whole ritual” (Hoppal 2012: 20; Hoppal 2016). Also, the
shaman has an important social function in that she is the healer in a small community, where
her advice has been given serious consideration as a spiritual protector. The shaman also has the
power to foresee the future—in the past it was common practice to ask the shaman to predict
the future. Also, Barbara Myerhoff (1976) describes a shaman as a “connecting figure,”
bridging several worlds for his people, traveling between this world, the under-
world, and the heavens. He transforms himself into an animal and talks with ghosts,
the dead, the deities, and the ancestors. He brings back knowledge from the shadow
realm, thus linking his people to the sprits and places, which were once mythically
accessible to all.
(VanPool 2002: 40)
A shaman travels beyond the commonplace to the extraordinary to bring the divine gifts of
wisdom and alternative knowledge. The journey requires the shaman to undergo metamor-
phoses to be protected in the supernatural realm. This alteration might take the form of a
totem animal, an icon of the spiritual god, or an object that spirits might mistake for a gift. A
shaman’s journey is never complete, for it has no beginning or end, but is rather an endless
cycle of memory.
Shamans, in historical or present Turkic settings, legitimate their leadership by the general
will of the public, by facilitating cultural symbols to generate a common language base, and
by claiming exceptional powers for their delivery. The cultural metaphors and the icono-
graphy define the cornerstones of a shaman’s message, while the will of the community

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legitimates the meaning and the significance. There is nothing particularly Turkic or Turkish
about the method of delivery, for it can include verbal references, songs and dances. The
shaman claims the leadership of the community at that given moment to generate collective
behavior. Environmental communication requires the shaman to communicate with environ-
mental signifiers, and their exceptional powers lie in the clarity of their delivery of action-
directed knowledge. Shamans protect the community by delivering often alternative knowl-
edge, directly confronting the conventional pragmatic vision.
Shamans are also advocates on behalf of their community against all things wicked and
foul, against “sorcerers, disease, malevolent sprits, and other threats. . .” (Charnela and Leed
1996: 131). Shamans draw new boundaries and formulate new languages, which enable the
connection between the sacred and the everyday, sometimes blurring the two, and sometimes
exaggerating the difference, therefore setting up the foundations of taboos. The creativity of
the shamanistic universe comes from the transformation that it demands from the everyday-
ness of imagination, community and commitment. The taboo here is the everyday-ness, the
ordinary and the readily visible. Sacred is an antithesis. In this modern, consumption-driven,
high-paced and violent world, the sacred is about balance, harmony and proportion. The
shaman’s journey has no end; rather the journey itself is the goal, and understanding the
sacred and the secret is integral to the journey. What facilitates the journey to the “unknown”
is communication by using icons and metaphors.
A shaman always sets herself apart, because the shaman is the seeing-eye, the wisdom
seeker, the guide of the journey, the protector of community, and the defender of the sacred.
The power of a shaman comes from the shaman’s knowledge and the shaman’s willful
ignorance. The knowledge that a shaman possesses, as well as the knowledge the shaman
rejects, is communicated by the shaman with words that constitute acts: a shaman travels with
words, molding imagination and defining passion regarding the sacred. Language and knowl-
edge, as well as the shaman’s access to the transformative universe, is the source of a shaman’s
power. The language becomes a key in defining, naming, and explaining an alternative reality, an
alternative past and future, an alternative universe and community, and an alternative sense of self
and the way to co-exist with the sacred (Charnela and Leed 1996: 133).
A shaman exists as an outsider. By being an outsider, the shaman is the defining member
of the community by being different, an extraordinary being, thus designating what is
ordinary, mundane and normal. This difference allows the shaman to confront the commu-
nity’s existing rules, norms, and conditions. David Abram, in his “Ecology of Magic,” points
out that a shaman, by being both a member of society and the “other,” maintains the state of
perpetual traveler and tries to establish a balanced and reciprocal relationship between human
society and a larger society of beings. Thus, a shaman represents the link between the natural
and socially constructed world, and the “extraordinary one.” This connection is meant to
maintain “continuous practice of ‘healing’ or balancing the community’s relations to the
surrounding land” (Abram 1997: 7). In this expanded universe, disease signals instability in the
web of relationships that is a threat to balance, harmony and proportion. Disease is the enemy
of respect and peaceful coexistence. Nature, in this relationship, is no longer a backdrop or
scenery, but becomes integral to how the world around us is reimagined. The supernatural, the
secret and the sacred is the “natural world.” It is an ecology of everything there is, where all
exist as equals with other beings. Therefore, a shaman, through communication with cultural
symbols, tries to convince society that “deeply mysterious powers and entities” are “us,” and
they demarcate our relationship with nature. If magic is “the ability or power to alter one’s
consciousness at will,” the magic that a shaman employs is about altering relationships between
“extraordinary” nature and “ordinary” human community. This connection is intended to

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persuade humans to “experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness
among many others” (Abram 1997: 8). Abram describes magic as “the experience of existing in
a world made up of multiple intelligences” (8). It is an alternative perception, and according to
Abram “modern humanity’s denial of awareness in nonhuman nature is borne not by any
conceptual or scientific rigor, but rather by an inability, or refusal, to fully perceive other
organisms” (10). Thus, such awareness is what enables the “extraordinary” and magic. Shamans
communicate this complex web of associations. Shamans regulate the complex of relationships
with extraordinary nature through magic, empathy, and a ritual reverence for the world around
us, to provide an alternative window to reality and an unconventional look at the future.
What enables a shaman is the community surrounding the shamanistic practice, made up
of three pillars: empathy/understanding, alternative knowledge, and new ways of connecting
past and future. What makes a novelist an eco-shaman is bringing them all together within
the context of the natural universe, and making the reader part of the extraordinary. These all
three culminate as the belief in alternative existence that allows shamans to mold the
relationships to all beings, the natural world as well as to the future. In a way, the temporal
metamorphosis is as much part of the ritual of the shaman as the spatial metamorphosis that
shapes the world around us. The past and the future are magical lands, the journey to which
enables power and inspiration and an alternative sense of being awakened to an awareness of
self and a sense of belonging. James Lovelock (2000) points out that in Gaia, we live in a
“world that is the breath and bones of our ancestors.” Past and ancestor worship means
receptiveness to nonhuman forms, and the acceptance of life and decay as parts of existence,
together enabling faith in the wisdom of the past, as a contrast to the banality of the modern
world (Abram 1997: 829). On the other hand, the future brings the possibility of bending the
normal of the present, to re-adjust possibilities by making alternative connections. Uzuner, as
an eco-shaman, tries in the pages of Water to bring all these components together, to reject
the present banality of the world, and to generate an alternative togetherness setting the
foundation of eco-civilization based on empathy and understanding of all beings, a mystical
past, an alternative common future, and the “Earth Ecological Knowledge.”

Uzuner’s Water [Su]

It is very hot in Istanbul, the humid air choking everyone. Uzuner’s novel, Water, begins on a
hot summer day in Istanbul at the police station of Kadıköy, a neighborhood on the Asian
side, as we are introduced to Defne Kaman’s family in the pages of the novel. Defne Kaman’s
grandmother, mother and sister are at the police station filing a missing person’s report for
Defne, who has not been seen for about 39 hours. She is a child of a family with secrets. But,
instead of solving every riddle and understanding the meaning of all the secrets, the reader is
encouraged to embrace them, for secrets are part of the cosmos that Uzuner invites us to
enter. The reader is encouraged to accept this “extraordinary” and “secret” world. In order to
appreciate the completeness of the universe, the reader needs to transcend the “ordinary” and
“mundane” and make peace with this extraordinary cosmos of extraordinary and magical
secrets. This is the first step to finding out that the fabric of the universe is made of
acceptance, respect, empathy and love. Uzuner advocates that acceptance, respect, empathy
and love together culminate in the rebirth of new consciousness, in which we all accept the
value of life in all its different forms and reality in all its different interpretations. In the pages
of Water, Uzuner argues that this is the road to eco-enlightenment, a path that leads society to
establish eco-civilization. In this challenging journey, the guides are Defne and her

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grandmother, Umay. Defne has vanished, because she entered a different realm of reality, and
the key to this alternative world has been possessed by Umay, her grandmother.
Three concentric narratives shape the novel. The first concentric chamber is defined by
the main story, delineating the flow of the novel, and is deceivingly simple. It begins with the
backdrop of the Kadıköy police station. The reader learns that the family’s last name
“Kaman” means “shaman” in old Turkish (see İnan 2015: 72), and the police sergeant
Ümit, who files Defne’s missing person report, surprisingly shares the family’s last name
“Kaman.” The family provides Defne’s picture, a likeness of a woman of 30, willowy and
delicate, average height, adorned with freckles and red hair. Defne is an independent
journalist who writes about neglected issues, such as the illegal medical trade, smuggling,
trafficking of women and children, and environmental problems—and therefore she is “one
of the few genuine, conscientious, investigative reporters left in this country.” It is no wonder
Defne was reported “lost” and “found” before, because she “disappears” often because of her
investigative reporting, such as the Black Sea villagers protesting the building and operation of
a hydroelectric dam “to protect their rivers, their water, their own lives and those of the
coming generations” (39). This time, it is suspected that Defne is busy with a case of violence
against woman. The policeman receives a report that recently Defne was seen on a city
ferryboat, but no one witnessed her getting off the ferry. Police detective Ümit gets more and
more involved with Defne’s case, interfering with his upcoming vacation to the countryside
to flee the “devilish heat” of the summer of Istanbul. In his endeavor to search for Defne,
Ümit finds a companion. Semahat is a complex woman who owns a secondhand bookstore in
the Kadıköy market. It is at this stage that three seemingly unrelated stories converge: the
complications of Semahat’s life as a single woman in a male-dominated world, the emergence
of a wounded dolphin in the Bosporus, and the unending story of Ümit’s longing for the love
of his life, Tasvir, from whom he has been separated for two years because of the religious
differences of their families. The book ends as the stories collide with Defne’s puzzling
resurfacing, together with the near escape of the wounded dolphin under sad and mysterious
circumstances, Semahat’s return to the bookstore in the Kadıköy bazaar, and the violence that
destroys Ümit and Tasvir.
The first chamber of the novel provides the context, but the second chamber offers the
content. The second chamber of the concentric narrative that Uzuner offers the reader is
about the sacred journey: Defne’s journey to become a shaman, and Ümit’s journey to follow
the footsteps of Defne. As the narrative unfolds, Uzuner makes it clear that Umay, the
grandmother, is Uzuner’s persona in the novel, while Ümit represents the novice reader.
Uzuner takes care to give names to the characters in the novel to designate their affiliation.
Umay is such a name. In ancient Turkic mythology, Umay, meaning “placenta and uterus,”
was considered a goddess, protector of women and children, and represented virginity and
fertility. In other words, she represents Gaia. Her last name “Bay-Ülgen” also represents god
of creation of earth, sky and all beings, claiming water, food, bountifulness and the richness of
the earth. Umay and Bay-Ülgen are related, and also related to “Ay Tanrı,” the deity
representing the Moon, the source of lunar powers. Umay’s older daughter, Ayten, meaning
“moon faced,” represents the shifting characteristics of the lunar cycle—light and dark. Defne
is a name akin to Daphne in Greek mythology, and it is the name of the nymph who turns
into a laurel tree to maintain her purity. It is no wonder that Uzuner, whose interest lies in
the conversions between human and non-human beings, gives this name to one of the central
heroes of this novel.
In the novel, Defne is staged as extraordinary, a heroine for all readers to admire and
emulate. But, she would be hard to imitate, because she is enigmatic. For example, her first

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appearance in the novel is brief and mysterious. She shows up in a crowded street to give a
piece of paper revealing coded words from the Kutadgu Bilig to Ümit, the police sergeant.
This is how Ümit’s journey to Defne’s universe begins as he tries to decipher the series of
notes in the pages of the old book, and Semahat, who has the old manuscripts and the
knowledge of how to interpret them, helps. This alternative reality is reflective of Defne’s
sense of being. The first note from Defne reads, “Oh, my hope, you are my own hope/Oh,
my hope, I won’t lose hope in you” (86). Defne calls out for Ümit, his name meaning
“hope” in Turkish, and others to follow her, but to what end? This puzzle has not been
revealed. The following notes from Defne are equally perplexing, such as: “If a pearl is never
taken from the sea/It might as well be stone;” “Not one of the creatures that flies, walks or
swims in water/Can be saved by your hand, oh one of formidable black temper” (140–41).
But, all in all, they are not intended to help Ümit find Defne, but rather to follow her in his
imagination. But Ümit is afraid that this journey might take him to dangerous places, and he
feels that Defne is in danger. Danger is usual for Defne, as her mother claims “Defne’s
imagination is out of control. . .” (144).
In the words of her family, Defne is a “misfit,” a rebel, an oddity. According to her
grandmother Umay Bayülgen, Defne is just simply different because she was born “with a
sixth sense,” which bestows her with “the talent and the insight to hear the right things at the
right place and the right time” (25). According to the grandmother, on the day Defne was
born, the beech tree in the garden, “the tree considered to carry the voices of all for
thousands of years,” and the tree that defines the split in the universe by standing between
ordinary and extraordinary in Turkic mythology, was struck by lightning. The grandmother
considers a beech tree “holy,” and the lightning strike was a sign of good luck (128). In
accordance with mythology, she associates “kayın,” beech tree, and “kadın,” woman, because
the beech tree has a nourishing milky substance, much like a woman (Çobanoğlu 2011: 246)
The grandmother contrasts Defne with her other granddaughter, Aysu, and her own
daughter, Ayten, both of whom are consumption oriented, living very much in the present
reality of greed. On the other hand, Defne seems to grow up under the tutelage of her
grandmother, living in the world of philosophy, imagination and empathy, shaped by her
grandmother’s shamanistic teachings. This was not without conflict in the family. Thinking
Defne’s imagination is “out of control,” Ayten, Defne’s sister, exclaims:
This misfit Defne is just plain weird! I’m telling you that there’s something really
strange about that girl. Do you know what she does? She sits down and cuts up
pieces of paper into hundreds of strips, you know, like those strips of paper to learn
reading and writing. And then she writes on every one of them “Nature is the
center of the Universe. And she is a woman! Anyone who doesn’t know this is
ignorant.”
(145)
Defne sees her grandmother, Umay, as “a shaman” and describes her as “wise, and she knew
herbs, poetry, healer, story teller and she was Mother Nature and has a sixth sense” (313).
Defne’s grandmother is a link in a chain of shamans who were part of the family for hundreds
of years. Umay remembers her own mother, now helping Defne to become shaman, perhaps
with the hope that Defne will carry the calling and the commitment to the next generation.
This commitment to nurture the alternative in Defne’s imagination is one of the pivotal
points to understand why Defne is different from ordinary people. For instance, when asked
to draw in her classes, her unusual sketches would always irritate her elementary school
teacher:

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None of my friends were human; they were more trustworthy and loveable. My
friends were half animal-half human and that’s how I drew my classmates so that my
imaginary friends wouldn’t feel bad, which really drove my teacher crazy.
(152)
Her belief in this world as well as in this complex universe, which allows her to become a
“better human being,” is very strong. Ümit feels that he needs to enter this universe through
her writings as “she seemed almost supernatural as an enchanted creature from a fairy tale”
(35), while he asks himself, “as someone sensitive to tragedies afflicting the modern age, how
could he resist dreaming of one day meeting a hero from a legend or an enchantress from a
fairy tale?” (35–6). And as Ümit reads Defne’s investigative reporting on the resistance of
Black Sea villagers to the hydroelectric power plant, he gets pulled into her universe. The
Black Sea villagers are protesting the hydroelectric plant because they want to protect
themselves and their future (39). Ümit also believes that Defne is an amazing journalist who
works on neglected issues, giving voice to the under-represented, dominated and violated.
Defne’s early education, which shaped her journey, is a complex one. Her pedagogical
experience was designed to teach her respect, peace and awareness of the world around her.
“Knowledge for Happiness,” a game that her grandmother Umay played with her grandmother
in the past, is one of the examples that Uzuner gives. The game has a single rule, which dictates
that the player keep a secret from people who would be unhappy if they knew that others
knew their secrets. Defne was allowed to share these secrets with Umay only, alongside her
imaginary companion, a famous Turkic fable teller, Dede Korkut. In reflection, Defne thinks
that this game was designed to protect her from others, who are short-sighted and narrow-
minded. Other than it being for the child’s protection, the game also taught Defne empathy,
along with accountability, respect and reflective self-awareness, and most importantly love.
Defne grew up thinking that “Nature is the center of the Universe. And she is a woman!”
(145). Her grandmother also taught her mythology and the importance of mythological
beings, from Erlik, in Turkish mythology, to the Swan Princess in Nordic mythology (146).
In contrast to Aysu, the “beautiful sister,” Defne grew up being proud of beauty that comes
with intelligence (151). Also, Defne was raised to embrace a range of emotion, including
melancholy, instead of pointless cheerfulness, meaningless happiness, and purposeless hope
(154). She remembers that she embraced her quality of being different from others, even
though she felt lonely and isolated from other children at times. According to her grand-
mother Umay, “everyone needs to be themselves,” advice that Defne took to heart, because
“that way you respect yourself and others” (158). She decided that
everyone was created as a unique person, everyone was different, but no one was
better than anyone else. A tree, a rabbit, a bird, an apple, a drop of water, a handful
of dust, a breath of air and every living being—they were all different and equally
important.
(158)
Defne later reflects about the importance of teachers in one’s life: “there is only one miracle
in life, and that is to find a good teacher at a young age” (158). Defne criticizes education that
is rigid, unimaginative, intolerant, arguing that this kind of education does not open
possibilities but sets up barriers in people’s lives. The miracle in her life was her grandmother,
Umay. The way Defne describes her, “she was a kam [shaman], a wizard, a sage, a seer, a
healer, a storyteller, she was common sense, she was Mother Nature, she was another eye and
she saved me” (158).

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Along with the account of the rich interaction between the grandmother and Defne, the
commentary from Uzuner enhances the flow of the novel, which is the third concentric chamber
for the reader to enter. The third chamber is the heart of the novel. These sections,
distinguished from others by being printed in italics, are written in the style of the Kutadgu
Bilig. In these sections, Uzuner offers her own viewpoint, without the help of any
intermediary character in the novel. These sections are written with a didactic voice,
elaborating on the finer points for the reader’s attention. In the rest of the novel, she
distinguishes herself by claiming the persona of Umay. She emphasizes that Umay, Defne’s
grandmother, whose name in Turkic mythology connotes universal mother and a healer that
protects nature, is a teacher and traveler like the novelist (Uzuner 2012: 38). This way, she
places her own voice among the continuum of history.
All symbols in Anatolian life today as well as those of our ancient Shamanistic
tradition, whose influences are still alive in all our rituals, can be traced to ancient
Turks who migrated from the Pacific to the Mediterranean 2000 years ago.
(39)
Within this context, Uzuner laments: “why do people in Turkey today take craftiness for
cleverness, a wallet for a consciousness, greed for pride?” (39). And here lies the conflict that
she emphasizes in the third concentric chamber: between present reality, made up of the
chaos, greed, profit, destruction and individualism of neoliberal society, and the alternative,
imaginary possibility of Turkic ideals of balance, harmony, and respect, augmented by
shamanistic empathy and eco-consciousness. This conflict is depicted in Uzuner’s exemplifi-
cation of rural life, and its sharp difference from the city: idyllic, calm and balanced country-
side, sheltered from the self-indulgence, decadence, ruin and disarray of the city. Throughout
the novel, Ümit desires to go to the countryside, and his inability to get out of the matrix of
the city is representative of this conflict. This conflict is also evident in the journey that
requires Umit to leap into an alternative understanding of his own existence in the alternative
universe. According to Uzuner, the shaman’s journey is about the beauty and complexity of
this alternative existence, the alternative altered universe, and the knowledge that it repre-
sents: it is about harmony, respect, love and empathy, in contrast to the daily “rat race” of the
city. It seems for Defne, this alternative universe is not far away, but here. If looked at
differently, Earth becomes a new, an alternative place.
Defne sees the Earth as a witness, even in its exploited and abused state. Earth is a witness
to the past as well as the future, and the source of all knowledge of understanding us and all
other life forms. Earth awareness is the beginning point of the cosmic vision leading to
enlightenment. Defne argues this awakening into eco-consciousness needs to develop within
the context of “secular humanism” (270). Uzuner asks readers to extend their imagination to
reach this alternative understanding, in the same way Umay asked Defne while she was
growing up. The section regarding the “Peach Pit” is a good example of this imaginary
journey into alternative experience. Uzuner talks, through Defne, about how each pit has the
potential to be a tree, such as each being has the potential to grow just like the peach tree
(273). Umay suggests that each person’s journey is somewhat different, because “every pit,
just like every person, has its own story” (273). Yet, she asks “how could such a unique fruit
that was both beautiful and delicious and whose seductive fragrance brought happiness to so
many have a poisonous center?” (274). And she remembers what Umay advised her to
consider: “everything was carrying its opposite inside, everything, all of us! Nothing was as it
seems” (274). This binary opposition is what sharply differentiates Defne from her sister, as
much as they also carry this contradiction within themselves. Even though they are “two

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similar fruits from the same tree,” they carry each other’s opposite, as Defne describes her
sister as “smart, tasteful and creative,” but with the capacity to be “an opportunist, . . . proud
and selfish,. . .” (265), and she points out that “I was, from the beginning, ‘inappropriate’ and
‘inadaptable’ to her value system and aesthetics” (265). Just like the sisters or the peach pit,
Uzuner suggests that the reader carries the opposite of herself or himself, perhaps tainted by
greed and individualistic ambitions, but the reader also has a kernel of empathy, respect and
love. The world of direct opposites fascinates Uzuner: the secrets of the past and future, in
contrast to the presumed clarity of the present, the mundane versus the extraordinary,
countryside and the city, this “world” in contrast to an alternative universe. She suggests
that the opposite is not an opposite, but half of a whole; and why live with just one half?
In the last section of the book, Uzuner talks directly with the reader, suggesting that the
end of the novel suggests the end of one journey, but the beginning of another. She argues
that “wisdom is madness” and “wisdom is the light, the brilliance that swirls in the palm of
the hand of the traveler at the end of a long journey, a traveler who has struggled with
courage and sincerity along his heart’s way” (375). Uzuner signals the reader that this is the
beginning of a journey, and the reader needs to decide whether or not this journey will be
part of their destiny. Uzuner also has a journey ahead of her as well, because no one can tell
these stories of her journeys but herself. It is clear that the journey that Uzuner suggests is
about developing the sense of being of the reader, according to shamanistic teachings. These
teachings advocate an alternative to the consumption-driven, monotonous and ordinary life
of everyday neoliberal capitalistic present to a path to future eco-consciousness based on
“Earth Ecological Knowledge”—just the opposite of consumption-driven, opportunistic self
in the neoliberal economy. Perhaps these two binaries complete the whole, but it is a half of
the universe that is worth living with!

The novelist as eco-shaman

Deep ecology, as a philosophical approach, has been celebrated for raising awareness of nature
and the interconnectedness of beings in the universe. As an eco-centric theoretical position,
deep ecology is meant to be critical of the anthropocentrism of the everyday capitalist life and
worldview. Yet, as an approach, it has been criticized for being far too individualistic, for as
an approach, it embraces the individual’s self-awareness and consciousness to alter behavior to
resist capitalistic, materialistic, dominating, violent existence. Uzuner, as an environmentalist
thinker and a novelist, is not opposed to deep ecology, but she is advocating more than what
classic deep ecology offers: collective eco-consciousness and the radical alteration of civiliza-
tion. Uzuner tries to persuade the reader that we are all members of a shamanistic society,
sacred with possibilities, capable of defining our future path. Kutadgu Bilig integrated into her
argument as a spiritual guide, without entering into the contextual discussion about how to
be a good leader in a just society. It provides an understanding into “civility” and the means
to establish a respectful and reverential society (Seker 2016: 37).
Throughout Water, Uzuner emphasizes three components which she feels dominate the
shaman’s role in society: first, shamans act as intermediaries, enabling connections; second,
shamans act as providers of alternative knowledge and understanding; third, shamans advocate
for balance and harmony to restore peaceful coexistence with nature.
Uzuner emphasizes that shamans are intermediaries and peacemakers of different realms,
and she seems attracted by how shamans guide the individual and society through the maze of
spiritual connections to facilitate a journey. She, as an eco-shaman and striving to be such an
intermediary, wants to take the reader on a journey. The journey defined in Water has no

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end, because it is about learning and understanding “Earth Ecological Knowledge” within the
context of gaining “eco-wisdom.” Her protagonist Defne is missing because she is traveling
away from the mundane and ordinary, to another, exceptional world, where she talks with
animals, to be with nature and the ancestors. Her metamorphosis is part of this process: “Long
live Defne the Dolphin!” (214). Defne’s transfiguration into a dolphin is not just physical, but
spiritual. This unworldliness is what Uzuner argues lies in the tale of the Prophet Yunus
(Jonah): he, who repented and was forgiven by God, was allowed to come back from the sea
to serve God to save all souls. According to the religious scripts, the atonement of Yunus
(Jonah) takes place in the belly of the giant fish. It is no coincidence that the Turkish word
for dolphin comes from Jonah. The dolphin is a central icon for Uzuner, representing
penitence and atonement. But, in the context of Uzuner’s novel Water, remorse stems from
the awareness of distance from nature, the goddess of all. When Umay expresses concern
about Defne’s disappearance from the present realm, she laments that “the human body was
not made to stay in the water for long periods of time” (237). She is alluding to Defne’s
conversion into a dolphin, meaning she can only be saved by coming back to shore to rescue
all souls. But for Umay, not only Defne, but also Ümit the police sergeant, and Semahat the
bookseller, are conduits. She tells Semahat, “you are the messenger Semahat. Your sergeant
friend is the vehicle” (239). Being a connecting rod is an important shamanistic function, in
this case being a point of transformation between society and nature. Uzuner, through her
character Umay, tries to convince others to become as such. While the story of Jonah is about
holding on to faith and hope in service to god, in Water, it becomes about relations to nature
and the future of humanity. At the conclusion of the book, Defne, seeing the future with
dolphin’s eyes, comes to the shore to lead humanity away from the destruction of nature, and
the ruination of our future.
The second interconnected function of a shaman is the presentation of alternative knowl-
edge to contrast with existing dogma. Uzuner reminds us that the world is suffering from
destruction, violence and greed, and she believes that humans need to face up to their
destructiveness and violence to confront the era of the Anthropocene. Issues such as extinction,
depicted by the dolphin, and pollution and resource depletion, represented by the protests
against the hydroelectric dam, are frequently presented in the novel. Another issue raised in the
novel is climate change, presented as the unusually hot summer, a “devilishly cruel” heat that
grips Istanbul throughout the novel and is the backdrop to everything:
It was July and Istanbul had surrendered herself unconditionally to the cruel reign of
an especially merciless summer. . . . The heat wreaked havoc on human emotion,
too. . . . This heat was more tyrannical than a dictator.
(15–16)
Along with the effects of climate change, Uzuner’s multi-layered plot structure converges
around a desire to foster balance and harmony to restore the peaceful coexistence with nature.
This is the third function of Uzuner’s trilogy. She longs for “a more truthful, useful, better”
life, one that is an alternative to our present materialistic, consumerist, alienating existence,
choked with media sensation. Rooted in the past, in the Turkic legends, this alternative
existence embraces harmony, peaceful coexistence, and nature, led by shamans and shama-
nistic leadership and teachings. Indeed, the two primary protagonists of the novel, Defne
Kaman and her grandmother Umay Bayülgen, represent a way toward this different
possibility. To reinforce these ideals, Uzuner intervenes in the flow of the story, and addresses
the reader directly throughout sections of the book with the icons and metaphors of
shamanistic teachings. In these sections of metanarrative, the readers are expected to unveil

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the message of the writer: that is, what guidance the shaman writer, as a mediator, is bringing
to our times. Thus, the writer as shaman, narrating a long past tradition, takes the reader on a
journey, claiming that at the journey’s end “we will never be the same.” The narrator reveals:
Oh good reader, grant me but a minute of your time. With all due respect, what I
wish to say is this: a person who has lived at least twenty-five years at any time in
the course of human history knows for certain that our world is a living hell and that
human beings can be their own greatest enemies. When you finish (the book), you
will never be the same. . . . [You] will achieve enlightenment.
(56)
Throughout the book, the journey is represented by water, since water also represents “the
passage of time” (99). Uzuner, in Water, in accordance with ancient Turkic cosmology, celebrates
water as the essence, the origin of all beings (98). “Water is the mother’s womb. Water is fertility”
(98). Water “has been seen as the cosmic element to end all.” Also, according to the mythology,
“after a worldwide tsunami, destroyed world rebirth in water to start anew” (quoted. in Yılmaz
2015: 103). Water is nature, for “water never dies” (69). “The Book of Water” that Uzuner
remarks upon in the novel defines why this novel, the first in a series of four, is named Water:
because water is the spirit of the universe. Defne writes in her “Book of Water” that Umay taught
her “the secrets of water,” and she understood that she is a “particle of water.” She relates that
when she understood that water circulates between the body, nature, and the world, she
understood “many other things,” including her own presence in the universe. In Uzuner’s
novel, water is the universe, thus, awareness of water becomes the beginning step toward eco-
consciousness. Sharing water, and keeping the water pure, is a collective action, and water then
becomes the foundation of eco-civilization. Uzuner presents herself as an eco-shaman because she
wants the reader to recognize the possibilities of the universe and wants to convince them to
move into this alternative realm by understanding, embracing and trusting “water.”
It is important to mention that shamanism is more of an academic discussion in Turkey
than it is in Turkic Central Asia and Siberia, because of historical circumstances leading to
suppression of Islam in the latter regions. Even though there are symbols of shamanistic rituals
existing in Turkish culture, the basic understanding dictates that they were informed in part
by the Ottoman or village past. Uzuner is not posing shamans or shamanistic inventory as part
of everyday life in Turkey. In fact, her proposal is that shamanism is a marginal issue, far from
the public’s mind: she is hoping that the exceptionality of her argument will capture the
readers’ imagination. What we are arguing here is how Uzuner, with the Kutadgu Bilig in one
hand, and environmental and social concerns in her heart, shoulders the task of posing as a
“path finder,” a guide to the journey into eco-consciousness. As a guide, Uzuner utilizes
shamanistic cultural icons and metaphors, and legitimizes their delivery with the Kutadgu Bilig,
to reorder the world around environmental and human needs. In order to achieve this, she
presents the reader with two undetailed futures: one, based on eco-civilization, and the other
apocalyptic. Scholars in the field of environmental communication have been discussing how
apocalyptic models have the power to generate public focus and motivation in collective
action. Indeed, fear combined with action in environmental movements has been used as a
motivator as well as a resource. Shamans perhaps have traditionally used fear of the
“unknown” to create focus in their communities, but in this case fear becomes a tool to
develop awareness of risk. Yet, this approach has its limits. As Ulrich Beck points out there is
always denial and apathy prior to transformative awareness, consciousness, and collective
action. Another problem, as Robert J. Brulle points out, is that the elite typically leads
communication regarding environmental issues. This type of communication has a potential

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to fail because it does not allow any form of civic engagement or collective knowledge-
finding or public dialogue. From this comes Uzuner’s dilemma: how can an eco-shaman
generate interest in eco-civilization without public dialogue or collective political discourse?
As for the narrator’s difficult task of “enlightening” the reader as an eco-shaman, this is
powerfully presented in the final page of the book. It is in the final chapter Uzuner claims
“for as you know already, there is no one else who can tell these stories but me,” promising
to continue in her tale on the element of Earth, and forthcoming volumes on Sky and Fire
(376). Uzuner, in the last chapter, reaches out to the reader in her own voice, not to offer a
farewell, but to meet with the reader’s heart and mind, just like a shaman after a ritual. Her
purpose is to convince the reader that “wisdom is the light, brilliance that swirls in the palm
of the hand of the traveler at the end of a long journey, a traveler who struggled with courage
and sincerity along his heart’s way” (375). She also advises the reader that if the world is
considered to be “sane,” then we should become “mad,” because “wisdom comes in
madness.” What the reader needs is to believe in the novelist as an eco-shaman, and travel
with her on a journey. Madness, it might seem, but the journey promises to lead to a future
world of eco-civilization: “Power to the people!” (39).

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Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Translated by Tim Parks, Penguin Classics, 2007.
Myerhoff, Barbara. Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians (Symbol, Myth and Ritual) 9th
edition. Cornell University Press, 1976.
Seker, Fatih M. “‘Kutadgu Bilig Aktüel Bir Metin Midir?’ (Is Kutadgu Bilig a Contemporary Text?).”
Yusuf Has Hacib’in Doğumunun 1000. Yılında Kutadgu. Bilig, (Kutadgu Bilig on the Anniversary of Yusuf
Has Hacib’s Birthday), Istanbul, Türkiye, 18–20 Kasım 2016, pp. 37–41.
Uzuner, Buket. The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kaman: Water. Translated by Clare Frost and Alexander
Dawe, Everest, 2012.
VanPool, Christine S. “Flight of the Shaman.” Archaeology 55.1 (2002): 40–3.
Yılmaz, Ayfer. “Buket Uzuner’in ‘Uyumsuz Defne Kaman’ın Maceraları: Su’ Adlı Romanı Hakkında Bazı
Tespitler (Buket Uzuner’s Misfit Defne Kaman’s Adventures: Some Discussions Regarding Su).” Asos
Journal Akademik Sosyal Araş tırmalar Dergisi 3.10 (2015): 101–22.

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 28
ENVIRONMENTALISM IN
THE REALM OF MALAYSIAN
NOVELS IN ENGLISH
Zainor Izat Zainal

Environmentalism in Malaysia
Environmentalism in Malaysia can be traced back to the British colonial administration (1824–
1957). Protest in the form of armed resistance by the locals whose livelihood in the forest was
threatened to unjust British laws that pertained to land rights and access was relatively
common then, though not many records are available. Tok Bahaman’s 1891–1895 rebellion
in Pahang exemplified these protests (Kathirithamby-Wells 2005: 128). Haji Abdul Rahman
from Terengganu, who represented 43 peasants who refused to bow down to the British
system of getting permits to plant hill paddy, contested the British notion of land use at the
Land Office (Mohideen 2000: 246). Discontent over land rights grew, which eventually
culminated in a Malay peasant uprising in Terengganu in 1928, led by To’ Janggut. However,
this resistance was quashed “swiftly and ruthlessly by British guns” (Idris 2000: 7).
Environmentalism during colonial times was crudely informed by scientific discovery and
botanical studies that were carried out throughout the Empire. Scientific discovery and
botanical studies were rooted in European Enlightenment values, which valorized the super-
iority of the rational human mind over non-rational matter, including nature. People and
nature in the colonies, therefore, were seen as “uncivilized” by the British Empire and in
need of being brought to order and rationality, named and labelled so as to enlighten the rest
of the world (Adams and Mulligan 2003: 3). Forest sustainability, however, became a major
concern throughout the British Empire because of hunting, commercial plantations, and
scientific research. To this end, conservation was seen as extremely crucial. The inauguration
of King George V National Park in 1939 (renamed as National Park in 1957), a forested area
that stretches over three states, Terengganu, Kelantan, and Pahang, reached the pinnacle of
conservation efforts carried out by Theodore Hubback, a British officer who was deeply
concerned about wildlife preservation and the survival of the Orang Asli (aborigines) in the
forests of Malaya (Kathirithamby-Wells 2005: 199). Hubback’s efforts were commendable but
not uncommon during colonial times. Coinciding with forest conservation measures carried
out throughout the British Empire, especially in Africa, India, and Burma, Hubback’s efforts
were premised on the philosophy of Empire at that time, which was “the concept that
protection and preservation of the biological realm were congruent with good governance

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and the enhancement of political power” (Kathirithamby-Wells 2005: 189). Indeed, con-
servation efforts such as Hubback’s were an important part of colonial ideology by the 19th
century, and had spread to become a global concern in the 20th century (Adams and Mulligan
2003: 1). This is evident from the creation of Kruger National Park in South Africa (1926),
Hailey National Park in India (1936), Kivu National Park in Congo (1937), as well as other
numerous conservation parks and sanctuaries throughout the world (Kathirithamby-Wells
2005: 211).
The oldest and largest environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) in Malaysia,
the Malaysian Nature Society (MNS), was established in 1940 by a group of British
expatriates committed to preserving the country’s natural heritage. With the publication of
Malayan Nature Journal Volume 1 in 1940, the MNS set out to be Malaysia’s premier
environmental NGO, promoting conservation and environmental education, tasks they have
continued to pursue until today. Decades of environmental work have made MNS the largest
environmental NGO in Malaysia, surviving from colonial times until now. Amongst its
greatest achievements are saving the Endau-Rompin Forest in the 1970s, preserving and
managing Kuala Selangor Nature Park in the 1980s, introducing School Nature Clubs in
schools in the 1990s, and gazetting1 the Royal Belum State Park in Perak in 2007 (Malaysian
Nature Society). NGOs working on environmental issues mushroomed from the 1970s
onwards. The Consumer Association of Penang (CAP) was established in 1970, WWF-
Malaysia was set up in 1972, and Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) was founded in 1977. These
NGOs have been acknowledged as the pioneers of the environmental movement in Malaysia,
which continued to grow in the 1980s and 1990s (Ramakrishna 2004: 116). To date, other than
MNS, CAP, WWF-Malaysia, and SAM, Malaysia has 14 registered MENGOs (Malaysian
Environmental NGOs) dealing specifically with the environment, such as the Environmental
Protection Society Malaysia (EPSM), EcoKnights, Borneo Resources Institute Malaysia
(BRIMAS), Sustainable Development Network Malaysia (SUSDEN), and Water Watch
Penang (WWP). MENGOs in Peninsular Malaysia are mostly concerned with resource con-
servation and quality of life issues, whereas MENGOs in East Malaysia are focused on the needs of
the forest and the indigenous people that inhabit it (Ramakrishna 118). These MENGOs differ
not only in their concerns but also in their approaches in influencing political and governmental
decisions related to the environment. Conducting and presenting research results, presenting
viewpoints, contacting government officials, and lobbying through the media are popular tactics
used by the MENGOs (Mohd and Lee 1999: 75). Broadly speaking, however, they share the
same aspirations of increasing environmental awareness, promoting activities that aid the pre-
servation of the environment, and encouraging and developing policies geared to sustainable
development (Ramakrishna 2004: 118).
MENGOs have been successful in some of their campaigns. CAP, SAM, and MNS have
managed to halt a few development projects that were deemed environmentally destructive,
such as the redevelopment of Penang Hill, the building of Tembeling Dam at Taman Negara,
and extensive logging at the Endau-Rompin forest, but failed miserably to lobby for the
termination of the Bakun and Selangor dam projects, the gazetting of Pulau Redang as a state
marine park, and many more unsustainable development projects that involved logging,
deforestation, and the building of road, bridge, and hill projects (Weiss 2005: 95). Many of
these MENGOs have the scientific knowledge, skills and expertise which they have some-
times utilized to cooperate with the government to draft environmental policies. Regional
and international support has also worked to these MENGOs’ advantage in addressing
environmental issues. However, Jeffrey Vincent and Rozali Mohamed Ali (2005), in their
book Managing Natural Wealth: Environment and Development in Malaysia, doubt the degree of

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the ability of these MENGOs to influence the pace and direction of sustainable development
and political outcomes in Malaysia (398). Ramakrishna also has the same opinion, arguing
that MENGOs generally have “inadequate power” and “a weak voice,” preferring non-
confrontational methods over aggressive ones (135). This is partially attributable to state-
imposed constraints (Ramakrishna 2004: 135). A major constraint related to this argument is
the Society Act (1966) and the Internal Security Act (1960) (replaced with Security Offences
(Special Measures) Act (2012) in April 2013), legislation that works in favor of the govern-
ment in implementing its development policies. The Society Act, for instance, requires every
club, organization, society, or political party to secure a license, thereby granting the
government the exclusive right to block or impede the formation of any organization which
it considers detrimental to the country, whereas the Internal Security Act gave the govern-
ment and the police absolute power to arrest and detain whoever they think is a threat to
national security, without trial.
Malaysia’s dynamic private business sector, which is the key economic growth driver and
carries out much of the economic activities in the country, including agriculture, mining, and
commerce, has also played a role in addressing environmental issues. Nowadays, more and
more companies and multinational corporations in this sector have included “green initia-
tives” in their corporate social responsibility, in line with governmental efforts in leading
green initiatives nationwide (Jeong 2010). To illustrate, DiGi, one of the leading telecommu-
nications providers, embarked on the “Mangrove-saving Project” in 2008 to help stop the
devastation of mangrove forests in Selangor (DiGi). Sime Darby, the Malaysian-based
diversified multinational involved in key growth sectors such as plantations, property,
motors, and industrial equipment, embarked on their three-year “Plant a Tree Program” in
2008 with the aim of planting 300,000 trees (Sime Darby Plantation).
Grassroots campaigns, usually organized by ordinary people fighting for a common
environmental cause, have also emerged in the past few decades. Their campaigns, though
successful and working in their favor, proved to be a long, difficult battle. The Bukit Merah
Action Committee, founded in 1984, is an example. The committee, which represented
about 10,000 residents of Bukit Merah, Perak, sued Asian Rare Earth Sdn. Bhd. (ARE), a
Japanese–Malaysian joint venture plant, in 1985 for its irresponsible dumping of radioactive
waste. Prior to this, numerous complaints were received from the community about their
failing health and increasing incidents of leukemia, infant deaths, congenital diseases, and lead
poisoning since the set-up of the plant in 1982 (Consumers’ Association of Penang). In 1992,
the people of Bukit Merah won their suit against ARE. The factory was ordered by the Ipoh
High Court to shut down within 14 days. This long battle was a feat, considering residents in
the community had to deal with health risks, countless false assurances by the government,
and the police force, which were quick to arrest them when they set out to protest
(Consumers’ Association of Penang). The Bukit Merah Action Committee set the precedent
in Malaysian legal history for being the first community to tirelessly fight over an environ-
mental issue in order to protect their health and environment from radioactive pollution.
Grassroots environmental movements in the past, especially in the 1980s, were seen
predominantly as racially-motivated, which was simply because an environmental issue usually
started off as an issue that affected a certain racial community, was fought for by that
community, and was later championed by racial-based political parties (Tan 2013). This,
according to Hezri, a prominent researcher in sustainable development and environmental
policy in Malaysia, is the outcome of racial-based politics, which has played a large role in
Malaysian politics for decades (Tan 2013). This, however, has changed. The sacking of then-
Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in 1998, followed by the formation of the Reformasi

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(reformation) movement, served as the catalyst for a civil society that is rooted in justice,
democratic reforms, and governance, rather than in race and state patronage (Bowie 2004:
197; Weiss and Hassan 2004: 12). As Loh (2009) has argued, in the 1990s, “new democratic
politics” has emerged, comprising new social organizations, NGOs, associations, and informal
groups, which have their own sets of leaders, goals, and agendas, which are not based on race
(xvi–xvii), or what Weiss and Hassan have termed as “contemporary Malaysian social move-
ments” (2004: 12).
For the past few years, Malaysia has witnessed countless protests and demonstrations
involving the establishment of environmentally destructive projects. Many have come
forward to question and challenge the state’s environmental decisions and implementations.
In 2011, what started off as a talk drawing fewer than 200 people in Kuantan quickly
garnered thousands of supporters “from a much wider spectrum of society” as they learned of
a rare earth processing plant project by Australia’s Lynas Corporation was being built in
Gebeng, Kuantan, Pahang and of the impending radiation exposure and its effects on health,
safety, and the environment (Gooch 2012). On September 30, 2012, several thousand people
gathered for a rally in Pengerang to protest against a massive RM60 billion petrochemical
project by Petronas (a Malaysian oil and gas company wholly owned by the government), set
to be the regional oil and gas hub as well as the home of 61,000 employees. Brought together
by the concern for sustainable development, this rally demanded that the mega project be
embarked upon responsibly with regards for the people (mainly fishermen and farmers) and
the environment affected by it (Rao 2018). These grassroots campaigns reflect the public’s
growing awareness of environmental issues and their rights for a safe and clean environment,
the power of expressing their views publicly and in urging business corporations and the
government to be more transparent and accountable to the people, as well as a shift from
racial-based politics to environmental-based politics.
The government responds to environmental degradation in many ways, one of which is
through legislation. There are currently 43 environment-related laws in Malaysia. Following
the Environmental Quality Act (EQA) in 1974, the government also set up the Department
of Environment (DOE) in 1975. In 1988, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
procedure was introduced. However, in his overview of the developments of environmental
law in Malaysia, law expert Azmi Sharom (2002) asserts that “the problem with environ-
mental law in Malaysia is not the lack of laws. Instead it is the lack of true political will to put
those laws to their full use” (889). Citing the controversial Bakun Dam Case in Sarawak,
which triggered a great hue and cry regarding the lack of transparency in its EIA, as an
example, Sharom contends that a more cohesive approach to environmental protection and
management is needed in Malaysia (889). This is particularly urgent, considering state-
approved environmentally-destructive projects such as the Bakun dam in Sarawak, the Lynas
Advanced Materials Plant in Kuantan and the Petronas oil and gas hub in Pengerang went
ahead despite protests and rallies.
Environmentalism in Malaysia has evolved as a social and political force. In this chapter, I
use a definition of “environmentalism” referring to concern about and action aimed at
protecting the environment. It is a social movement that involves actors (agencies) such as
the state, multilateral institutions, businesses, ENGOs and grassroots activists. I will be using
the term “environment” in the sense given by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee in his book
Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Borrow-
ing from Mukherjee (2010), the concept of environment is not only restricted to living and
non-living things, but it is also “inclusive of culture,” which inevitably entails economic,
political and historical matters (4). “Environment,” writes Mukherjee, “is the surroundings

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we find ourselves in, from ecosystem to biosphere, where humans and non-humans exist or
co-exist naturally; and these are inclusive of culture” (4). The term environment used in this
study is essentially different from “nature,” which I take to mean non-humans and which I
distinguish from environments constructed by humans.
State-imposed constraints may be the Achilles’ heel in the fight to ensure sustainability, but
this has not deterred the movement from developing. In the realm of Malaysian literature in
English, writers have written extensively about environmental activism—although little
attention has been given to this area in the local literary-critical practice. In this chapter, I
attempt to redress this dearth by examining and critiquing four contemporary Malaysian
novels in English: Keris Mas’s Jungle of Hope (2009), Yang-May Ooi’s The Flame Tree (1998),
K.S. Maniam’s Between Lives (2003), and Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change (2010). All of
these novels were originally written in English except for Jungle of Hope, which was first
published in Malay in 1986 as Rimba Harapan. The English-translated version that is used for
this study was published in 2009. With the exception of Yang-May Ooi and K.S. Maniam,
the writers’ readership is mainly confined to Malaysia and South East Asia. Yang-May Ooi
has a wider, international readership by virtue of having been published in the UK. K.S.
Maniam is widely known in postcolonial literary communities, mainly for addressing the lives
and problems of the colonial and post-colonial Indian Diaspora in Malaysia.
These novels are selected because of their alignment to the key phases in the history of
environmentalism in Malaysia. The first phase is during British rule (1824–1957). This phase
is what I would refer to as “hard times,” as the locals struggled against unjust laws that
threatened their livelihood and dependence on the forests. The second phase is the period
between 1970 and 1990. I would refer to this phase as the “growing awareness” phase, as
many environmental laws were introduced and numerous ENGOs were established during
this period and worked to promote environmental awareness, justice and sustainability.
Grassroots activism also emerged during this period. The third phase is the period between
1990 and 2000. This is when the “environmental movement” was born. This decade saw
massive degradation of the environment as well as the rise of civil society that became more
assertive and critical. The fourth phase is the period from 2000 onwards. I would refer to this
phase as the “marching forward” phase, as globalization and the Internet alike further
accelerate environmental awareness, cooperation and lobbying. This chapter analyzes the
environmental politics, past and present, found in the selected texts, and the solutions that
their works present to ensure sustainability. It yields a keen understanding of irresponsible
environmental degradation as well as illuminates agency and transformation.

“Hard Times”: Keris Mas’s Jungle of Hope

Jungle of Hope (henceforth, JOH), a historical novel, represents environmentalism during the
colonial times. Personal experiences growing up in rural Pahang and substantial research have
gone into the writing of this novel. The latter, according to Amin (2009), is the result of
Mas’s stint as Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka’s (The Institute of Malay Language and Literature)
Resident Writer in 1984–1985, though Mas asserts that the historical data he had used may
not be accurate (viii). The popularity of this novel throughout Malaysia was due in part to its
adoption as one of the compulsory texts for the teaching/learning of the English literature
component in secondary schools in Malaysia for the past decade.
In JOH, Mas delineates the human–environment interactions in the Malayan environment
in the 1920s–1930s. These relations are largely linked to political, economic, and cultural
domination. To accentuate the power of colonial capitalist enterprises, Mas broadens this

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domination to include the success of the colonial rulers and capitalists in manufacturing
consent among the Malays to embrace the capitalist tin-mining and plantation economy.
Zaidi, one of the main characters in JOH, and a score of other villagers who take up rubber
planting in Ketari, exemplify this consent. Even though Zaidi adopts this ideology, he does
not do so “blindly.” A self-made man, he makes sincere efforts to salvage the Malays’ land in
Ketari. Rather than let the villagers’ land be acquired by British and Chinese capitalists, he
buys the land and lets the villagers grow rubber trees on them without imposing any fees.
Zaidi’s effort is built upon a vision of social justice for the Ketari villagers and change in the
villagers’ practices and attitudes. Zaidi’s hard work, however, is undermined since it is hardly
able to stop the menace of mining from eating up the land in Ketari and the surrounding
areas. Nor is he able to stop the breakup of the Ketari people into two factions—one that
takes up rubber planting and the other that is displaced and has no choice but to flee to the
jungle. Environmentalism in JOH, as represented by Zaidi, involves embracing and giving
consent to the capitalist ideology, but this is done with a clear conscience of alleviating
displacement and landlessness among the Malays as well as spurring the Malays’ political and
economic autonomy to faster growth.
Zaidi’s empowerment, however, becomes a problem since the transformation that he
aspires to is crushed by the counter-hegemonic struggle of his brother, Pak Kia, and some
folks from the village who refuse to “work as coolies,” “clinging even more firmly to their
old way of life,” to “their original rice fields and village,” which they feel are their last bastion
(62–65). This form of resistance has typically been propagated in colonialist discourse,
resulting in Malays being accused of being indolent, lazy, and unproductive (Alatas 1977:
95). Such resistance, however, is grounded in the rural Malay culture, which has nurtured
non-capitalist relations of production. The new forces and relations of production that are
taking root in the land around him are radically different from the relations of production
nurtured by the pre-capitalist Malay culture. This brings Pak Kia into a conflict, and he
resolves this by resisting conformity. Pak Kia’s sullen resistance also represents the fragility of
environmentalism during colonial times. Environmentalism, to Pak Kia, includes significant
resistance to overt attempts to alter his livelihood, lifestyle and tradition. In the end, however,
his resistance proves to be futile, leaving him with no choice but to flee from Ketari and settle
in the jungle.
Plot-wise, JOH is directly related to colonial times. It offers a critical account of human
displacement brought about by colonial capitalist industrialization, which, to this day, has had
a bearing on some of the environmental issues faced by the nation. By focusing on the
protagonist’s struggles and resistance to the capitalistic development around him, Mas evokes
memories of the lost and forgotten environment, as well as imbibes in readers the important
cause of protecting the environment, mediated through a sense of place and tradition.

“Environmental Movement Was Born”: Yang-May Ooi’s The Flame Tree

Yang-May Ooi’s The Flame Tree (henceforth, TFT) is a novel set in Britain and Malaysia in
the 1990s. It revolves around the construction of Titiwangsa University, a complete town and
campus in the rainforest-covered hills of Malaysia, set to be the grandest, most visionary
project in Asia. TFT reconstructs many of the most significant things that occurred in
Malaysia in the 1990s: globalization, mega projects, national tragedies, and the propagation
of Asian values to delineate the politics of the environment in Malaysia. The futuristic
Titiwangsa University in TFT, for instance, represents the craze surrounding most mega
projects in the 1990s. A complete town and campus in the rainforest-covered hills, the

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Titiwangsa University project is located in the Titiwangsa mountain range, also known as the
Main Range, of Peninsular Malaysia. Ooi could not have picked a better setting for TFT as
the Titiwangsa Range is real, and forms the backbone of Peninsular Malaysia, extending for
about 500 kilometers from the Malaysia–Thai border to Negeri Sembilan. A biodiversity
hotspot, the Titiwangsa Range is covered with forests and is home to a great wealth of
endemic and endangered species. Many rivers of the peninsula have their headwaters in the
range, and a large population of Orang Asli also resides in the lower slopes of the Titiwangsa
Range. With so many ecological properties at stake, the proposed Titiwangsa University
town, located in the Titiwangsa Range, becomes a perfect site for power struggle.
On the one hand, there is Bill Jordan, owner of Jordan Cardale PLC, a construction and
property management firm in the UK, who bids for the construction of the new university
town in Malaysia. Luke, an environmental consultant hired by Dr. Chan, on the other hand,
is adamant to prove Jordan’s design of the new university town would be damaging to the
environment and the people of Kampung Tanah. Using his knowledge and expertise, Luke
tries to instil awareness in the people of Kampung Tanah of what is in store for them when
the proposed development project is approved. His awareness campaign, however, falls on
deaf ears as more and more people in Kampung Tanah are “bought over,” intimidated and
threatened by Jordan and his accomplice, Tan. Dr. Chan decides to leak part of Luke’s report
to the media in the hope that it will alert the authorities and subsequently make the
authorities consider Jordan’s proposed design and its environmental impact. Consequently,
Tan intensifies his intimidation by kidnapping Wong’s son and threatening Sarojaya and
Ibrahim, members of the Kampung Tanah Committee. Luke’s office in campus is also burnt
down, destroying the data he had gathered for Jordan’s proposed design. Dr. Chan also dies in
a car accident staged by Tan.
Because of the “publicity” by the media, Jordan’s proposed project receives its fair share of
criticism. Ooi demonstrates that capitalist hegemony over the Malaysian society is never
totally complete and that the degrees of consent (and dissent) vary. To silence dissent, Jordan
is forced to suppress these criticisms, especially those made by Luke, who holds the key to his
flawed design. Taking advantage of Luke’s “white” background (Luke is the offspring of a
British/American couple), Jordan launches a “smear campaign” against Luke, playing on the
locals’ dislike and distrust of outsiders, especially the whites. At a time when globalization is
often equated by Asian nations with Western political, social, and cultural hegemony, Jordan’s
“smear campaign” is geared to reinforce the cautious feelings the locals have towards any
foreign interference in local affairs. Since Luke is not a typical Malay, Chinese, or Indian
Malaysian, and given his foreign, mixed American and British parentage, the distrust and
dislike towards him become almost automatic. To a large extent, this distrust also plays a
major part in curtailing Luke’s efforts to stop Jordan’s destructive project as it gives the local
people and the authorities the impression that he is trying to meddle with things and events
that an outsider does not understand.
Luke and Dr. Chan fail miserably to stop the environmentally-damaging project. A year
after construction begins, the university tower that is being built collapses, causing a massive
landslide that causes massive environmental damage, adversely affecting tracts of forest and the
Kampung Tanah people (304). In Kampung Tanah’s case, Luke’s awareness campaign fails to
persuade the people to contest Jordan’s proposed project. Dr. Chan’s attempts to let the
public and the authorities know about the flaws of Jordan’s design is also easily countered,
backed by the ideology that Luke’s attempts are “interference” by those representing the First
World country or First World environmental movement, encroaching on the rights of
Malaysians to enjoy the benefits of progress. This ideology, coupled with the ideology of

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progress-and-development, which have been propagated by the state and internalized by the
rest of society for many decades, come in handy for Jordan to advance his interests. In TFT,
Ooi seems to necessitate the need to focus more on ideological rather than coercive
domination. To sum up, TFT represents the environmental politics during the 1990s, at a
time when civil society was only developing, constricting progress-and-development ideology
was rife, and globalization was treated with distrust and suspicion by Malaysian leaders and
authorities.
To date, critical reception of TFT has been lacking. This is probably because the novel
belongs to the thriller genre, which I suspect may not be a popular genre for readers, writers,
and critics in Malaysia. Nevertheless, concern for the environment is central to the novel and
had indeed informed Ooi’s novel. Ooi wrote TFT at a time when environmentally
destructive development projects became national tragedies and provoked public outcry in
Malaysia. The landslide-related Highland Towers collapse in 1993, the Genting Highland
landslide tragedy in 1995, and the North-South Highway landslide near Gua Tempurung in
1996, for instance, claimed many lives, caused a lot of damage to the environment, and the
public was in uproar after each tragedy. By engaging readers in the memory of vivid, relatable
national tragedies, Ooi speaks of the problems, failures and what needs to be done to sustain
the environment.

“Marching Forward”: K.S. Maniam’s Between Lives and Chuah Guat

Eng’s Days of Change
There are two novels written from 2000 onwards that seem to operate in tandem with the
“Marching Forward” phase, so in this section I will discuss these two novels: K.S. Maniam’s
Between Lives and Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change. K.S. Maniam’s Between Lives (hence-
forth, BL) is located imaginatively in colonial and contemporary Malaysia, probably in the late
1990s or early 2000s. Sellamma, an old, poor, rural woman, battles to keep her land from
being acquired and developed as a theme park. Sumitra, a young woman and a social worker,
is entrusted with the task of persuading Sellamma to give up her land. Maniam delineates the
human–environment interactions in the postcolonial Malaysian environment, foregrounding
his indictment of state control and domination while highlighting the problems of resistance
and empowerment. Both Sellamma and Sumitra exemplify resistance and empowerment, the
former using her knowledge and memory to resist the displacement from her land, whereas
the latter uses her skills and connections to help save the land from being grabbed by the
developer. In Sellamma’s case, resistance poses a problem as she is denied the right to live on
her land. Sumitra’s indifference towards Sellamma’s predicament in the beginning of the story
demonstrates the extent of the power of the state’s progress-and-development ideology.
Maniam probes into this ideological domination, pointing out the need to pay more attention
to ideological rather than coercive domination. Sellamma’s resistance, which is limited to the
private sphere, needs to be advanced, which is why Sumitra is given the role by Maniam to
extend it into the public sphere. Maniam underscores what happens when strongly-held
personal and cultural views come into conflict with those of the state. Through these power
relations in BL, Maniam also affirms the contradictory roles of the state, as the protector and
destroyer of the environment. The state’s complicity in making decisions and taking
subsequent actions to evict Sellamma from her land attest to these opposing roles.
Maniam also delineates the nuanced and dynamic image of the Internet as an arena for
resistance—an arena to protest and garner public support, away from the constricting “power
over” of the state. In semi-democratic Malaysia, the media and the state have a symbiotic

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relationship. Mainstream media are often controlled and owned by the state. Laws related to
the operation of media often give the state the power to censor or stop the transmission of
information that is deemed as going against state policies. This symbiosis naturally manifests in
pro-state press and broadcasting coverage, often sidelining alternative voices struggling to gain a
hearing. However, in the past few decades, the proliferation of new media in Malaysia has
provided a venue in which more basic political conflicts are waged. Alternative media and the
Internet have become the arena for those who want to be heard and need a less constrictive
democratic space. Maniam accentuates this political liberalization through Sumitra’s efforts to
raise society’s awareness of the injustice suffered by Sellamma. The Internet, Maniam elucidates,
provides greater freedom of expression and political participation and challenges the existing
power structures in ways that have been limited before. This measure may serve as “an example of
the countervailing implications of the globalisation process, where intensified market penetration
and appropriation of hitherto peripheral environments are accompanied by expanding commu-
nications networks and new political possibilities for resistance” (Hirsch and Warren 2002: 4).
Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change (henceforth, DOC) is set in Malaysia, spanning several
decades from colonial times to the early 2000s. It revolves around the life of Hafiz, a 55-year-
old self-made Malay man. When the story begins, Hafiz is suffering from amnesia. To trigger
his memory, Hafiz uses the I Ching, the Chinese “book of changes,” to recall his past. He
then remembers his battle with his friends against a major corporation bent on appropriating
his land at Ulu Banir, and his efforts to bring development to Kampong Basoh, a poverty-
stricken village in Banir Valley.
Chuah conveys her optimism towards solving environmental threats through resistance
and empowerment. The protesters lined up by Hafiz’s friend, Yew Chuan, are all educated,
urban citizens intent on raising public awareness and making the Banir Valley issue heard,
despite the daunting obstacles that await them. There are Dr. Mohini, a physician; Hector
Wong, a journalist attached to a regional newsmagazine based in Hong Kong; Faridah, a
psychologist; and Sundram, an engineer who works with the Waterworks Department and
also is a chairman of the Malaysian Nature Society’s local branch. These characters embody
empowerment, each with his or her expertise and knowledge, which are then played out
collectively in the public sphere to stop the proposed project.
When news regarding Hartindah’s plans for the Banir Valley receive coverage in the local
and regional media because of Hector’s role in drumming up media interest, the protest
group organized by Yew Chuan relentlessly lobbies for its case. Hector’s position as a
journalist attached to an external press service proves advantageous and liberating, considering
the media in Malaysia has either been co-opted or is controlled and constantly reinforces the
state’s ideology regarding development. Hector writes about how the development project is
merely a pretext to log the forest in Banir Valley, while
Sundram gave interviews, wrote letters to editors and even articles explaining the
importance of forest reserves and the ecological impact of the proposed theme park.
Faridah, the psychologist, did the same on the issue of the sociological and
psychological impact of displacing people from their ancestral homes.
(60)
The media exposure led to some conspiracy theories, which were “picked up by journalists
writing for regional newsmagazines, and they began to probe into Hartindah, its finances, and
its political connections” (61). Months of intense lobbying pays off when, a few months later,
Hartindah announces that the project is shelved until a thorough environmental impact
assessment has been made.

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 Zainor Izat Zainal

Yew Chuan’s group’s fight against Hartindah’s proposed project is a manifestation of

empowerment. After decades of progress in economy and education, Yew Chuan’s group is
convinced of their right to freedom of expression and the right to participate in issues that
concern the land threatened with social and environmental degradation. The community-
based group proves to be a formidable player in the controversial Banir Valley project,
challenging the moral character of the state and business corporations. Chuah suggests that if
the public sphere realizes its unique potential in resistance and empowerment, and works
together irrespective of ethnicity, race, or religion to shape the course of action and decisions
related to the land, it would be able to create more equitable relations and structures of
power. More equitable relations and structures of power here means the public would be able
to challenge the role of the state in managing the various aspects of environmental well-being,
and thus be able to pressure the state and its backed business corporations to modify or stop
practices that contribute to land and community degradation. Yew Chuan’s group’s struggle
to fight the ecological injustice brought by a development project implies that when an
environmental issue is fought for, per se, as in DOC, without exploiting communal or racial
politics that are central in contemporary Malaysian politics, it would help an environmental
issue to be resolved. The group’s civil society-based protest and lobbying reflects what Weiss
(2009) has noted as a “reasonably diverse and vibrant” civil society in Malaysia, which has
“expanded dramatically since the 1980s” (742).
Yew Chuan’s group’s resistance also serves as a significant political intervention that proves
“civil-society activism has succeeded in influencing state policies and political norms” in
Malaysia (Weiss 2005: 78). This, I believe, also reflects what capitalist modernization in
Malaysia has brought over the years, such as more equal access to education, occupations, and
wider access to information through the media, all of which play major roles in advancing
knowledge of environmental issues, as well as sensitivity to local environmental conflicts and
resistance. It also signifies what Bryant and Bailey (1997) have identified as “a new politics of
the environment in the Third World” (131). This “new politics of the environment” is
evoked by Chuah on two levels. On one level, the lobbying by Yew Chuan’s group
represents Malaysians’ revulsion to the manner in which the state and its cronies exercise
their power to realize environmentally-destructive projects, denying freedom of expression,
right to information, participation in decision-making, and right to justice—traits associated
with liberal democracy. At another level, these politics also signify the erosion of the state’s
hegemony and authoritarian rule over the society based on rapid economic development and
the rise of civil society in Malaysia, which has matured over the years.
It is hard to classify both novels into a specific, single genre. BL, for example, is a marriage
between historical and mythological genres. DOC, on the other hand, combines murder
mystery, family drama and magical realism. Even though both novels are made up of
divergent narrative strains, the overt indictment of the environmental issues resulting from
rapid development in Malaysia is dealt with thoroughly and intelligently, incorporating the
formidable influence of globalization forces and the Internet in accelerating environmental
awareness, cooperation and lobbying.

Conclusion
In conclusion, in the realm of Malaysian literature in English, writers have written about
environmental activism—thereby exposing the paradox of balancing ecological and human
considerations in a country where governance and decisions related to the land continue to be
defined and constrained by the dominance of the state, the capitalists, and the ideology

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propagated by both, and limited space is provided for civil society participation. The four
novels selected represent the different phases of the history of environmentalism in Malaysia.
JOH represents environmentalism during the colonial times. TFT represents the politics
involved when the environmental movement was born, whereas BL and DOC represent
environmental politics from 2000 onwards. What these works suggest is that environmental-
ism is at its best when it becomes a collective effort and is fought for in the public sphere.
These works express a deep-seated responsibility to environmentalism and sustainability
which can be mediated through a strong and resilient civil society. In a multiracial country
such as Malaysia, where English is not the national language, choosing to write in English
could be a politically-motivated choice, considering literature written or published in Malay,
the national language, is more susceptible to intense scrutiny by the state, thereby subjecting
writers to the immense possibility of being detained under repressive laws such as the Internal
Security Act (1960) (replaced with Security Offences (Special Measures) Act (2012) in April
2013). This legislation gave the government and the police absolute power to arrest and
detain whoever they think is too vocal in questioning state policies and decision-making,
without trial. Malaysian literature written in English, fortunately, often slips under the radar,
giving writers greater leeway to question, deliberate and interpret environmental change and
its impact on local communities. Although the four novels selected in this chapter may not
gain the national recognition they deserve, they have commendably demonstrated that they
can contribute to the discourse of nation-building as well as environmentalism, using English
that is invariably imbued with a sense of Malaysian “flavor”—communicating messages that
incorporate vivid, relatable, and compelling local environmental issues, needs, motivations
and values. Indeed, the four novels selected in this study are key players in documenting some
key moments in the history of environmentalism in Malaysia, making them indispensable in
the discourse of environmentalism.

Note
1 In the Malaysian context, when a piece of land is gazetted, it means that the land is reserved by the
state for the purpose of conserving it, and such act is published in official state gazettes.

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a Post-Colonial Era, edited by William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan, Earthscan Publications Ltd,
2003, pp. 1–15.
Alatas, Syed Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native. Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977.
Amin, Adibah. “Introduction.” Jungle of Hope. Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009, pp. vii–x.
Bowie, Alasdair. “Civil Society and Democratization in Malaysia.” Growth and Governance in Asia, edited
by Yoichiro Sato, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2004, pp. 193–202.
Bryant, Raymond L. and Sinead Bailey. Third World Political Ecology. Routledge, 1997.
Chuah,Guat Eng. Days of Change. Chuah Guat Eng, 2010.
Consumers’ Association of Penang. “Chronology of Events in Bukit Merah Asian Rare Earth Develop-
ment.” Consumers’ Association of Penang, www.cap.org.my (accessed 22 June 2016).
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July 2016).
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Hirsch, Philip and Carol Warren. The Politics of Environment in Southeast Asia: Resources and Resistance.
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Idris, S.M.M. “Foreword.” Tanahairku: Land Issues in Malaysia, edited by Consumers’ Association of
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Curzon, 2004.

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 29
ECOMEDIA NURTURE
JAPANESE ECOLOGICAL
IDENTITY
Keitaro Morita

Introduction

From nature writing to environmental literature to ecomedia

Nature writing is a genre of literature that originates in the United States of America, often credited
to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Both of them are associated
with Transcendentalism, which emerged in the U.S. in the early 19th century. The genre re-
emerged toward the end of the 20th century when environmental issues began to garner more
public attention than ever. Scholars have defined nature writing in various forms. I focus solely on
definitions from Japanese scholars of ecocriticism, or the critical analysis of nature writing.
Tsutomu Takahashi and Kenichi Takada (2000) characterize nature writing as “non-fiction
written in the first person to reflect on a relationship between nature and humans” (i–ii).1
Kenichi Noda (2001) describes nature writing as “writing about correspondence between nature
and humans” (249), while Shogo Ikuta (2004) says that nature writing is “linguistically represent-
ing action to bring the relationship between humans and nature to the foreground” (20). Masami
Yuki (2005) simply defines nature writing as “literature about nature” (47).
Environmental literature is a broader term in scope than nature writing and “encompasses
nonfiction nature writing, ecofiction, nature poetry, eco-drama, and various modes of oral
story-telling and rhetorical exhortation” (Slovic 2003: 30). As for my own definition, I would
also include environmental films, ecocinema,2 and nature-oriented TV programs, all of which
are bundled as ecomedia in this chapter. Numerous books and papers have been published that
analyze ecomedia from an ecocritical perspective. Examples from Western academia include the
books Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film edited by Paula Willoquet-
Maricondi (2010a), Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation
edited by Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä (2013), Ecocinema Theory and Practice edited by
Stephen Rust et al. (2013), and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
by Ursula K. Heise (2016),3 as well as Heise’s 2003 paper, which presents a “cinematic
ecocriticism” (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010a) of Steven Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park.
If we turn our eyes to analyses of Japanese ecomedia, Heise (2008) ecocritically explores
animated films by Hayao Miyazaki, including Kaze no Tani no Naushika [Warriors of the
Wind (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)], Tenkû no Shiro Rapyuta [Castle in the Sky], and

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 Keitaro Morita

Mononoke Hime [Princess Mononoke], as well as Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pompoko [Pom Poko]
by Isao Takahata.4 Kotaro Nakagaki (2007) conducts an ecocritical analysis of several Japanese
TV programs, including the monster Godzilla, the product and symbol of the nuke, while
Livia Monnet (2016) ecocritically analyzes the TV anime series Coppelion. The works
juxtaposed above, however, focus on cultural representations of nature and non-humans in
ecomedia and their potential impacts on the viewers’ ecological identities, rather than which
works of ecomedia indeed nurture such identities, which is the point of focus of this chapter.

Ecological identity and significant life experiences (SLE) research

The human ecologist and psychologist Richard Borden ought not to be overlooked in the
study of ecological identity. As early as the 1980s, he provided his initial insights into ecology
and identity. Mitchell Thomashow (1996) rightly points out that Borden proposed that
ecological awareness could influence and transform a person’s own identity—developing
ecological identity—and stated that:
[The] study of ecology leads to changes of identity and psychological perspective,
and can provide the foundations for an “ecological identity”—a reframing of a
person’s point of view which restructures values, reorganizes perceptions and alters
the individual’s self-directed, social, and environmentally directed actions.
(4)5
Building upon Borden’s development of the concept, Thomashow, in his 1996 epoch-making
monograph, Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist, defines ecological identity as an
identity with which people construe themselves in relation to the Earth and raise their self-awareness by
understanding nature. Indeed, several scholars have proposed alternative terms when defining an
ecological identity, including environmental identity (Clayton 2003; Clayton and Opotow 2003b),
ecological self (Merchant 1996; Zavestoski 2003), and environmental self (Cantrill 1992). Thomashow’s
proposition on ecological identity has influenced a number of environmental scholars, including the
environmental educator Valerie Grider Vickers (2003), who, in her dissertation on ecological
identity, defines the concept as “the relationship of intimacy and reciprocity between humans and
the Earth for mutual care” (110). In the anthology, Identity and the Natural Environment (2003a), co-
edited by the psychologists Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow, Volker Linneweber et al. (2003)
conceive of ecological identity as “how we see ourselves in relation to nature” (250), while Stephen
Zavestoski (2003) explains it as the “part of the self that allows individuals to anticipate the reactions
of the environment to their behavior” (299). I find that the most resonating definition of ecological
identity is the one by Thomashow, which I will employ herein.
Meanwhile, since around 1980 (Tanner 1980), a plethora of significant life experiences (SLE)
research papers has been published in the field of environmental education (e.g., Chawla 1998;
Furihata 2005; Furihata et al. 2006, 2007; N. Gough 1999; S. Gough 1999; Hiyane and Hatanaka
2001; Okada et al. 2008; Palmer and Suggate 1996, 1998; Palmer et al. 1998). The SLE studies,
most of which are quantitative, examine significant ecological experiences in the lives of people,
mainly environmental specialists, that influence sensibility for the natural environment and lead to
the construction of ecological identity.6 In Japan, the first research of this kind was the 2005 study
by the environmental education scholar Shinichi Furihata (see also Furihata et al. 2006, 20077),
which focuses on 188 executive officers of environmental education organizations in Japan. The
following ten SLE categories were extracted from the returned questionnaires implemented in the
study (in order of the frequency): nature experience, lost sense of nature, family, books/media,
social activity, school, work, friends, others, and travel.

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 Ecomedia nurture Japanese ecological identity

Furihata’s work is a milestone in that it is one of the earliest SLE research projects conducted in
Japan. At the same time, it does have several limitations: First, being questionnaire-based research, it
fails to rigorously explore the participants’ responses with the limited space of only three answer
sheets provided; second, it fails to fully apply the qualitative method because of the view that it is
merely a method to extract a hypothesis, not produce a certain outcome, a conclusion which I argue
against;8 and last, a third party could theoretically fill out the questionnaire.

Purpose of this chapter

In my 2010 dissertation research, I was able to qualitatively delve deep into the significant
ecological life experiences of 26 research participants of an environmental NGO (non-
governmental organization) active in Japan by interviewing and having them reflect on their
personal ecological life experiences. An analysis of the interviews uncovered that nature
experience, lost sense of nature, family, books/media, school, ecological social events, and the shadow of
America9 were seminal in establishing the participants’ ecological identities. The former five
factors overlap with the outcome of Furihata’s SLE research, while the latter two have
emerged through the lens of my research. Figure 29.1 highlights all seven factors.
One of the seven factors identified is “books/media,”10 and in this chapter I will shed light
on the “media” element, or more precisely ecomedia. To reiterate, the objective is to
document the analysis of the kinds of ecomedia that work to nurture participants’ ecological
identities, in contrast to other works and papers which focus on the cultural representations of
non-humans in such media and the potential impacts on the viewers’ ecological identities.
Before I detail the core analysis, it is worth taking a brief look at the research method.

Figure 29.1 The seven factors that have contributed to the development of the research participants’
ecological identities

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 Keitaro Morita

Research method
In the research I conducted, I interviewed, in Japanese, 29 staff members of the subject
NGO as research participants. As employees of an NGO directly involved in environment-
alism, I assumed that they possessed ecological identities, based on past findings (Clayton
2003; Thomashow 1996; Zavestoski 2003). In regard to the demographics of the partici-
pants, the age cohorts of the participants are: 20s (2), 30s (13), 40s (9), and 50s (4), with
one interviewee declining to disclose their age. The ratio of men to women is 10:19.
Twelve of the participants are single, 13 are married, three divorced, while one participant
declined to provide a response. Eight participants have children while 20 of them do not
and one declined to answer. Twenty-three are full-time employees, while five are part-time
employees and one did not provide their employment status. The average tenure of the 28
participants who provided a response is approximately 9.5 years; one declined to answer.
Two participants graduated from junior college, 16 from university, 10 from graduate
school, and one participant declined to respond. Twenty-five participants agreed to be
recorded during the interviews, while four declined. Afterward, I concluded that the
interviews revealed 26 of the 29 interviewees possessed ecological identities as defined in
the section “Ecological identity and significant life experiences (SLE) research,” while the
remaining three were identified as not possessing ecological identities and working for the
NGO for non-ecological reasons.
Data were collected from April to October 2009 by means of semi-structured interviews. Semi-
structured interviews are often employed in qualitative research, where predetermined questions are
used for guiding the interview. The questions posted to the participants are as follows:
Question 1: (Demographics)
Question 2: What do you currently do in your work?
Question 3: What is the best part of your work?
Question 4: Why did you choose to work for this NGO?
Question 5: What comes to your mind when hearing the term environmental issue?
Question 6: What made you become interested in environmental issues?
Question 7: When do you feel that environmental destruction is occurring?
Question 8: How do you think you can address environmental issues?
Question 9: What do you personally do in order to address environmental issues?
Question 10: Some people say that “women are more environmentally-friendly than
men”; what do you think about this statement?
Question 11: If there is anything you’d like to add, please let me know.
For data analysis, I adopted the inductive approach in line with that of John W. Creswell’s
(2009) book, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. His
proposed process is: (a) collect raw data, (b) organize and prepare data for analysis, (c) read
through all data, (d) code the data, (e) generate themes, (f) interrelate the themes, and (g) interpret
the meaning of the themes. Using this approach, I conducted an analysis of the participants’
narratives revolved around ecomedia, the results of which are presented in the next section.

Analysis: ecomedia nurture Japanese ecological identity

An outcome of analysis of the interview narratives indicates that five participants referred to
ecomedia as a trigger for their ecological identities to have been nurtured. One such

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 Ecomedia nurture Japanese ecological identity

participant is Ms. Higashi. In response to Question 9, she recounted the following story
around how the news reports of the Gulf War stirred her emotions:11
MS. HIGASHI: //Back then, the Gulf War was going on, and when I saw oil-soaked water birds
or something like that in the images reported, I felt a strong, very strong emotion, the
emotion like how unacceptable it is that innocent animals are killed because of human
beings!

Her experience does not come as a surprise, as “the mass media are widely recognized as having a
large impact on . . . public attitude and behaviors” (Leiserowitz 2004: 25). In particular, television is
said to be “a major influence on people’s knowledge and attitudes as it can carry dramatic images of
disasters into the home” (Palmer and Suggate “Influences and Experiences” 120). Indeed, a group
of scholars conducted an evaluation of the effects of a TV campaign to prompt petrol conservation
in three cities in New South Wales, Australia (Syme et al. 1987). Intensive four-week TV
campaigns were waged in two of the three cities. The result shows that the pro-petrol conservation
TV campaigns, regardless of theme, had small but statistically significant effects on the approxi-
mately 400 randomly selected respondents. It substantiates the power and impact of TV images.
Similarly, in the case of Ms. Higashi, she had been influenced by the images reported supposedly on
TV (as oil-soaked bird images were repeatedly aired at that time), which developed her ecological
identity. She explained that this experience had eventually motivated her to join the subject NGO
as a supporting member first, later going on to become a full-time employee.
Ms. Oe, who spent her early elementary school years in London, would watch the TV drama
Tarzan while living there. As is widely known, Tarzan is a fictional character created by Edgar
Rice Burroughs in his novel Tarzan of the Apes, who is raised by an ape in the African jungle.
Responding to Question 6, Ms. Oe mentioned that the drama served as a trigger for her
ecological identity to grow:

MS. OE: In my childhood, the TV drama Tarzan was on air. I really loved Tarzan, who kept
various animals at his side, communicated with them, and sometimes fought against human
intruders hand-in-hand with the animals, which was exactly my ideal figure (laughter)
when I was small. So back then, I decided to become Tarzan when I grew up, seriously
(laughter). So, during my early elementary school years, I was thinking of living with
various animals in a jungle when I grew up. Then, over the course of time, probably when
I was in junior high school or a higher grade at elementary school, I became interested in
news reports and for the first time, watched a news report on ongoing deforestation and
because of that, animals were being deprived of their habitats, which made me feel that the
place I’d dreamt about was being destroyed, and this was how I got interested [in
environmental issues], I think.

David Abram (1996) argues that more-than-human nature is often encountered through
television. This thesis is true in the case of Ms. Oe, where she encountered through the eco-
TV-drama Tarzan animals and the jungle, and it is this media exposure that nurtured her
ecological identity. Furthermore, the TV news reports around deforestation that she saw also
helped her ecological identity to grow, in a way similar to Ms. Higashi’s experience.
By the same token, during Question 7, Ms. Shigeyama also revealed that her ecological
identity was influenced by TV images:

INTERVIEWER: So,//when do you feel that environmental destruction is occurring?

355
 Keitaro Morita

MS. SHIGEYAMA: Public works.

INTERVIEWER: Public works. . .
MS. SHIGEYAMA: Public works, and also conflicts? Conflicts are bigger than public works in
terms of size, I think.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel so when you see them [conflicts] on TV?
MS. SHIGEYAMA: Yes.

For Ms. Shigeyama, televised images of environmental destruction had an impact on her
ecological identity, having evoked her concern for the environment. That conflict can cause
environmental destruction is not difficult to imagine, and vice versa, environmental destruc-
tion can cause conflict, as observed in the Niger Delta (Akpan and Hiebert 2016). In the case
of Ms. Shigeyama, she appears to be referring more to the former.
As illustrated in the section “From nature writing to environmental literature to
ecomedia,” ecomedia include not only TV programs but also environmental films and
ecocinema. Indeed, according to a global online survey conducted in April 2007 by the
Environmental Change Institute of the University of Oxford together with Nielsen, a
global measurement and data analytics company, which polled 26,486 internet users across
47 countries, 66 percent of the viewers who self-identified as having watched the
ecocinema film An Inconvenient Truth responded that it had changed their mind regarding
global warming, and 89 percent responded that seeing it made them more aware of the
issue, while 74 percent of the viewers stated that they had changed some of their habits as a
result of their viewing. This suggests the power and effect of ecocinema to change not only
the viewers’ awareness but also their habits and behaviors. The same outcome is observed
in findings from a representative survey (Leiserowitz 2004) which targeted 529 adult
Americans who either watched or did not watch the ecocinema film The Day After
Tomorrow. The results of the comparative analysis between “watchers” and “nonwatchers”
demonstrate that the ecocinema film had a considerable influence on the watchers’ risk
perception, attitudes, and behaviors.12, 13
This is also true of another participant, Mr. Niwano, who spoke about a movie that had
changed his awareness and behaviors and eventually directed him toward engaging in
environmentalism. In reply to Question 6, he stated:

MR. NIWANO: //Around the time when I was in elementary school, I guess,//I was most
influenced by the movie called Born Free.//Anyway, Born Free most influenced me, I think.
Have you seen Born Free?
INTERVIEWER: No, I haven’t.
MR. NIWANO: I see.//In short, there’s this game warden in Kenya, Africa, and the game warden
eliminated a lion because the lion had sometimes come down to the village. Then, three
whelps came out from a bush, two of which were brought to a zoo and one of which was
loved by the warden and named Elsa, and the story is about raising Elsa and bringing her
back to nature. The final message is “humans should not lay their hands on wild creatures
without a reason.” So, around that time, I thought I wanted to do a job like the game
warden in Kenya, Africa. So, when I was in junior high, I wrote a letter to the Embassy of
Kenya, saying, “I want to do such a job.”

It is said that cinema is able to reframe perception (Rust and Monani 2013), bringing us
closest to the dynamism of the world outside the cinema (Ivakhiv 2013), and evoking in
people an interest in environmental issues (Fujimura 1992). These elements would appear to

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apply to Mr. Niwano’s experience, given that Born Free reframed his perception, brought him
closest to the dynamism of the world outside the cinema, and nurtured in him an interest in
environmental issues, thus developing his ecological identity.
Intriguingly, the same film was referenced by Mr. Arakawa, too, during the interview. It
turned out that the movie also motivated Mr. Arakawa to take part in environmentalism. In
response to Question 4, he presented the following narrative:

MR. ARAKAWA: I got interested [in environmental issues] when I saw Born Free as well [as Mr.
Niwano ]. It’s, really, a story in Africa, and, in short, a story about fighting for animals in
14

Africa and against poachers. That’s all.//I’ve been keeping a picture I drew when I was in
the sixth grade (laughter) with me holding a gun to fight against poachers (laughter).
INTERVIEWER: Interesting.
MR. ARAKAWA: So, since that time, I’ve been interested [in environmental issues]. Even when I
was in junior high, high school, and college, I was always interested.

By virtue of being re-presentations of the “real” world, films are a type of virtual
environment that at the same time model for us ways of perceiving and engaging
with material and organic environments. From this standpoint, as a specific type of
environmentally oriented cinema, ecocinema can offer us alternative models for
how to represent and engage with the natural world.
(Willoquet-Maricondi 2010b: 44)
This discourse evidently applies to Mr. Niwano and Mr. Arakawa, as the ecocinema film Born
Free undoubtedly offered them an alternative model for how to engage with the natural
environment and hence directed them toward environmentalism.15
Up to this point, we have witnessed narratives by research participants whose ecological
identities have been nurtured through ecomedia. At this juncture, I would like to present a
narrative by Ms. Higashi, who contrastingly shuns things related to her environmental work,
such as eco-TV-programs, in her private life. It is worth noting her reply to Question 11 here:

MS. HIGASHI: I myself, personally, think it is not good that I don’t want to watch such eco-TV-
programs [in my private time].
INTERVIEWER: I see.
MS. HIGASHI: Down inside, I feel I’m obliged to collect information by being interested in them
in daily life//I used to love such programs. I never failed to watch them and read [relevant]
books, too. But now, in my private time, I want to do something completely unrelated to
the environment. This tells me down inside, “Oh, this is not good.” Among the staff here
[at the NGO], there’re really many who are very [environmentally] active even in their
private time. So, I feel, “Oh, I guess I can’t be like this” (laughter). But on the other hand, I
think like, “But, it can’t be helped” (laughter).

As Ms. Higashi used to like to watch eco-TV-programs, it appears that they, to a certain
extent, contributed to the nurturing of her ecological identity. However, she has not
continued to do so after her ecological identity was established, and that seems to be
attributable to “fatigue” from her work and/or too much exposure to the topic of the
environment in her work. Zavestoski suggests the significance of not only constructing but
also maintaining an ecological identity, and Ms. Higashi might maintain her ecological
identity in other ways than watching eco-TV-programs or only through work.

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 Keitaro Morita

Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated through an analysis of interviews with staff of an NGO in
Japan that ecomedia have helped some of the research participants construe themselves in
relation to the Earth and raise their self-awareness by understanding nature, shaping and
nurturing their ecological identities. Within the presented qualitative study, the ecomedia that
have been identified as having had an impact include: images reported around the Gulf War,
the TV drama Tarzan, news reports on deforestation, TV images on conflicts, and the
ecocinema film Born Free.
Due to limitations in scope, the research conducted focuses on local knowledge (Geertz
1983), examining the topic at one specific Japanese environmental NGO and exploring how
Japanese individuals inform their ecological identities. Therefore, it is envisaged that several
comparative studies would be a fruitful endeavor, including conducting the same study with
individuals who are not interested in environmentalism, as well as a study examining the
ecological identities of employees who work within other NGOs based not only in Japan but
also in other countries around the world for a comparative approach.
Willoquet-Maricondi says,
Ecocinema overtly strives to inspire personal and political action on the part of
viewers, stimulating our thinking so as to bring about concrete changes in the
choices we make, daily and in the long run, as individuals and as societies, locally
and globally.
(2010b: 45)
And I would argue that this is applicable to ecomedia in general. Indeed, the present research
shows us that ecomedia can in actuality “inspire personal and political action on the part of
viewers” and inform “changes in the choices” they make.
In closing, we might want to be reminded of Ms. Oe again, who in response to Question 7
expressed how powerfully ecomedia reach out to people and can nurture their ecological
identities:

MS. OE: //When I’m exposed to the information I indirectly obtain through media, for
example, a TV special program featuring forests on the Sumatra Island being cut and the
deforestation forcing orangutans from their habitats, I feel it [that environmental destruc-
tion is occurring]//When images or something like that of a problem poignantly appeal to
me, very indirectly though,//[i]t doesn’t feel like someone else’s problem and so, the
power of the media is surprisingly huge, I guess.

I cannot come up with any more resonant way to conclude this chapter than this discourse.

Notes
Special thanks go to Dr. Yaqoub BouAynaya, Mr. William Paul Baptist, and Ms. Jessica Smarsh
Hisamoto, who kindly provided astute comments on a draft of this chapter.
1 All citations from literature and interviews in Japanese in this chapter are translated into English by
the author.
2 Environmental films and ecocinema are not considered synonymous. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi
(2010b) makes a clear distinction between the two kinds. She describes the former as the cinema
that “affirms rather than challenges the culture’s fundamental anthropocentric ethos” (47) and the
latter as having “consciousness-raising and activist intentions, as well as responsibility to heighten
awareness about contemporary issues and practices affecting planetary health” (45) and striving to

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“inspire personal and political action on the part of viewers, stimulating our thinking so as to bring
about concrete changes in the choices we make, daily and in the long run, as individuals and as
societies, locally and globally” (45).
3 In this book, Heise (2016), focusing on species and their losses, states that “growing awareness of
species loss has translated into a profusion of popular-scientific books, travel writing, novels, poems,
films, documentaries, photographs, paintings, murals, musical compositions, and websites” (32), the
genres which are categorized as environmental literature. Still, she pays heed to how in environ-
mental literature the environmentalist idea of nature’s decline is presented, as well as how the stories
of communities and societies are told, concentrating on the authors’ side, in contrast to the focus of
this chapter on how such literature impacts the viewers’ ecological identities.
4 Regarding this ecocritical exploration by Heise, Yuko Nakamura (2014) writes: “[M]anga comics
and animation are no longer received as subcultural but as a genre of arts and literature and have
become the media that enable both thoughts and discussions and aesthetic expressions around
environmental issues” (317).
5 Borden’s original paper is identified in Thomashow’s book but has not been obtained by the author
despite attempts.
6 To the best of my knowledge, there are four seemingly qualitative studies in SLE research (all self-
proclaimed); however, they are insignificant as a qualitative study here because they either provide no
narratives from the participants (Hiyane and Hatanaka 2001; Okada et al. 2008) or use written autobio-
graphical accounts in place of oral interview narratives (Palmer and Suggate 1998; Palmer et al. 1998).
7 These two papers insert the results of the interviews with 12 research participants among the 188
participants; yet they cannot be regarded as a qualitative study because the interviews are summar-
ized and condensed to several sentences; furthermore, they are positioned to complement the
quantitative SLE research in limited space.
8 Chawla (1998) maintains that SLE research is essentially qualitative provided that qualitative research
focuses on “the emotional and interpretive side of human experience” (384); however, her
discussion is contentious in consideration of the fact that most of the SLE-related papers conduct
statistical calculation, including simple counting of the number of responses, and fail to present
interview narratives as they are, even though some such papers claim that they conducted
autographical, qualitative research (Hiyane and Hatanaka 2001; Okada et al. 2008; Palmer and
Suggate 1998; Palmer et al. 1998; see also N. Gough 1999; S. Gough 1999).
9 The shadow of America refers to the fact that the U.S. military is involved in part in environmental
destruction in Japan, which led to the development of the ecological identities of some staff
members of the subject NGO. The naming is borrowed from the literary critic Norihiro Kato’s
(2009) book, Amerika no Kage [The Shadow of America]. For more details, see the author’s 2011 paper.
10 The author’s 2012 paper addresses what books cultivated research participants’ ecological identities.
11 Permissions were obtained from the research participants for this specific chapter to allow the author
to use their narratives. All their names here are pseudonyms in order to protect their privacy. As to
transcript convention, two slash lines (//) refer to an omission of a word or words.
12 In this instance, one is reminded of the KAP (knowledge, attitude, and practice) model used in the
international healthcare world that suggests that knowledge begets attitude begets practice.
13 Of note is another survey (Balmford et al. 2004) on the influence of The Day After Tomorrow that was
conducted in England in June and July 2004 on 200 subjects who watched the ecocinema film. The
results conclude that the exaggerated illustration of the potential effects of climate change raised public
concern but in reality, reduced public understanding of the issue, an example of which includes less
realistic expectations around specific effects of climate change predicted for the U.K. by 2100.
14 Mr. Arakawa knew that Born Free piqued Mr. Niwano’s interest in environmental issues.
15 If it is true that there are cognitive, emotional, and affective eco-aesthetic aspects in ecocinema
(Ingram 2013), my future task would be to figure out which aspect(s) of Born Free has developed
Mr. Niwano’s and Mr. Arakawa’s ecological identities.

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 30
INDIGENOUS INTERIORITY
AS NATURE–CULTURE–
SACRED CONTINUUM
An ecological analysis of Have You Seen
the Arana?

Rayson K. Alex

Introduction
In the representation of indigenous culture in cinema, the culture’s specific artifacts,
geographical context, “the rituals, the language, the posturing, the décor, the use of elders,
the presence of children, attitudes to land, the rituals of a spirit world” (Barclay 2003: 12)
are all visually or otherwise presented. Barry Barclay, the New Zealand indigenous film-
maker (Maori), while defining the paradigm of indigenous cinema that he calls “fourth
cinema,” considers “interiority” as its major feature. Representation of the obvious, i.e., the
cultural artifacts and processes that one explicitly sees in a cultural community, is the
peripheral—the exteriority. The Maori filmmaker Kahurangi Waititi (2008) calls it “surface
processes” (1). So how does a filmmaker go beyond these surface processes (exteriority) to
connect to the internal processes (interiority)? In this chapter, I attempt to look at the
concept of “interiority” from an indigenous perspective by analyzing the Indian ecodocu-
mentary Have you Seen the Arana?

The indigenous interiority and exteriority

Barclay defines indigenous interiority as the “essence” (2003: 3) of indigeneity. Waititi (2008)
interprets “essence” as “challenging to discuss aspects of spirituality.” Indigenous spirituality is
the deep interconnection with the cosmos of the community. This deep interconnection is an
entanglement of natural elements, such as trees, land, water, mountains, rivers, seas, fish, and
animals, and cultural elements, such as rituals, social institutions, familial structures, agricul-
ture, and so on. Salma Monani (2014) defines this “entanglement of material and mental” as
“a natureculture continuum” (132).
Interiority encompasses cultural identity. Exteriority has an important role to play in the
creation of cultural and social identity. When the interior/exterior refers to a spatial/non-spatial

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 Rayson K. Alex

location, interiority/exteriority explains the worldviews of both these spaces. While explaining
the Tamil poetic-spatio-temporal convention of interior (akam) and exterior (puram), Martha
Ann Selby (2008) dismisses the idea of a conflict between them, calling it a “false line” (33).
“The fluidity of the akam and the puram, the inside and the outside, brings to light the
concurrence of nature and culture” (Alex et al. 2016: 192). Along Martha Ann Selby’s
argument, it should be understood that the assumed conflict between interiority and exteriority
is also a false line. Though the interiority and exteriority influence each other, they are not one
and the same. “It’s-all-the-same” attitude about interiority and exteriority is similar to Barclay’s
“we-are-all-one” attitude about different races of people. Barry Barclay (2003) condemns “the
One People theory”—that we are all one. He says, “the One People paradigm, equates to
extinction for Indigenous Peoples” (3) as it denies the particular indigenous wisdom. Barclay
engages in an argument about a community’s identity as an indigenous “nation,” which is in
direct conflict with its respective political nation-state. He says: “Indigenous cultures are outside
the national orthodoxy. They are outside the national outlook” (Barclay 2003: 6). There is an
evident disagreement between the indigenous communities and the nation-states:
A main reason for the absence of agreement is that indigenous peoples have different
cultures, social structures and worldviews than those who support liberal democratic
nation states. Nation states try to deal with the absence of shared institutional
foundations with indigenous peoples by assuming that cultural differences are a
matter of group or personal preference.
(Champagne 2011)
The nation-state framework is meant to govern and appeal to all cultural and geographical
communities. Whatever the communal worldviews are, the nation-state is the supreme power
system and no other systems ought to threaten the nation-state’s supremacy. Any system
which does not comply with the nationalistic “rationale” is outside its framework. As long as
the cultural communities are not a threat to the nation-state, it does not bother about the
community’s existence. On the contrary, the nation-states threaten the indigenous commu-
nities for the resources of which they are custodians. The tribes of Mizoram are in between
tradition and development (Chakma 2013), whereas the tribes in Orissa and Goa face a
similar issue due to mining, especially near the forests of Western Ghats (Mishra 2013). The
health conditions of tribal people in Kerala and across India is a major problem, among
others, such as land grabbing, exploitation of forest resources, privatization of lands, educa-
tion, and so on, that are not being addressed by the State (John 2016).

Analyzing Barclay’s concept of fourth cinema

Barclay’s seminal essay, “Celebrating Fourth Cinema” (2003), discusses several concerns of
indigenous cinema that are central to our discussion. Inferring from the essay, the concerns
that define fourth cinema are discussed below. Fourth cinema would include:

1. Films that express the interiority of the indigenous community;

2. Films which differentiate the non-indigenous to portray the indigenous (expression of
cultural difference);
3. Films that highlight the spiritual relationships that the people have with their land and
elements of land (quite contrary to the metaphorization of relationships to the land upheld
by the nation-state framework). Films that convey the spiritual roots (and value systems)
of the indigenous community through myths and other narratives;

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 Indigenous interiority

4. Films that present the indigenous people’s ancient roots and worldview;
5. Films that do not invade indigenous cultures;
6. Films that shift the focus from Hollywood, art cinema, and the white man’s supremacy;
7. Films produced by indigenous technicians and filmmakers (this might not exist at present,
but Barclay hopes that this phenomenon will be a reality in the near future) and set in
their cultural contexts;
8. Films that engage indigenous philosophies (indigenous epistemology, worldviews, and
ontological systems) in the whole process of filmmaking.

Duncan Petrie (2010) considers fourth cinema as an “indigenous response to settler hege-
mony” (80). Janet Wilson (2011) opines that fourth cinema “is a cinematic urge to return the
indigenous visual imagery to their owners (indigenous people) as they and their culture have
long been misrepresented” (200). Fourth cinema, thus, is a radical approach to the represen-
tation of the indigenous culture from an indigenous point of view.
One major change from first (Hollywood), second (art house) and third (third-world)
cinemas, fourth cinema’s camera, according to Barclay, shifts to the insider’s perspective.
Simply said, fourth cinema is made by filmmakers of indigenous origin. Barclay admits that if
such a restriction is made, “we are looking at a very slim body of work” (2003: 2). Moreover,
if we look at cinema as a critical work—exploring, questioning and analyzing a cultural
context—fourth cinema should be a theoretical framework analyzing any ideas of indigeneity,
irrespective of the director’s cultural affiliations and geographic location. Further, he makes
some connections between the “spiritual” and the natural, which seem to be the underlying
philosophy of the essence of indigeneity. But, can “the essence of indigeneity” only be
presented by a filmmaker of indigenous origin? This restriction also affects the academic
engagement of fourth cinema, in the sense that all indigenous films should represent the
essence of the community.
Every individual, every community, every animal needs representation to safeguard their
identity and make their existence sustainable. The interior/interiority is always defined in
the context of the exterior/exteriority. This is how the exteriority contributes to the
interiority. Thus, exteriority and interiority form a unit to represent an individual or a
cultural community. If they are not represented, they fail to exist. This explains why
communities (indigenous, gender) fight for their rights to be politically and socially
acceptable and to exist in the supremacy of the nation-state. If it is important for a
community to be represented, it is also important to consider how they are represented.
Barclay puts forward an acceptable framework to represent the indigenous communities.
Let me elaborate on this by analyzing a case.
Niyamgiri hill range in the districts of Kalahandi and Rayagada, in the Indian State of
Orissa, is known for its abundance of bauxite mineral. Vedanta Resources, an international
mining company, having its headquarters in London and mining operations in other parts of
the world, has been mining in the Niyamgiri hills since the early 2000s. Among others, the
Church of England is a major shareholder, with about a US$4.1 million stake. Niyamgiri was
projected as merely a land with mineral resources until the tribal leaders, activists, and NGOs,
such as Survival International, came up with another story: Niyamgiri is the sacred hill of the
Kondh communities in Kalahandi and Rayagada. How could the Church of England have
invested in an unethical business activity like this one? However, it is evident that the people
and their hills were misrepresented, or weren’t represented at all. Withdrawing from this
business deal, the Chairman of the Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group, John
Reynolds, made the following statement:

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After six months of engagement, we are not satisfied that Vedanta has shown, or is
likely in future to show, the level of respect for human rights and local communities
that we expect of companies in whom the church investing bodies hold shares.
(“Church of England” 2010)
Any misrepresentation (deliberate or not) is injustice but no representation is an even worse
injustice. In the present case, Vedanta was assured entry into Odisha by the approval of the
state government. Recalling Barclay’s words gives an apt conclusion to the discussion:
Indigenous cultures are outside the national orthodoxy. They are outside the
national outlook. They are outside spiritually, for sure. And almost everywhere on
the planet, Indigenous Peoples, some 300 million of them in total, according to the
statisticians—are outside materially also. They are outside the national outlook by
definition, for Indigenous cultures are ancient remnant cultures persisting within the
modern nation state.
(Barclay 2003: 6–7)
It is easier to suppress indigenous communities because they are mythical people. They live
by their myths. And the nation-states can simply label them “superstitious.” However, there
are empathetic people who empower the indigenous communities to fight back and demand
their rights. Such involvement should not be undermined, though they belong to the
exterior. They might not even understand the spiritual connection between the land and
the people, but they might be aware of the denial of human rights. In such cases, the fourth
cinema framework which represents the “essence of indigeneity” would help in under-
standing the interiority of the community. In the above case, Vedanta and the State had
aligned to misrepresent the Kondh communities. The Church of England seems to have been
carried away by the monetary benefits of this exploitation. However, the Church took the
moral responsibility to rectify its mistaken action and withdrew from the alliance.
Returning to the discussion on indigenous cinema, if indigenous cinema is seen as an
academic activity, would it not be pursued by filmmakers of any nationality and cultural
origin? If yes, would such “indigenous” representations be called fourth cinema? While
agreeing with the indigenous philosophy of Barclay, I would take a position quite contrary to
his and argue that fourth cinema represents the indigenous essence when it acceptably
(acceptable to the community) represents the nature–culture–sacred continuity of the com-
munity. Analyzing the film Have you Seen the Arana? I will substantiate this argument. Critical
understanding will give us a better perspective on the process of transmediation in this case,
where myths are transmediated to film.

Have You Seen the Arana? as fourth cinema

Have you Seen the Arana? is “a journey through a rich and bio-diverse region in Wayanad
District, Kerala State, South India, that is witnessing drastic transformation in the name of
‘development’” (“ningal aranaye” 2016). The documentary tells the parallel stories of five
individuals belonging to two indigenous communities (the Adiya and Kurichya tribes) and a
religious community (Syrian Christian). The characters in the film are M.P. Kalan, an elder of
a hamlet and a singer of the pulapaattu, the song of the dead (Adiya tribe); P.K. Kariyan, a
community elder, the president of Thrunelli Panchayat (local governing body), a pulapaattu
singer, and renowned Gadiga (an invocation to the goddess Malli) artist (Adiya tribe); N.P.
Jochi, a traditional healer using herbs and produce from the evergreen forests in Wayanad

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(Adiya tribe); Raman Cheruvayil (Kurichya tribe); and George Joseph (Syrian Christian). The
four parallel narratives of the characters present four experiential stories (of four specific
cultural contexts) of cultural and natural deterioration. These experiences are not merely
those of an individual, but represent issues concerning their respective communities or a
socio-economic crisis. There are also minor characters who bring in important aspects of the
larger problem discussed. However, the three stories (Kalan and Kariyan’s, Jochi’s, and
Cheruvayil’s), belonging to various cultural communities, are similar in their indigenous
worldviews as they evince an integration between the natural, cultural and sacred elements of
their cultures. The story of George Joseph is a conflicting one.

The four stories of socio-environmental crises

The communal crisis discussed through the experiences of P.K. Kariyan and N.P. Jochi is the
deterioration of cultural values, resulting in a decline in their relationship with their traditions
and ancestors. The decline of the biodiversity of the evergreen forest in Wayanad has resulted
in the loss of medicinal plants and trust in traditional medicine, among other issues that Jochi
narrates, such as, the conflict between tourists and the locals, and the disrespect the younger
generation has for traditions and mythology. Raman, a traditional rice farmer belonging to
the Kurichya community, cultivates 32 varieties of rice in his field. Though he cultivates the
land and works hard to make ends meet, he is worried that this does not bring him any
monetary benefit. Raman is one of the few rice cultivators who follow the traditional ways of
agriculture. Much like Jochi’s complaints about the disinterestedness of her children in the
indigenous knowledge system, Raman is worried about the same. However, Raman makes
an effort to impart indigenous knowledge to his grandchildren. He takes them to the rice
fields, so that they can watch and learn from what he does in the field. Though Raman’s sons
are not interested in the traditional methods of cultivation, he motivates his grandchildren to
experience and learn those practices. In both cases, the film realistically represents the rituals,
creation myths, and cultural practices of the Adiyan and Kurichya communities. In both the
stories, there is a clear conflict between the interior and the exterior spaces. When the tinai
exterior contextualizes one or more cultural communities with a similar worldview, Kari-
yan’s, Jochi’s and Raman’s conflicts are with communities of conflicting worldviews.
George Joseph, belonging to the Syrian Christian community, is a ginger cultivator from
Wayanad. After pawning his wife’s jewelry and spending his savings, which he had earned in
the Persian Gulf in the Middle East (where he worked for a few years), he leased about 18
acres of land to cultivate the monoculture crop—ginger. A major agricultural crisis in the
Indian states of Kerala and Karnataka led to the suicide of more than 20 ginger farmers in the
2000s. The reason for the fall in price was the rotting of ginger in the field caused by
changing climatic conditions and a deficiency in labor. George’s story, quite contrary to the
other two stories, is an outlook from the exterior’s perspective, as the context of the film is
dominantly set in the three aforementioned indigenous narratives. Through the apocalyptic
prophecy of the “death of the soil” indicated through the story of the monocultural ginger
cultivation, the audience is left with the thought that the first three communities presented in
the film might also follow suit.

The journey of people and deity

As a metaphor of a journey, the documentary begins with Kariyan narrating the mythical
story of their ancestors. While Kalan sings the myth in a song, Kariyan takes the audience on

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a journey while explaining the song. The song is interspersed throughout the film, from
beginning to end, providing the background, literally and ideologically, for the other
narratives in the film, similar to a journey with breaks allowing the travelers to rest. The
story translates thus:
After the Gods created humans, a bird flew down and perched on a flowering tree.
The bird pronounced the destiny of all humans gathered there. “Some of you will
die young and some old,” said the bird. Immediately several people died. “Who will
bury them?” they asked. A young couple took on the responsibility to perform the
last rites. Ithi (the woman) embraced the responsibility fully, while Achan (the man)
carried the sorrow like a burden on his head. Bearing the burden on his head, the
two began a journey across the land, looking for a place to perform the last rites.
The path winds through rice fields, and along a stream until it reaches a temple.
They continued as far as Kuruwa Island. Along the way, Ithi and Achan passed the
gate of the Kuthirakode temple, and continued to walk until they reached Chek-
kani. These are the paths that brought Ithi and Achan to this land. So we treasure it.
The re-enactment of the memory of the myth and the journey through the mythical path is a
physical and spiritual exercise towards mapping the Adiya community’s boundary of “home”
(here, home is to be considered as an extension of house to the interior space of the people)
and its territory. During the journey Kariyan comments on the drastic changes in the
contours of the landscapes, trees, and animals. While crossing a teak plantation, he says:
Earlier these teak trees weren’t here. There were only old forest trees. The forest
department cut down all the old trees and planted teak. And because of that there is
no drinking water now. There were different varieties of fruit- and nut-bearing trees
and enough to eat on the way. Now they are not there. That’s why wild animals
have to come into villages in search of food. And then they blame the animals for it.
In the narration of Kariyan, he suggests that the entire forest is an interior space, considering the
space beyond the house as interior space, which is an aspect of interiority. In another instance,
Kariyan points to a gooseberry tree to say that Ithi and Achan ate gooseberries from the tree and
drank water from the lake. They found that the water was sweet and named the stream sweet-
water stream (Madurachola). Pointing to a stream, Kariyan says: “There used to be a lot of water
and fish in the stream. Now there are no fish. The increased use of chemical fertilizers has taken
away all life forms. Our source of food has also vanished.” The gooseberry tree and the fish in the
stream are specific references that are elevated to the status of an “ecocultural keystone” (Alex
2016: 188). Ecocultural keystones have ecological, cultural and mythical implications. Ecological
keystones mediate the rootedness in the tribe’s cosmology. This mediation is helpful in integrating
the physical (land and its elements—gooseberry tree and fish) and the non-physical (the belief that
this destruction is the beginning of the end of their home).
The journey is the narration of the Adiya history, through their miseries of the present—a
narrative that combines the past, present, and future. Though Sunanda Bhat, the director of
the film, does not belong to any of these communities, she has represented the interiority of
the people quite realistically. In an article written by Bhat (2015), she says that she had a long-
term relationship with the “characters” which resulted in a great exchange of knowledge
(115). She writes:
Minute creatures like dragonflies, caterpillars, crabs were beautifully captured against
textures of water and earth. Focus was intentionally on the small and ordinary, often

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overlooked yet amongst the first to disappear when nature undergoes rapid trans-
formation. The characters were equal collaborators in the making of the film.
Textures of lives of these “ordinary” people gradually emerged through the layers
of landscape.
(Bhat 2015: 116)
Bhat’s narrative has an integrative voice similar to that of the indigenous worldview. Her
search for the “minute” is evidence of intentional embracing of the essence of indigeneity and
careful understanding of interiority. Bhat has also taken care to make the process of filming as
integrative and non-conflicting as possible.
The film also highlights the conflicts that the indigenous people have with tourists. Some
of the conflicts mentioned by Jochi and others concern: the tourists who irresponsibly pollute
the Adiya community’s ancestral land; the tourists’ understanding of the forest as a “pleasure-
land”; the resort that commodifies the forest as a “comfort land”; the forest products, such as
fruit and nuts, that are no longer theirs; the chemical fertilizers that would “kill” the land and
the living beings on it; and the inability to cope with the rapidly growing population around
their settlements. These are the conflicts with the non-indigenous communities and their
systems, such as the forest department, and the nation-state with its liberalist policies.

Mythical representation in the film

The mythical story of Ithi’s and Achan’s journey has various purposes. One of the major
purposes of the journey is to territorialize the land, which could be assumed to be the first
appropriation of the land. As told in the documentary by the community members, the myth
transforms to become a social norm and territory. The virtual and the far-fetched story of the
journey of Ithi and Achan is realized and materialized in the film in two different ways—in
the form of the structure of film and as the actual journey traversed by Kariyan. The structural
and thematic representation of the myth is an effort to authentically represent the community
and their beliefs.
When the mythical song sung by Kalan does not address themes of conflict between the
Adiya and neighboring communities, the film contextualizes the present situation of
the communities. Jochi and Kariyan elaborately narrate the conflict between themselves, the
tourists, and other communities. The present crises of agriculture, tourism, sanitation, and the
younger generation’s and tourists’ indifference towards traditional values are all issues of
disapproval that are brought in through their experiential narratives. These issues are
interspersed in the film, keeping the journey metaphor as the overarching narrative. The
narratives of the past (myths, traditions, and the traditional rituals) attain a relevance in
the present. For instance, Jochi complains that the community members have lost trust in
traditional medicines, inclining towards “English medicines,” and referring to allopathic
medicines. As if a remedy to this problem, Jochi, in the film, is seen within the visual context
of planting a medicinal plant in the forest. She continues: “If children should know these
plants in the future, they should also engage in these activities such as nurturing plants and
taking care of them, otherwise how would they know their traditions?” In the aforemen-
tioned local–tourist and indigenous and allopathic medicine narratives, the extended inter-
iority (the forest itself as a home) is threatened because of the mindless invasion of the interior
space (forest) of the indigenous people.
The authenticity of representation of various factors, such as traditions, the daily life of the
people, present challenges faced by the people, and environmental degradation, would have

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been a major concern to the filmmakers. The film leaves it to the people to represent
themselves. The filmmakers do not intrude in any of the scenes in any way, except by asking
questions. However, the engagement of the filmmakers is felt by the audience only in the
brilliant parallels drawn between the four stories. The enormous responsibility (and, of course,
the greatest challenge) of the filmmakers, I believe, was to make the film as authentic as
possible for the community audience as well as for the general audience. The filmmakers have
succeeded in their mission: the film “. . .has been seen widely in Wayanad within the
indigenous community spaces and outside. It has been very well received, especially among
children who are able to absorb every nuance and find delight in stories of the natural world”
(Bhat 2015: 116). Another factor that increases its authenticity is the “seeing” of the place.
The audience is presented with the forest, the characters’ homes, their places of work, towns,
neighbors, nearby shops, streams, schools and so on. The cultural context has been opened for
the audience to literally see, in spite of considering all images as constructed. In fact,
constructed reality represents, and has the ability to represent, authentically.
A very peculiar feature of this interiority is the nature–culture continuum that the film
highlights. I would consider the nature–culture–sacred continuum as the interiority of
indigeneity. “As with all indigenous peoples, this ecocultural rootedness cannot be
essentialized, as it is tied to the long process of learning to live with the land” (Alex
2016: 189). There are different ways in which this continuum is expressed. Selvamony
(2007), while explaining the geopoetic concept of tinai, calls it a “human-nature-spirit
nexus” (xv). De la Cadena (2010) uses the concept of “indigenous cosmopolitics” to
describe the sacredness in the nature–culture relationships maintained by indigenous
people across the globe. She names such people as “earth-beings” (357). The creation
story of the Adiya community narrated by Kalan and Kariyan in the documentary
corresponds to the concepts proposed by Selvamony and de la Cadena. At the end of
the documentary, Kalan sings thus:
It was late in the evening, tired and hungry Ithi and Achan decided to rest. [Kalan
narrates the story in the background of a bus-journey] The Goddess appeared in a
terrifying form. Bridging the earth and sky, the Goddess rushed towards the young
couple. Terrified, Ithi and Achan sought refuge with the Lord of Pakkam. The Lord
told the Goddess, “Henceforth you will stop eating humans. . .”
After the song, Kariyan explains: “We believe the Goddess was transformed into arana”
(Sphenomorphus dussumieri), commonly known as Skint. The search for the arana, which begins
at the beginning of the film, continues to the end; the search ends and the arana is found. The
members of the community believe that the arana, which was once a fearsome goddess,
should be guarded, as the Lord of Pakkam guarded their ancestors Ithi and Achan. It is this
mutuality between the gods, nature, and humans that brings sacredness to natural entities such
as the arana. The indigenous culture is molded in such a way that the belief system upholds
the mutuality between these elements. The documentary shows what it means to have not
seen the arana. The “physical” and “non-physical” qualities of the three elements, humans,
arana, and the goddess, are seen as a continuity. It is a belief that much of what we call
“humanness” is “animalness” and “sacredness”—a fluidity. Then what is sacredness? Sacred-
ness is a continuity between “humanness” and “animalness.”
If the arana, which is yet another ecocultural keystone, is not to be found, it would be an
alarming situation. The search for the arana seems to be a search for the reasons behind the
indigenous and agricultural crises that the communities experience. The juxtaposition of
the local poet reciting a poem on the environmental crisis of India, within the montage of all

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the narratives in the film, culminates in the disappearance of the arana. The unnamed local
poet recites his poem (diagetically in the film) giving reasons for the crises:

The style of life has changed

The pace of time has changed
Vehicles increase day-by-day
Heat heightens day-by-day
We put on the torn sack of empty luxury
Bringing into the ring a rooster that cannot crow
Earth movers turn jade hills to bald heads
And concrete dwellings pile up
Ginger and bananas wither away
As their water is made to flow straight to the Arabian Sea
Factories spring up spewing poisonous gases [the poet mentions that the description
refers to Bhopal Gas Leak]
As we bow down to global warming
Tissues of damage become human hands
And the tough work is left to God
What a heat it is, Oh my God!

Conclusion
Like the gooseberry tree, the fish and the arana, ecocultural keystones immensely contribute
to the “physicalness” and rootedness in interiority of the indigenous people. This is evinced
in the narratives of Jochi, Kariyan and Raman. The indigenous people have preserved their
interior spaces, which is ecologically rich and diverse. Any kind of exteriorization of the
interior spaces of the indigenous people is a threat to all life forms and the earth—a critical
environmental injustice.
Apart from the worldviews of the communities that are expressed by the community
members, the documentary’s focus on the minute and the “trivial,” by using cinematic
techniques such as neutrality of the filmmaker’s voice in the narratives, devising a non-linear
narrative style to tell the stories, make it an effective medium to authentically represent the
communities. Thus, Have you Seen the Arana? is a good case for a cinematic environmental
communication presenting the interiority of indigenous people in a unique and yet engaging
narrative style.

Works cited
Alex, Rayson K. “tinai-Documentation as Ecocultural Ethnography: My Experience with the Mudugar.”
Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos, edited by Salma Monani and Joni
Adamson, Routledge, 2016, pp. 188–203.
Alex, Rayson K., K. Samuel Moses Srinivas, and S. Susan Deborah. “Eco-exoticism in Thorny Land:
Invasion of Cheemakaruvel.” Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays, edited by Rayson K. Alex and S. Susan
Deborah. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 189–202.
Barclay, Barry. “Celebrating Fourth Cinema.” Illusions Magazine, 2003, www.scribd.com/document/
355534705/Barclay-Celebrating-Fourth-Cinema (accessed 5 November 2016).
Bhat, Sunanda. “Tracing a Terrain: Conversations of People and Landscape.” Landscape Architecture
Frontiers/Experiments & Processes 3.3 (2015): 107–16.

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Chakma, Dilip. “Seven Sisters Speak: The Chakma tribe – Ethnic aliens of Mizoram.” thealternative.in, 13
October 2013, www.thealternative.in/society/the-chakma-tribe-ethnic-aliens-of-mizoram (accessed
14 July 2018).
Champagne, Duane. “Indigenous Cultures and Nation States.” Indian Country: Today Media Network.com,
9 March 2011, https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/indigenous-cultures-and-nation-
states-MVDy2D_kz0K_3gBeEee-Fw/ (accessed 18 July 2018).
“Church of England withdraws from India mining Project.” BBC News, 5 February 2010, news.bbc.co.
uk/2/hi/south_asia/8500997.stm (accessed 7 July 2018).
De la Cadena, Marisol. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond
‘Politics’.” Cultural Anthropology 25.2 (2010): 334–70.
Depoe, Stephen P., and Jennifer Ann Peeples. “Introduction: Voice and the Environment—Critical
Perspectives.” Voice and Environmental Communication, edited by Stephen P. Depoe and Jennifer Ann
Peeples, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 1–20.
Have You Seen the Arana? Directed by Sunanda Bhat. Songline Films, 2012.
John, Haritha. “Truth or Hype.” The News Minute, 11 May 2016, www.thenewsminute.com/article/
truth-or-hype-we-asked-kerala-tribal-activists-about-modis-somalia-comparison-43090 (accessed 13
July 2018).
Mishra, Arunima. “Rule of Thumb.” Businesstoday.in, 15 September 2013, www.businesstoday.in/
magazine/features/orissa-niyamgiri-rejects-vedanta-entry-impact-reasons/story/197972.html (accessed
13 July 2018).
Monani, Salma. “Kissed by Lightning and Fourth Cinema’s Natureculture Continuum.” Ecoambiguity,
Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism, edited by Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha
Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 131–47.
“ningal aranaye kando? [Have You Seen the Arana?] – Synopsis.” Songline Films, 8 November 2016,
songlinefilms.com/#synopsis.
Petrie, Duncan. “Cinema in a Settler Society: Brand New Zealand.” Cinema at the Periphery, edited by
Dina Lordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belen Vidal, Wayne State University Press, 2010, pp. 67–83.
Selby, Martha Ann. “Dialogues of Space, Desire, and Gender in Tamil Cankam Poetry.” Tamil Geographies:
Cultural Constructions of Space and Place in South India, edited by Martha Ann Selby and Indira
Viswanathan Peterson, State University of New York, 2008, pp. 17–42.
Selvamony, Nirmal. “Introduction.” Essays in Ecocriticism, edited by Nirmaldasan Nirmal Selvamony, and
Rayson K. Alex, Sarup & Sons, 2007, pp. xi–xxxi.
Waititi, Kahurangi. “Maori Documentary Film: Interiority and Exteriority.” MAI Review 1.6 (2008),
http://review.mai.ac.nz/MR/article/download/116/116-584-1-PB.pdf (accessed 6 July 2018).
Wilson, Janet. “Re-representing Indigeneity: Approaches to History in Some Recent New Zealand and
Australian Films.” New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past, edited by Alistair Fox, Barry Keith Grant,
and Hilary Radner, Intellect, 2011, pp. 197–216.

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 31
RISK, RESISTANCE, AND
MEMORY IN TWO
NARRATIVES BY ASIAN
WOMEN
Chitra Sankaran

In the two texts that I compare, the risks that Asian women routinely face, their
vulnerabilities and their resilience are foregrounded. Wave: A Memoir of Life after the
Tsunami by Sonali Deraniyagala from Sri Lanka (2013) and “Lake” (2010) by the
Indonesian writer Lily Yulianti Farid, which links the sudden disappearance of Lake
Beloye in Central Russia with the disappearance of the narrator’s sister, Fayza, in Jakarta,
are two narratives that link natural disasters with cultural predicaments in interesting ways.
In both of these texts, the protagonists are grappling with deep personal tragedies. They
share an approach in responding to risk through resistance and memory, though doing so
in different ways. Their personal traumas and risks, interestingly, find a perspective and a
balance in comparison with the large-scale destruction of the planet. Hence, the apoc-
alyptic, the pastoral and the dystopic are juggled—alternated contrapuntally—in these
narratives to convey the urgency of both the personal loss and the large-scale environ-
mental damage that is occurring all around us, conveying the criticality of both personal
and global disasters. This “scale-framing” becomes an effective way of communicating
unimaginable catastrophes on a human, imaginable scale.
Deraniyagala, an academic from the United Kingdom, recounts her shocking personal
story. The book, described by Michael Ondaatje as “[t]he most powerful and haunting book I
have read in years” (2013, blurb), is autobiographical and hence rooted in the past and in
[personal] history rather than speculation. The narrative is a painful recounting of the
immense loss the author suffered when, on the morning of 26 December 2004, her husband
and her two young sons, as well as her parents, were swept away in the tsunami while she
miraculously survived.
The narrative begins on a pastoral note: a calm sea, a happy family, an idyllic holiday,
only to be immediately followed by apocalyptic images of the dreadful tsunami of 2004,
the deadliest in recorded history, when around a quarter of a million people died.
Sonali’s family was obliterated by its fury while they were holidaying with her family in
Yala, a national park on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka. The memoir begins with
her words:

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I thought nothing of it at first. The ocean looked a little closer to our hotel than
usual. That was all. A white foamy wave had climbed all the way up to the rim of
sand where the beach fell abruptly down to the sea. You never saw water on that
stretch of sand.
(3)
Her desultory curiosity combined with her recollection of her friend Orlantha’s words about
her family—“What you guys have is a dream” (4)—display her feeling of insulation, even
invincibility against nature. The elite academic is representative of privilege, with her
anthropocentric perception of a nature tamed and contained by culture, revealed by her off-
hand remarks such as referring to her 7-year-old son Vikram’s fascination with a family of
white-bellied sea eagles: “They always turned up, as reliable as the tooth fairy” (3). Her words
are tragically replete with irony when, minutes later, the unreliability of nature and
unpredictability of risk are forcefully brought home through the disastrous tsunami:
The foam turned into waves. Waves leaping over the ridge where the beach ended.
This was not normal. The sea never came this far in. Waves not receding or
dissolving. Closer now. Brown and grey. Waves rushing past the conifers and
coming closer to our room. All these waves now, charging, churning. Suddenly
furious. Suddenly menacing.
(5)
Shouting out to her husband, Steve, she recounts:
I grabbed Vik and Malli, and we all ran out the front door. I was ahead of Steve. I
held the boys each by the hand. “Give me one of them. Give me one of them,”
Steve shouted, reaching out. But I didn’t. That would have slowed us down. We
had no time.
(5)
Not even stopping to warn her parents who were staying next door to their room at the
resort, the young family dash towards the road, where a passing jeep stops to pick them up.
For a short while everything seems under control, only for the jeep to be suddenly deluged
by water.
Suddenly, all this water inside the jeep. Water sloshing over our knees. Where did
this water come from? I didn’t see those waves get to us. This water must have burst
out from beneath the ground. What is happening? The jeep moved forward slowly.
I could hear its engine straining, snarling. We can drive through this water, I
thought. . . . Then I saw Steve’s face. . . . A sudden look of terror, eyes wide open,
mouth agape. He saw something behind me that I couldn’t see. I didn’t have time
to turn around and look.
(7–8)
At last, when she comes to, she feels a burning pain in her chest and she sees “billowing
brown water, way into the distance” as far as the eye could see. She feels herself being swept
along at tremendous speed, tasting salt. “Water battered my face, it went up my nose, it
burned my brain” (10). A long time later, when the pain seems bearable, she opens her eyes
to gaze on a “blue spotless sky. A flock of storks were flying above me, in formation, necks
stretched out. These birds were flying in the same direction that the water was taking me”
(10). The image of the cerulean sky and the beautiful storks after the calamitous tsunami is

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once again, ironically, pastoral, and runs in tandem with the biologist Daniel Botkin’s
discussion of dynamic and unstable ecosystems in Discordant Harmonies (1990), where he
counters placid views that congeal nature in unchanging stasis. Instead, he argues that natural
ecological systems are constantly fluctuating. This narrative moment is akin to a caesura, a
deep holding of one’s breath, the calm before the storm. Scott Slovic’s discussion of
Robinson Jeffers’ poem, “Oh Lovely Rock” (2012), suggesting that meditating on the rock
proffers humans the ability to think of mutability and contrast their ephemeral existence to
the permanence of nature (85), is particularly apt. But the narrative moves relentlessly forward
to replace this pastoral image with a graphic one of a violent nature, using distinctly
apocalyptic imagery:
I saw then the toppled trees everywhere, . . . trees on the ground with their roots
sticking up. . . . I was in an immense bog-land. Everything was one color; brown,
reaching far . . . What is this knocked-down world? The end of time?
(11)
After her traumatic survival, Sonali wants to stay suspended in her confusion, far removed from
reality. “But in a few hours it would be light. It will be tomorrow. I don’t want it to be
tomorrow. I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start” (19). To paraphrase James
Lovelock (2006), Gaia has wreaked her vengeance on humans, and Sonali’s family is one of
several thousands the sea swept away in its wake. After weeks of refusing to leave her dark room,
on the first day her friend parts the curtain and lets in light, Sonali resents being reconnected to
nature and hence to life. Her first view is again ironically but also poignantly pastoral: “There was
the first time I saw a paradise flycatcher.” But the pastoral is inappropriate to her extreme grief:
I thought then I should never have allowed my friends to open the curtains to my
room. I had been much safer in blackness. Now sunlight splintered my eyes, and
that familiar bird trailed its fiery feathers along with the branches of the tamarind
tree outside. . . . Now look what’s happened, I thought. I’ve seen a bird. I’ve seen a
flycatcher, when all the birds in the world should be dead.
(40)
The pastoral has no place in this extreme dystopic world with no lingering hope, like Dante’s
Hell.
This glimpse of a pastoral nature threatens to stir her to a sense of the reality of her (continued)
existence in the face of her unspeakable loss and she rejects this categorically. Suicidal after she
learns the truth of her entire family’s demise, Sonali is vigilantly guarded by her aunts and cousins,
who nurse her back to health and a semblance of normalcy. But her return to everyday lucidity
does not occur overnight. Nature, in the form of the tsunami that had destroyed her family and
her life as she knew and understood it, continues to overwhelm her mind in unaccountable ways.
Nevertheless, despite her anger at it, nature seems to be the only aspect of life that she can connect
with, albeit in more negative than positive ways. She walks for miles on a dark deserted beach one
night to search for the place “where turtles came ashore to lay their eggs,” and, finally, coming
upon “a green turtle, her soft eggs dropped into the huge pit she’d dug up in the sand” (49) helps
her find a measure of her place in the larger world where she doesn’t feel she needs to belong.
Going back months later to the scene of her calamity, the hotel in Yala, Sonali witnesses the
ravages on the landscape in the aftermath of the tsunami:
Dust, rubble, shards of glass. This was the hotel. It had been flattened. There were
no walls standing, it was as though they’d been sliced off the floors. . . . Fallen trees

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were everywhere, the surrounding forest had flown apart. As if there’d been a
wildfire, all the trees were charred.
(61)
As she wanders the land, recollecting the terrible catastrophe, she is sensitised to aspects of
nature, which had never before impacted her:
The wind was fierce that day we went back, it flung sand into our faces. A strangely
quiet wind, though, bereft of the rustling and shaking of trees. It was midday, and
no shelter from the seething sun. The sea eagles that had thrilled Vik, they were still
there. Bold in this desolation, they sailed low, sudden shadows striking the bare
ground. Eagles without Vik. I didn’t look up.
(61)
The details of the landscape, though scrupulously observed, are qualified anthropocentrically
by human loss and emotion. The eagles, favoured by her son, bring no joy in his absence. “I
couldn’t make this real. This wasteland,” she exclaims tellingly (61).
Kali Tal defines trauma in Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, as “a life-
threatening event that displaces [one’s] preconceived notions about the world” (Tal 1996:
15). This sense of displacement—a disjunction from reality—with feelings of being
severed from it, often overcome Sonali. What she experiences is, as the psychologist
Elizabeth Waites explains, “an injury to mind or body that requires structural repair”.
According to Waites, “a main effect of trauma is disorganisation”, which could, she
believes, cause “fragmentation of self, shattering of social relationships, erosion of social
support” (1993: 22, 92). But what is noteworthy is that in this state of “disorganisation”,
Sonali compulsively turns to nature. Looking at the land ravaged by the sea, she finds
some kinship:
Nothing was normal here, and that I liked. Here, in this ravaged landscape, I didn’t
have to shrink from everyday details that were no longer ours. . . . My surroundings
were as deformed as I was. I belonged here.
(64)
The ravaged land seems more a part of her than the cultural world. Nature, however, also
persists as an enemy. She cannot grasp nor forgive its continued existence in the face of her
family’s extinction. Furthermore, nature’s awesome powers have to be recollected repeatedly
for its proportions to enter her mind and be acknowledged as reality. She needs to re-learn
and come to terms with the sheer dispassion and indifference of nature to human predica-
ments. Nature’s power, never truly cognised before, has to be newly understood. Repeating
the statistics about the tsunami is a useful tool to tutor her on nature’s power and to anchor
her to the fact of her calamitous, unreal loss:
The wave was more than thirty feet high here. It moved through the land at
twenty-five miles an hour. It charged inland for more than two miles, then went
back into the ocean. All that I saw around me had been submerged. I told myself
this over and over. Understanding nothing.
(62)
She seeks for some measure of understanding of her immense loss, the death of everyone who
had shaped the contours of her everyday life in the unrelenting statistics of the tsunami. But
her loss and disorientation continue:

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I was directionless. Where do I go? What did I come here to see? Then I
remembered the rock. There was a large rock here on the bank of the lagoon that
is to the side of the hotel. A black, peaceful rock that we’d often sit on at dusk . . .
with that rock I found my bearings.
(62)
Sonali’s thought on locating the rock and finding it reassuring is by no means unique. Slovic
(2012) refers to the deepest urge in any environmental writing as the “quest for contact with
external reality” (83), a quest that now gets centred in Sonali’s life. Slovic says: “When we say
‘environment’, we seem to mean what’s ‘out there’, what’s hard and fast and externally
verifiable. . ..” (2012: 82–83). It is this quest for some certainty in the midst of her loss
through which she can acquire a grip on her life again that leads Sonali obsessively in search
of these external “chthonic” certainties of nature. She finds, however, that time and again,
nature appears to mislead her, for her confused mind misreads the signs, cocooning her in
false images of comfort:
It was the light that did it. It was the angle of the sun at five o’clock on a Sunday
evening in early March on a country road somewhere in Shropshire. It was those
sinking rays slanting against a yew tree and glinting on the wing mirror on my side
of the car, dazzling my eyes. The hawthorn hedgerows on either side of the road
throw long shadows in this light. This light that is so familiar unexpectedly makes
me forget.
(79)
Though Sonali is a Sinhalese Buddhist, religion never intrudes except in very veiled and
unobtrusive ways as when she recalls visiting the Buddhist temple with her grandmother.
Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to pause here to probe her experience and to link it to a notion
central to Eastern mysticism, that of universal connectivity. A view in Shropshire connects
her viscerally with her experience in Sri Lanka. In his sermon of “The Not-Self Character-
istic” (Anatta-lakkhana-sutta), the Buddha declares that because physical perceptions, though
never overtly articulated, often play critical roles in times of trauma and renewal, should be
distanced:

bhikkhus [monks] any kind of form whatever, whether past, future or presently arisen,
whether gross or subtle, whether in oneself or external, whether inferior or superior,
whether far or near, must with right understanding how it is, be regarded thus: “This is
not mine, this is not I, this is not myself.”
“Any kind of feeling whatever. . .
“Any kind of perception whatever. . .
“Any kind of determination whatever. . .
“Any kind of consciousness whatever, whether past, future or presently arisen, whether
gross or subtle, whether in oneself or external, whether inferior or superior, whether
far or near must, with right understanding how it is, be regarded thus: ‘This is not
mine, this is not I, this is not myself.’”

The Buddha’s discrimination between the higher consciousness leading to the right kind of
dispassion and state of enlightenment or Nirvana, as opposed to the overt attachment to
earthly or material things that brings suffering, appears to reinforce certain mystical Eastern
insights. Though, no doubt in the face of the extreme anguish of Sonali’s predicament, the

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Buddha’s words appear distant, unworldly and ungraspable, there is a greater truth that pushes
to be heard. We are all sucked into her trauma, where we stand poised in the consciousness
of the overwhelming dominance of nature while attempting to grapple with the unreality that
grips her after the trauma. Hence it is doubly ironic that in her state of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), many of her utterances appear to echo Buddha’s spiritual insights in a gross
parody of spiritualism. Her extreme anguish seems to put her in a state which mimics and
indeed mocks the idea of Nirvana. What appears immediate and central is the overwhelming
presence of the material world. But simultaneously, it is precisely in this moment that the
greater truth about the ephemerality of life also strikes home.
As she struggles over many years to come to terms with her irrecoverable loss, gradually,
nature, which had been her enemy first and foremost, the irreducible, indifferent “other”,
which had robbed her of all that she held dear, now, gradually, insidiously, becomes her [sole]
source of solace. Sonali establishes a relationship with the land and seascape, in other words
with the place of trauma, despite or because of her loss. The unreality of her extreme
circumstance, which is at odds with the commonplace routine of her everyday life, drives her
to re-establish her relationship to the event, and to the land and sea that caused it. She
develops a reluctant bond with the land that had thwarted her of life. Terry Tempest
Williams (1995) incongruously labels this compulsive bond with land, the “erotics of place.”
Williams says:
I am interested in a participatory relationship with the land. I want to reclaim the
word erotic at its root, meaning “of or pertaining to the passion of love; concerned
with or treating of love; amatory.”
(16)
An erotic of place encompasses a “relationship with the natural world that includes many
aspects of an intimate relationship with another person: love, risk, surrender, vulnerability,
connection, trust, and merging” (cited by Cory 2012). Sonali gradually moves from feelings
of anger, mistrust and hatred towards the place of her loss to an obsessive focus on it. The
land and sea are indelibly etched in her memory and she compulsively revisits the place of
trauma, giving truth to the stark title of the book, Wave. All it took was one gargantuan tidal
wave, a mere grain of an incident in the vast speculum of time but it spells the end of all that
is meaningful in her life.
Wave also attests to what Timothy Clark has identified as one of the paradoxes that are
central to ecocriticism, namely “scale framing . . . as a strategy for representing complex issues
in ways that make them more amenable to thought or overview” (Clark 2015: 74). Clark
argues about the patent incongruities that can emerge from representing the scale of a global
phenomenon of risk from the perspective of the local or, indeed, the individual. Wave, in
showing the futility, even impossibility, of an individual devastated by the tsunami to grasp its
magnitude and significance, is indeed grappling with the paradoxes of “scale framing”.
Such gradations chart the gap between the span and value of a human life against the vast
span of evolutionary time. Gradually, “time”, which itself is an aspect of nature, causes her to
come to terms with nature—the cause of her loss—to make it the source of her solace. The
“two sea-eagles” that she always comes back to watch (61; 160), the blue-whales “who keep
their hugeness hidden” (185), and the “vast isolated landscapes” allow her moments of
“clarity” (116), when she realizes that her loss has not robbed her sense of identity as her
sons’ mother, which emerges as the central truth of her transient life. In that moment of
Sonali’s reconciliation, the Buddha’s sermon provides a meaningful framework for our lives,
to us readers, journeying with her and searching for a meaning to this unbelievable tragedy. It

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conveys a quiet, calm wisdom, a reprieve in the face of human vulnerability and helplessness.
These moments of clarity allow her (and the readers) a sense of perspective. Nature, the
perpetrator of her great misfortune, also becomes her companion:
Sometimes vast isolated landscapes allow me this. Recently, . . . in sub-Arctic
Sweden, on the deserted shores of a lake of ice, surrounded by naked birches
sheathed in frozen fog, each branch glowing like a stag’s antlers in velvet in that
mellow light. Immersed in that endless white, I knew I was their mother, my horror
dormant, or not that relevant even.
(116)
The wheel has turned a full circle, it seems. Her journey away from nature ends with her
coming back to it. On leaving this tortured narrative, we could legitimately echo Jameson’s
words on apocalypse: that “its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to
dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future. . .” (Jameson 1982: 152). The untold risks in
nature and culture appear inextricable and unpredictable. The pastoral, which had lingered
on, then been ousted by the apocalyptic, returns limping, only to be overwhelmed by the
unimaginable scale of the apocalypse.
Lily Yulianti Farid’s “Lake” also grapples with scale effects as it attempts to link global
ecological risks with individual destinies. It implicitly foregrounds the efficacy of narrative as
the bridge between the local and the global and also sets up a dialogue between apocalyptic
moments in nature and culture. It links the impulse to narrate with the sudden disappearance
of Lake Beloye in Central Russia and the disappearance of the narrator Zara’s sister, Fayza, in
Jakarta. Farid, popularly known as Ly, is a journalist and writer, born and raised in Makassar,
Indonesia.1 She spreads her year between Melbourne, Australia and Makassar, Indonesia.
The focaliser of “Lake” is Zara, a limnologist, whose study of lakes takes her to far-flung
regions of the planet. When the story opens, a group of Zara’s colleagues are in a small
restaurant on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Creative urges and ecological impulses jostle with
each other as Zara confides to her fellow researchers her plan to write a story in memory of
her missing sister, Fayza:
All their attention is focused on Zara’s plan, which seems so out of place amid the
snippets of conversation about changes in the ecosystem, particularly ones resulting
from reclamation, sedimentation, and evaporation of lakes.
(84)
Zara’s story is not going to be about ecology, she claims, but about love. “Do any of you
have an interesting story about love or life? I want to write a novel in memory of my
sister. . .” (84). Her creative energies are hence presented as firmly separated from her research
pursuits. Yet, this is not quite accurate because the narrative opens with a description of
an imaginary lake, which Zara declares will form part of her fictional tale and, in the eco-
consciousness that permeates it, geography, geology, despair and hope combine:
The immense basin entices bees, grasshoppers, and birds, and causes the wind to
hasten the union of pollen with the pistils of wild plants that circle its edge. . . . After
a few months have passed and the land that had slid off surrounding slopes begins to
harden, an ever-growing number of visitors come to the lake’s shore to recollect the
massive landslide and to try to calculate how many people had died or were lost;
how large an area of land had been displaced; and how many kilograms of asphalt
road had been torn up to completely isolate the area. The basin, like an immense

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earthenware bowl bestowed by nature in just one night, was now filled with water
on which lotus flowers would grow, in which fish would come to live, and whose
bottom would be covered with algae.
(83, italics in original)
Zara’s interest in lakes that disappear and/or appear overnight is emphasised in this passage. But
equally significant is the hope that permeates it, where the lake, despite being the product of a
geographical devastation that caused untold grief, would once again become a beautiful
landmark. This points to the core of the angst that drives the plot forward. Zara’s sister, Fayza,
a social activist, has gone missing. No one knows what’s happened to either her or her fellow
activists. Ecological hazards and social risks get integrated and are inseparable. Zara’s profes-
sional enthusiasm is offset by her personal loss and despair. Throughout, passages that deal with
various ecological problems are surfaced alongside her personal, cultural narrative of love and
loss. Thus, as she bids farewell to her fellow researchers, in her mind she rehearses a made-up
passage, which, like all such in the narrative, is separated from the main text through being
italicised. It talks about the disappearance of the lake in the Russian village of Bolotnikovo:
At the base of the lake are a church and the houses that had mysteriously vanished
seventy years before. And now the lake had disappeared, in just a single night, like a
huge bathtub whose stopper had been pulled and its waters sucked out by a
mysterious force . . . But what happened to the fish, the moss, the algae and
tadpoles? . . . An elderly woman says apathetically, “This is all America’s doing.”
(86; this and all ensuing italicised passages as in original)
The apocalyptic imagery of the passage that blends well with the mystery and anxiety and
ends on a note of abrupt irony, in fact, captures the mood that pervades the entire narrative,
which is a strange mixture of missionary zeal when it comes to uncovering ecological facts
versus a cynicism bordering on apathy when it comes to discussing the socio-political scene.
This mood is explained by Melanie Budianta (2010) in the Introduction to the collection:
“Lake” reminds us of the New Order political climate [in Indonesia], in which the
Soeharto (sic) regime (1966–1998) ruled by suppressing critical voices. This was a
time of centralized government and corrupt petty officials.
(xiii)
As Zara ponders the strange superstitions that she recorded in Bolotnikovo in the course of
her research and wonders if Fayza would like “her stories of the mysterious beings that lived
in the lake and who were said to appear only to abduct human beings” (87), the tone shifts
abruptly and now the italicised sentence that follows focuses sharply away from natural
mysteries to cultural ones: “And just what kind of being was it that abducted you, Fayza?”(87)
Thus, the political abduction of her activist sister and the disappearance of the lake converge
to set up connections between risks to individual lives and risks to the wellbeing of the planet.
The complex problems, both social and ecological, refuse to be reduced to bucolic simplicity.
The pastoral seems far away from this complex life. As Zara waits for her flight at Schiphol
Airport, she ponders Earth’s mysteries.
She thought of the two lakes in two different places: one created almost instantly,
following an earthquake and massive landslide; the other ingested in an instant by a
secret cavern in the Earth’s belly, which had taken into its maw everything that had
once been above it.
(87)

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But the troubling question related to her sister will not go away: “What kind of stories and
people must she create to accompany Fayza’s own horrific tale?”(87) Personal worries mingle with
her ecological passion. Though the text deploys an apocalyptic rhetoric, it balances it with a
social consciousness in what Graham Huggan (2013) in Nature’s Saviours labels an eco-
cosmopolitan understanding of planeterity, which “forces collective acknowledgement of the
social and environmental threats that face us, and insists on the need for global cooperation in
the face of these” (88). Collective action becomes imperative.
Zara’s colleague is concerned about her, wondering if her depression,
from all the days she had spent noting in her journal fluctuations in temperature and
soil acidity, along with changes in vegetation. . . . Or maybe, the many miles she has
spent traversing the lake-lands and plains of Finland before going to the Netherlands
to visit areas where lakes once had been then had disappeared, had instilled in Zara
the inspiration to convey a noble message, like a holy man after finishing a long
term of meditation.
(85)
But Zara is no messiah. Though she plays with the idea of writing about ideal love, her
motivations are more pragmatic and are rooted in the real. Her scientific curiosity is centred
on conveying facts: “In the past, Fayza, the site of Schiphol Airport was a lake. People called it
‘Haarlemmermeer’. It was not a calm and refreshing lake . . . but a fierce and raging battlefield for Dutch
and Spanish forces” (89; italics in original). Despite her attempts at creative writing, Zara rarely
strays from established facts. She recalls that it was because of her sister that she learned to
love lakes and to study “lakes, ponds, reservoirs: any kind of land-based recess in which fresh
water pooled” (88–89). But paradoxically, Fayza “chose to live a life behind resistance
banners” (89). The narrative see-saws between two kinds of consciousness-raising: about the
state of the politically corrupt nation and the state of the unstable planet, moving between
apocalyptic images and Ulrich Beck’s “risk narrative” (1992). The two intersect with Fayza,
the point of origin for both. Her vision catalysed her little sister Zara to become aware of
both the environmental apocalypse to come and the political crises in the nation. Zara’s
words to Fayza before her disappearance are therefore timely and critical. They explain her
love of lakes but also the probable cause of her activism and disappearance.
Almost since time immemorial, Fayza, people have been eliminating the lakes of this
planet in order to expedite their ever more evil and greedy plans. In this country,
lakes are filled in to become farmland. Swamps are transformed into industrial zones
and toll roads. But when a lake disappears, the landscape’s brilliance also vanishes,
bringing tears to the eyes of the hunters of light in this lowland area.
(90)
Back in Jakarta, Zara accompanies her parents to the eighth annual memorial to the nine
missing activists, including her sister. Their families and friends commiserate with each other
and angry voices demand acknowledgement, reparation and an apology from the govern-
ment. Zara recalls the final exchange with her sister with ironic bitterness:
Be careful, Fayza. . .
You’re the one who should be careful, Zara, living in a foreign country.
(92)
Zara wanted so much to return to the time that conversation took place. She regretted never
having really expressed her fear:

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 Chitra Sankaran

Fayza, you are the one who should be more careful in our own homeland. . .
(92)
Zara’s thoughts at the end of the memorial service collapse the two concerns (environmental
and socio-political) that propel the narrative forward: “Zara . . . recalled the lake in Bolotni-
kovo, which had vanished in the night. The same thing that had happened to Fayza” (91).
Hence, apocalyptic and risk narratives coalesce to reveal the intricate network of issues at the
micro and macro levels that contribute to socio-political dangers and ecological destruction.
Frederick Buell, in “A Short History of Environmental Apocalypse”, talks about how
levels and consciousness of risk have escalated such that “risk today is not finally manageable
or limitable. Increased consciousness of it haunts us far more than any sense of ends to come”
(2010: 30). Buell discusses how the conversion of “the rhetoric of apocalyptic irrevocability”
into “temporal irresolution of world risk society” has deep implications. The uncertainties of
risk “opens up new sites for action and coalitions for change”. This, he claims, reveals “the
creeping spread of crisis” into the “physical, social and psychological spaces” of our everyday
life (Buell 2010: 31). Zara’s description of the plight of the bereaved families near the
conclusion of “Lake” approximates to this “creeping spread of crisis”. Her comment can be
extrapolated to all environmentally-conscious humans: “. . . the people here had remained
trapped in a mysterious tunnel so long that there was no sign of light at its end” (90). To
return then to Jameson and explore the representational quality of these texts emerging from
the margins and rooted in specific events in their communal and/or personal histories, is to
arrive at the idea that these specific moments predict or set up warnings about our present and
possible future(s).
These scenarios give glimpses of the unpredictable futures to come . . . that can also be our
present. Deriniyagala’s text demonstrates the false sense of control over nature and her
surroundings that the representative “elite academic” from Western institutions of privilege
had entertained all her life, and how this is blown apart in a single instance of climate
catastrophe. Farid’s “Lake” teaches the truth that in the face of an increasingly unpredictable
nature and a planet at risk, the one important power for change is the power to narrate both
human predicaments and nature’s intractability. Both texts point to pervasive risks that suffuse
both nature and culture.

Note
1 Lily Yulianti Farid is deeply committed to the Indonesian arts and literary scene and is the founder/
director of Makassar International Writers Festival and Rumata’ Artspace.

Works cited
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage, 1992.
Botkin, Daniel B. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University
Press, 1990.
Budianta, Melanie. “Introduction.” Family Room, edited by Lily Yulianti Farid. Lontar, 2010, pp. ix–xii.
Buell, Frederick. “A Short History of Environmental Apocalypse.” Future Ethics: Climate Change and
Apocalyptic Imagination, edited by Stefan Shrimshire. Continuum International, 2010.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Cory, Pamela Libre. “Love, Land and Language: An Erotics of Place.” May 2012. 10 August 2016. http://
rwwsoundings.com/wpcontent/uploads/2012/05/Cory-1.pdf.
Deraniyagala, Sonali. Wave: A Memoir of Life after the Tsunami. Vintage Books, 2013.
Farid, Lily Yulianti. “Lake.” Family Room. Translated by John H. McGlynn. Lontar, 2010, pp. 83–92.

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Huggan, Graham. Nature’s Saviours: Celebrity Conservationists in the Television Age. Routledge, 2013.
Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9.2
(1982): 147–58.
Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity.
Penguin, 2006.
Slovic, Scott. “Oh, Lovely Slab: Robinson Jeffers, Stone Work, and the Locus of the Real.” Essays in
Ecocriticism, edited by Nirmaldasan Nirmal Selvamony and Alex K Rayson. Sarup and Sons, 2012,
pp. 82–113.
Tal, Kali. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Waites, Elizabeth A. Trauma and Survival: Post-Traumatic and Dissociative Disorders in Women. Norton, 1993.
Williams, Terry Tempest. An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field. Vintage-Random House, 1995.

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 32
ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS
AND ENVIRONMENTAL
COMMUNICATION IN
CHINA
Chen Hong

Since the founding of Friends of Nature, the first real environmental non-governmental
organization (NGO) of China, in 1994, Chinese environmental NGOs as a whole have
developed tremendously over a period of more than two decades.1 A survey conducted
by All-China Environment Federation reveals a total number of 3,289 environmental
NGOs in Mainland China up to October 2008, of which 1,309 have been initiated
and partly sponsored by the government, 1,382 are community organizations based in
universities, 90 are branches of international environmental organizations in China, and
508 are grass-roots environmental organizations2 The survey report published in 2008 as
Environmental Blue Book particularly points out the rapid growth of grass-roots environ-
mental NGOs such as Friends of Nature, whose number doubled in the three years
between 2005 and 2008 (ACEF 2008: 3). One reason for such rapid growth is
presumably the change of the role of environmental NGOs in China. The changes
experienced by Chongqing Green Volunteers Federation, one of the earliest and most
influential environmental NGOs in China, from finding fault with polluters to being an
adviser and assistant of the government, is rather typical among such organizations (Wang
and Wang 2012: 54). Environmental Blue Book confirms this observation by stating that
“[Chinese] environmental NGOs [. . .] have provided a good supplement to the environ-
mental protection of the government” (ACEF 2008: 34). The fact that about 40 percent
of Chinese environmental NGOs have government backing and that their number is
more than twice as much as that of their grass-root counterparts also indicates the leading
position of the government in environmental protection.
Therefore, it is crucial for grass-roots environmental NGOs in China, which is the focus of
our attention in this chapter, to communicate effectively with the government on behalf of
the public. In fact, they are expected to function as the mediator or “bridge between the
government and the public” (Wang and Wang 2012: 457). The following section shows,
using two particular cases, how environmental communications actually work in China and
what changes have taken place with the NGOs and their ways of communication in a period
of over ten years.

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 Environmental NGOs in China

Case one: academics, environmental NGOs, and anti-dam actions

On January 5, 2005, the sudden death of a young Chinese anthropologist named Xiao
Liangzhong aroused much attention in the media. It is believed that he died from extreme
fatigue, both physical and mental, caused by his relentless devotion to the activist movement
against a dam construction project in the Hutiaoxia area on the Jinsha, the upper branch of
the Yangtze River.3 Only 13 days after Xiao’s death, the state Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) ordered the closing of 26 illegal power stations, including one on the Jinsha.
For his contribution to the protection of the precious ecological system and cultural heritage
of the Jinsha basin, Xiao was awarded “The Top Ten Honorable Men of the Nation in the
Year 2005” by Phoenix TV.4
I published a paper in 2016 about Xiao to explore the connection between his ethnolo-
gical writings about the ethnic groups in the Jinsha basin in Yunnan province, where he
himself came from, and his leading role in the Jinsha basin protection activity. In that paper, I
discuss issues including:
the interplay between local opinions and professional views in expressing and
promoting ecological consciousness, the value of ethnological narratives in achieving
a balanced view about traditions and changes in terms of both culture and the
environment, the importance of local knowledge as well as local identities in the
formation of a sense of community crucial for the practice of environmental
protection, and the benefits of combining individual scholarly work and public
participation in environmental action.
(Chen 2016: 11–12)5
To me at that time, Xiao’s case provided an example of a good combination between
scholarly work and environmental activism. But it is actually also a successful case in which a
highly-motivated individual worked in collaboration with the media and NGOs to make his
voice, or rather the local voices, heard by both the public and the government. In his second
and posthumous book of ethnographic studies titled The Xiana’s: A One-hundred-year Story of a
Tibetan Family, he used a lot of dialogues to present local voices that together create what
Lawrence Buell (2005) called “narratives of community,” from which one came to know
what the local people most needed or cared about. It is a knowledge that became crucially
important in the face of such “common issues” as the dam construction in the Jinsha basin.6
But, just as Xiao had realized, to confront the urgent situation at the moment, the written
narratives of community presented in his ethnographies were perhaps not as directly relevant
or effective as the oral narratives that members of the Jinsha community, to which he himself
also belonged, might produce in order to plead for their rights.
In the last year of his life, Xiao often attended meetings and conferences in Beijing with
the data he collected in his home village. In presenting a paper at the United Nations
Symposium on Hydropower and Sustainable Development held in Beijing in October 2004,
he made a careful analysis of the potential threats of the dam planned to be built in the Hutiaoxia
area to the ecology, cultural properties, and livelihood of the local people in the Jinsha basin.7 He
was also remembered to have criticized those hydropower companies for only considering the
feasibility of their projects from a technical point of view, and for “showing little concern about
the ecological and geological limitations, and paying even less attention to the opinions and
needs of the native people in the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage Site” (qtd. in Xiang
2006: 131).8 It was owing to his effort that the need to protect the Hutiaoxia and the Jinsha
basin from impending dam construction was realized by domestic NGOs and publicized by

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the media. Moreover, he encouraged the local villagers of the Jinsha basin to speak out for
their own rights in matters concerning dam construction. It was with his help that two
villagers got the chance to attend international academic conferences, in Beijing and Thailand
respectively, and proposed the so-called “participation rights of natives” (Xiang 2006: 131).
Several environmental NGOs have given their support to Xiao Liangzhong and the
villagers in this case, including the aforementioned Friends of Nature and the famous Green
Home, whose members are all from the media. In fact, a league of nine environmental NGOs
was quickly formed in August 2004 to plead formally to the government to stop the dam
construction in Hutiaoxia, mainly on the grounds of environmental protection. This strategic
union of NGOs immediately drew the attention of the media. The official Xinhua News
Agency issued a report at the end of 2004 to praise the united action of NGOs against the
Hutiaoxia dam construction as an extraordinary case of “vigorous expression of the opinions
of the public” (Zhai and Gu n.d.).
The emphasis of the report on the involvement of the public and NGOs in the policy
decisions of the government is an indicator of an important transition experienced by Chinese
environmental NGOs around that time. For Chongqing Green Volunteers Federation, the
transition is one from “negative environmental protection” to “positive environmental
protection,” from exposing polluters and forcing the government to deal with them to
giving constructive advice to the government. For Friends of Nature, which focused on
nature education and exposure of individual cases in its early stage, this shift of its
attention to increasing public involvement in environmental protection was an important
and timely change.
At the time when Xiao Liangzhong and the NGOs started the anti-dam campaign in
2004, only a limited number of local people on the Jinsha basin were aware of the ecological
consequences of dam-building, but things have changed owing to the efforts of NGOs and
individuals like Xiao Liangzhong. In June 2009, when a group of journalists went to
investigate the two hydropower projects on the Jinsha that had just been stopped by the
state EPA, they found that, unlike the earlier situation when such projects were mainly
opposed by NGOs, the local villagers were now able to see the danger of these projects
more clearly and comprehensively with their newly-acquired ecological consciousness.
While they only worried about their own farm fields in the past, they had come to have a
much wider concern about such things as the safety of the geologically and culturally
unique Hutiaoxia and the habitat of fish in the river, because, as one of the villagers in
Hutiao County realized, “no matter how much money those hydropower projects can
make, such things [as fish habitat] cannot be acquired with money” (Zhou n.d.). It is only
when environmentalism has taken root inside the villagers that the expertise of academics
and NGOs may be in agreement with local opinions and may therefore be said to express
the opinions of the public.
Now more than ten years have passed since Xiao died. What challenges are faced by
Chinese environmental NGOs nowadays and what modes of communication are they adopting
with both the public and the government?

Case two: environmental NGOs, progress, and problems

The focus of this case is on a young environmental NGO located in Shanghai—Shanghai
Daorong Conservation and Sustainable Development Center. Founded in 2011, Daorong is
devoted to water source protection of the Upper Huangpu River at the eastern end of the
Yangtze River, the source of drinking water that supplies a population of nearly 10 million

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out of a total of nearly 28 million in the city of Shanghai. But rather than working on the
point of the Upper Huangpu River only, Daorong set up a non-point pollution control
platform that covers the whole of Taihu Basin, a huge area of 36,900 square kilometers
including most of Shanghai and parts of the neighboring Jiangshu province and Zhejiang
province as the main water source for the Huangpu River. Actually, Daorong is the only
NGO working on the basin level among all those dealing with drinking water problems
caused by non-point pollution. For that reason and others, Daorong has a strong reputation
for professionalism among Chinese environmental NGOs.
On July 17, 2018, I interviewed the founder of Daorong, Mr. Shen Liping, in Shanghai. A
young man in his late thirties, Shen has had rich experiences in the field of environmental
protection, as he worked with the World Wide Fund for Nature, also known as World
Wildlife Fund (WWF), for eight years before he set up his own organization. He is also the
owner of two organic farms, one in Shanghai and the other in Jiangshu province, as part of
Daorong’s experimentation with methods of water quality control.
The interview began with a discussion of Xiao Liangzhong’s case. From his position as an
NGO leader, Shen regarded this case as a rare successful example of active involvement of
Chinese NGOs in an important protection work that eventually affected the government’s
decision. But he was conservative about the real effects of this case on the government’s
policy concerning dam-building and hydropower development, as he pointed out the fact
that the EPA in China has no legal enforcement power and its orders are often made invalid
by the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR), which has real administrative power over the
use of water resources.
Comparing this case with other similar cases that had happened later, Shen observed some
changes. He mentioned the anti-PX movement that had taken place in the city of Xiamen in
2007, in which the local citizens’ protests against the construction of a toxic chemical plant
got positive response from the local government. The construction was stopped after a series
of negotiations between the government and representatives of the protesters, with an
inexplicable absence of environmental NGOs in the whole process. From this case—as a
typical example of civil environmental movements that have happened rather frequently in
China since 2005, when more and more environmental problems were gradually exposed—
Shen observed a higher level of public participation owing to increased environmental
awareness of the public. But along with this good change, there is also an obvious setback
on the side of NGOs, which Shen attributed mainly to their “deficiency in mechanism and
capacity” that had made them unable to make prompt and professional responses to the
specific environmental problems involved so as to play a leading role in those movements.
The issue of the professionalism of Chinese environmental NGOs is thus raised in the
interview. Shen regarded the diversification of NGOs as a result of the diversity of environ-
mental problems in China as a necessary step towards the professional development of NGOs
in subdivided fields. According to him, when numerous professional people who used to
work with international organizations or who had overseas study background began to join
Chinese environmental NGOs, or even found their own NGOs, as in his own case, around
2010 and afterwards, they started to face environmental problems in subdivided fields directly
and professionally. Daorong under Shen’s leadership is one of these organizations, which is
still rather small in number, that has a specific scope of work with a specific goal. During the
interview, Shen reflected on his past working experiences with an international NGO
(WWF) with gratitude and admitted that what had distinguished Daorong from the majority
of Chinese environmental NGOs, such as its operation methods and its monitoring and
evaluation techniques, were actually all modelled on those of WWF. For instance, when

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dealing with an environmental case, Daorong tends to put more emphasis on a direct
environmental output or what is called an “environmental goal” rather than the adminis-
trative process, such as issuing a notification of rectification, as most other Chinese environ-
mental NGOs usually do. In some cases, they had set the decline of contaminants of a water
conservation district as their goal. Or in others, they aimed at filing a lawsuit against a
polluting enterprise. Shen was obviously proud of Daorong’s high rate of successful fulfill-
ment of its environmental goals.
The interview then turned to the supposed function of Chinese NGOs as the mediator or
“bridge between the government and the public” (Wang and Wang 2012: 457). Regarding
which particular channels Daorong uses to communicate with the public, Shen mentioned
brochures, television interviews, charity markets, and farm open days. But the most com-
monly used channel in recent years, he said, is We Media, including blogs and WeChat. Of
the two, WeChat, a free app for instant messaging on smart terminals (which came out in
2011), is extremely efficient in spreading scientific information, publicizing environmental
events, and exposing environmental problems through its powerful “moments.”9 Daorong
has attempted to publicize information about water quality problems in Shanghai through
“moments,” often with an obvious effort to make scientific facts and data accessible to the
public by using popular internet phrases, interesting graphics, and imagined dialogues with the
reader. It’s no exaggeration to say that the rapid growth of Chinese people’s awareness of
environmental problems in the last few years since 2011 owes a lot to WeChat and its
“moments.” But to Shen, there is still a long way to go to transform the public’s environmental
awareness into environmental action. As far as Daorong is concerned, environmental actions on
the public’s side do not mean open protests but rather the public’s willingness to change their
behavior with regard to the consumption of water and agricultural products, which is then
reflected in the amount of public donation to Daorong’s protection work. Shen did not see a
high level of willingness in this aspect. In 2017, Daorong has successfully raised an annual
donation of nearly 10 million yuan, most of which came from private foundations and
enterprises. Only a small part, less than 10 percent, came from public donation, which was
raised mainly through the “moments” of WeChat. Shen was sure that, compared with the total
hits of Daorong’s donation promotions on WeChat and the number of people who have read
about those promoted projects, the actual number of public donors and their average amount of
donation are fairly small. Shen mentioned a particular project as an example. It was a project
aimed at the daily monitoring and tracking of water quality control in the drinking water
protection area. They set a target of 100,000 yuan in donations from Shanghai, which, if
considering the huge population of Shanghai, would have been an easy target to meet. But after
an attempt at promoting the project in local universities and residence communities, by face-to-
face communication mainly and WeChat secondarily, they ended up with only 20,000 yuan.
Some of the donations they received were as small as one cent or ten cents, which meant to
Shen that the donors did not really care about the work that Daorong was doing.
To explain the apparent contradiction between the different levels of public participation
between the above-mentioned cases of public donations and that of the anti-PX movement
in Xiamen, Shen shared his thoughts about the concept of “public participation.” In his
opinion, a real or high level of public participation is a case in which the majority of the
participants are those who have no interests involved in what they are supporting or
defending, whereas the public in the case of the anti-PX movement in Xiamen was made
up mainly of those whose interests are felt to be threatened. Judged by this definition,
environmental movements or projects in China on the whole have a very low level of public
participation. As Shen explained, though, Chinese people generally have a sense of the

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environmental problems they are facing, such as water pollution and soil pollution common
in modern agriculture, they do not see themselves as directly and personally responsible for
causing or solving these problems, nor significantly affected by such things as contaminated
vegetables, fruit or meat. As a result, they do not want to make any changes with themselves
nor contribute to environmental protection.
As far as public participation is concerned, Shen sounds rather pessimistic from the
experiences of Daorong and many other NGOs. But there are actually also a few other
organizations which seem to have done a better job in that aspect and the aspect of
environmental communication. The Institute of Public Environment (IPE) is a case in point
for relying very much on public participation for collecting environmental problems by using
GPS and the data visualization methods developed by the IPE itself. In this way, it encourages
the public to get directly involved in the work of environmental protection. In the case of the
IPE, apps such as The Pollution Map and The Blue Map that help citizens know about the status
of pollution around them and therefore alert them to environmental problems as a whole are
certainly good communication tools or channels.
Compared with the diversified ways NGOs are able to communicate with the public,
NGOs’ communication with the government tends to be more restricted and formal. In the
case of Daorong, it usually communicates with the local government for specific cases.
Currently they are working on the monitoring of the so-called “black and smelly waters,”
which is actually part of a nationwide, government-initiated campaign against water
pollution. Once pollution is detected in a water body or part of it, Daorong would
write a formal letter to a relevant department of the local government and ask for
information disclosure about the problematic water body. If the government agrees in its
reply letter, Daorong would then go ahead with locating sources of pollution and
proposing solutions to the government. If the government rejects in its reply letter on
the ground of the rule of secrecy, Daorong might launch a public welfare lawsuit against
the government. In fact, Daorong has made data disclosure applications of this kind
several times, with both success and failure. In Shen’s view, environmental NGOs in
China as a whole have contributed enormously to pushing the government to be more
open to the public by making the most frequent requests for information transparency
among NGOs in various fields.
When asked about his hope for the Chinese government from his point of view as an
environmental NGO leader, Shen said he hoped that the government could work with
environmental NGOs on a deeper level of policy-making. Considering China’s political
system and administrative systems, he added: “In China, only the government can solve
environmental problems.” The fact remains that the government, enterprises, and civil society
share the same goal: to respond to the direct demands of society and stimulate the develop-
ment of society. For that goal, they should all keep communicating and developing.

Notes
1 Though the first officially registered environmental NGO, the Chinese Society for Environmental
Sciences, was established in 1978, it is not considered “real” because of its government backing. In
fact, organizations such as CSES are sometimes called GNGO (Government NGO) because they are
initiated and partly sponsored by the government. What they do share with grass-roots NGOs is that
they also rely on donations for doing their work. Besides, from the public’s point of view, it is easier
to communicate with GNGOs than with the government. The grass-root and formally-registered
(with Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China) Friends of Nature is generally
regarded as the forerunner of Chinese environmental NGOs (Deng 2010: 200).

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2 The large number of environmental community organizations in universities is mainly due to the fact
that they are not required to register with the government.
3 The relations between the Yangtze, the Jinsha, and the Hutiaoxia are as follows: The Jinsha is the
upper reach of the Yangtze, which is the longest river in China. Running south-eastwardly through
the whole of Yunnan and part of Sichuan provinces, the Jinsha measures 2,316 kilometers, with the
basin area of 340,000 square kilometers. Where the river turns suddenly north-eastward near the
small town of Shigu in Lijiang, Yunnan, it forms one of the deepest canyons on earth. This is the
famous Hutiaoxia.
4 Phoenix TV is one of the most popular and influential TV stations among the global Chinese.
5 The translation of the quotation, which is originally in Chinese, is the author’s.
6 The two quoted phrases are from Lawrence Buell. In his review about ecojustice revisionism, Buell
approved its focus on “community issue and narratives of community” (2005: 115).
7 The paper is titled “Relations between Dam Construction and Potential Emigration and Cultural
Heritage in Large River Valley” (Water Resources Development Research 1 (2005): 61–63).
8 The said World Natural Heritage is made up three rivers and their basin areas in Yunnan province,
including the Jinsha.
9 WeChat was devised by Tencent, a leading provider of Internet value-added services in China. Up to
the spring of 2016, it had covered more than 94 percent of smart phones in China, which resulted in
806 million active customers per month. One of its major functions, “Circle of Friends” or
“moments” as it’s called in the English version of WeChat, is so efficient in spreading information
that it’s actually described as “virus dissemination.”

Works cited
All-China Environment Federation. Environmental Blue Book on the Development of Chinese Environmental
NGOs. All-China Environment Federation, 2008.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Blackwell, 2005.
Chen, Hong. “Ethnographic Writing and Environmentalism: The Case of Young Scholar Xiao Liangz-
hong” (Minzu Zhi Shuxie yu Huanbao Shijian: Yi Nianqing Xuezhe Xiao Liangzhong Wei Li). Siyi 3
(2016): 11–22.
Deng, Guosheng. “Several Developmental Indicators for China’s Environmental NGOs.” China Nonprofit
Review 2 (2010): 200–12.
Wang, Yongchen, and Wang Aijun. Watching: Media Investigation into Chinese Environmental NGOs
(Shouwang: Zhongguo Huanbao NGO Meiti Diaocha). Chinese Environmental Sciences Publisher, 2012.
Xiang, Ying. “Xiao Liangzhong: The Watcher for the Jinsha” (Xiao Liangzhong: Jinshajiang de Shouwang
Zhe). The Xiana’s: A One-Hundred-Year Story of a Tibetan Family (Xiana Renjia: Yi Ge Zhangzhu Jiating de
Bai Nian Gushi). Guang Xi People’s Press, 2006, pp. 128–35.
Zhai, Wei, and Gu Ruizhen. “The Rise of NGOs to Reflect a Changed Social Ecology” (Minjian Zuzhi
Boxing Zheshe Shehui Bianqian). http://news.163.com/41218/0/17SJ3FFQ0001124T.html
(Accessed on July 12, 2018).
Zhou, Xiaofang. “Behind the Stopping of China-Energy and China-Power Projects” (Hua Neng Hua
Dian Xiangmu Jiao Ting Beihou). http://finance.sina.com.cn/g/20090618/02372900914.shtml
(Accessed on July 12, 2018).

390
 AFTERWORD
Homero Aridjis and Betty Ferber

One smoggy day in February 1985 we read a letter a poet/philosopher friend had sent to a
newspaper complaining about the deadly air pollution in Mexico City. We knew no
attention would be paid to one lone voice, but it occurred to us that a call to action from a
substantial number of writers and artists living in the city might get a response. We did some
research, wrote a declaration and made phone calls, until we decided to stop at 100
signatories. In 1985 fax machines were a novelty in Mexico, and we certainly didn’t have
one. Homero took photocopies of the typewritten statement—embargoed until March 1—in
person to the Mexican newspapers, foreign correspondents and press agencies AP, UPI, EFE
and AFP, and we waited to see what would happen.
We had struck a nerve. Media coverage was generous: a leading broadsheet daily printed
the declaration and signatures on a full page, the English-language paper published its own
translation as “A Declaration by 100 Intellectuals and Artists Protesting Air Pollution in
Mexico City,” along with an interview with Homero. Agencies picked up the news.
Writers and artists have traditionally been public figures in Mexico, their opinions
respected, occasionally heeded. Homero and others who had signed the letter were inter-
viewed by the press and featured on TV talk shows, and after one commentator referred to
the Grupo de los 100 (Group of 100), the name stuck. Six weeks after the Declaration’s
launch, the Group held a multifaceted show of art works and writings by Mexico’s most
prestigious creators. On the opening night hundreds watched “Ajax in Mixcoac,” a theatre
piece whose message was, “If we are to survive, we have to remember the old gods. And will
we survive? We humans are the earth’s antibodies. We will save the planet.” Soon afterwards
we published a book based on the show.
This was quite possibly the first exhibit anywhere in the world of what is today known as
ecological art (or ecoart). Over the years many of the Group’s members, whose numbers have
grown constantly since 1985, have incorporated environmental concerns into their work as
artists and writers. For example, Helen Escobedo’s installation titled Black Garbage, Black
Tomorrow (1991), featuring ten tons of discarded rubbish on a three-foot-wide path along 100
yards of the capital’s Chapultepec Park, had a significant impact on park users’ awareness of
their actions.
Our efforts were focused on uncovering the truth and making it public, putting pressure
on government and industry to take action and fostering environmental awareness among the

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population. We tracked down sources, carried out investigations, verified information,

developed relationships with the press. In those pre-Internet days print media and television
reigned supreme, the only ways to get the news out. For important issues we held well-
attended press conferences. We would often make the front page, garnering headlines and
denouncing air pollution with the real facts. Homero regularly went to the office where data
from the air pollution monitoring system was collected but kept confidential, and a
sympathizer would slip him the printouts of all pollutants from all the stations. We analyzed
the data and issued press releases revealing the real levels of air pollution in Mexico City. The
homegrown Metropolitan Air Quality Index (IMECA), concocted in 1982, is still used to
report these levels, rather than using micrograms per cubic meter, making it virtually
impossible for most people to compare Mexico City’s levels with the World Health
Organization’s air quality guidelines. In February 1987, when thousands of birds fell dead
from the sky in a downtown park and Homero spoke often on TV about thermal inversions,
Mexico City residents interviewed thought this was a new disease caused by pollution.
At a meeting in April 1985, we gave several cabinet members and Mexico City’s mayor a
list of eight urgent actions. Our first demand—that lead be removed from gasoline and sulfur
from diesel fuel—was satisfied after we published an open letter to President Carlos Salinas de
Gortari in May 1991 divulging research that found alarming lead levels in a broad cross-
section of children in Mexico (including the American ambassador’s young son and daugh-
ter). Homero was invited to give a speech in representation of civil society at the World
Environment Day celebration presided over by the president. When he returned home, the
Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology (SEDUE) called to tell him that the president
wanted to get rid of lead. Use of lead in colored pencils and painted toys was prohibited, lead
soldering for cans was banned, by 1997 lead was fully eliminated from gasoline sold in
Mexico, and lead content in pottery has been drastically reduced.
We defended the right of citizens to be informed about pollution levels in Mexico City.
In January 1986, SEDUE agreed to publish daily reports of air quality levels in the
metropolitan area.
We proposed taking every car off the streets one day a week, according to its license plate
number, and kept insisting on this in the media, until finally the “Hoy No Circula” or “Don’t
Drive Today” program was put into practice, toward the end of 1989. The program still exists.
We urged the government to move the most highly polluting industries, such as cement
and paper factories and the refinery in Azcapotzalco, out of the metropolitan area. A year
later, Rufino Tamayo, Octavio Paz and Homero were invited to attend the closing of the
Loreto and Peña Pobre paper mill’s cellulose plant. After two weeks of record-breaking air
pollution, in March 1991 the president closed the 58-year-old Azcapotzalco refinery. Twenty
years later the site was turned into a park.
Homero has said that air pollution is the most fairly distributed commodity in Mexico City.
We demanded a halt to the construction of an airport extension which would have
obliterated a bird and wildlife sanctuary in Lake Texcoco. Our opposition gathered momen-
tum, and the project was cancelled. Five years later, “Opposing Mexico City’s New Airport
May Ruffle a Few Feathers,” the Group of 100’s April 11, 2001 ad in the New York Times,
endorsed by 21 Mexican and United States NGOs, called on the Mexican government to
cancel the construction of a new airport that would destroy 30 years of environmental
restoration in Lake Texcoco, the Valley of Mexico’s prime waterfowl habitat, and increase
the risk of birds colliding with planes. We warned that building on the lake’s muddy, salty
and compressible soil, parts of which sink as much as 12 inches annually, would be
tantamount to building on jello. But it took the death of an ejidatario [a communal

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landowner], who lost his life after taking a beating from the police during a violent protest
against selling communal land for the airport. This led to President Vicente Fox halting the
project, on August 1, 2002. In 2014, President Enrique Peña Nieto announced the construc-
tion of the New International Airport of Mexico City on the dry Texcoco lakebed, situated
on federally owned land. The environmental arguments against it are still valid: subsidence,
bird strikes, flooding, disrupting the Valley of Mexico’s hydrological balance. However, all
opposition was overridden, and the work is ongoing. Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
Mexico’s president as of December 1, 2018, scrapped the new airport, after less than 1% of
the electorate voted in a referendum (which was not legally binding) for its cancellation.
On five consecutive days in late January 1990, Homero published a series of front-page,
in-depth, thoroughly researched articles about the massacre of seven species of sea turtles in
Mexico. The Fisheries Secretary called him, furious that his sources were more reliable than
hers. Our strategy was to build on the attention gained by the articles and make the protest
international. In San Francisco, Earth Island Institute supporters disguised as turtles staged a
demonstration at the Mexican consulate; in London, Greenpeace protested during the visit of
President Salinas de Gortari. More than 70,000 letters were sent to the president, and the
threat of a tourist boycott loomed large. Our telephone was cut off every weekend. We
published a letter to the president, endorsed by more than a hundred international conserva-
tion and environmental groups and scientists and dozens of writers and artists, calling for an
immediate end to the slaughter of sea turtles in Mexico and trade in turtle products. A month
later, at a solemn ceremony in Chapultepec Castle, the president decreed a total and
permanent ban on the capture and commercialization of all species of sea turtles which nest
on Mexican beaches and swim in coastal waters. A year after the ban, Homero visited the site
of the former slaughterhouse in Mazunte, Oaxaca with Todd Steiner, founder of the Sea
Turtle Restoration Project. A stocky man in shorts came up to them to complain, “The
greenbacks are still swimming out there, but we can’t take them. I’d like to get my hands on
that son-of-a-bitch from the Group of 100.” He didn’t recognize Homero.
In 2002, the Group of 100, Wildcoast and the Sea Turtle Conservation Network petitioned
the Vatican to issue an official statement that sea turtle is red meat, and not fish or sea food, to
discourage slaughter of sea turtles during Lent. To combat the erroneous belief that turtle eggs
are an aphrodisiac, the Group of 100 and Wildcoast printed and distributed a poster and a
postcard featuring a bikini-clad Argentine model boasting, “My man doesn’t need sea turtle
eggs because he knows they don’t make him more potent. Turtle eggs are not aphrodisiacs.”
Poaching of eggs continues in Mexico and turtles are still illegally hunted for their flesh,
although on a much smaller scale than 30 years ago. Today sea turtles face the same threats in
Mexico as they do in all the world’s waters: by-catch in fisheries, ghost nets, development of
coastal areas and ingestion of plastic waste and other marine debris. In his biweekly television
commentaries in 2018, Homero has been educating viewers about single-use plastic items and
pressing for their elimination.
Homero grew up in Contepec, Michoacán, a town nestled against Altamirano Hill. Every year
millions of monarch butterflies would arrive from Canada and the United States—as was later
learned—to overwinter at the Plain of the Mule at its summit. This miraculous spectacle has been
an inspiration for his poetry, and the wellspring of his environmental activism. However, in
March 2005 he was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “There used to be rivers of
butterflies, but now there are years when there are no butterflies at all. This is a village full of
ghosts, not of people, but of nature, a paradise lost.”
In 1986, in response to Homero’s personal request to President Miguel de la Madrid, the
monarch butterfly forests were declared protected areas and the Monarch Butterfly Special

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Biosphere Reserve was created. Over the years, through dozens of articles in the press,
television interviews and participation in films such as The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies
and The 11th Hour, Homero blamed illegal logging in the Reserve, chaotic tourism and
devastating climate events for the steady decline in monarch numbers. While Homero was
Mexico’s ambassador to UNESCO, in 2008 he successfully lobbied representatives of the 21
countries on the World Heritage Committee to inscribe the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere
Reserve on the World Heritage List.
By 2014, the monarch population overwintering in Mexico’s high-altitude oyamel forests
had plummeted from 1.1 billion in the 1996 season to 33 million. Monarch butterfly experts
agreed that the main cause of the dizzying drop in monarch numbers was the huge increase in
land planted with genetically modified, herbicide-resistant soybean and corn crops (93 percent
of total soybean acreage and 85 percent of corn acreage in 2013) in the U.S. Corn Belt.
Relentless spraying of herbicides on the fields had destroyed the once abundant milkweed,
the only plants that monarch caterpillars can eat. The monarch butterfly was literally being
starved to death. Homero and Betty proposed to Lincoln Brower, the world’s foremost
monarch butterfly expert, and ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan, founder of Make Way for
Monarchs, that we address a letter to Mexican and US presidents Enrique Peña Nieto and
Barack Obama and the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, asking them to discuss the
future of the monarch butterfly at their upcoming North American Leaders’ Summit, to be
held in Toluca, State of Mexico on February 19–20. Homero, Brower, Nabhan and monarch
scientist Ernest Williams wrote that this would show their governments’ political will to save
the living symbol of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The letter, which was
widely covered in the media, was signed by 200 writers, artists and scientists from 18
countries (Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 87–90). In their final statement, the three leaders pledged
that “Our governments will establish a working group to ensure the conservation of the
monarch butterfly, a species that symbolizes our association” (Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 91).
In May 2015, the White House Pollinator Health Task Force published the National
Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators, which includes habitat
restoration along the monarch’s migratory route through the United States. A 2016 letter
drafted by Brower, Williams and Homero and delivered to Obama, Peña Nieto and Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, signed by monarch experts and several hundred writers, artists,
scientists and environmentalists from around the world, urged the three leaders to discuss the
future of the monarch butterfly at their upcoming summit at the end of June. We wrote that:
Success will require activity within all three countries: mitigation of the loss of
breeding habitat due to milkweed-killing herbicide usage by protecting parcels of
land with milkweeds and native nectar sources; termination of all logging in the
Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve; and a prohibition of mining in the Reserve.
(Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 98–101)
The leaders responded, “We reaffirm our commitment to work collaboratively to achieve our
long term goal of conserving North America’s Monarch migratory phenomena and to ensure that
sufficient habitat is available to support the 2020 target for the eastern Monarch population.”1
Lincoln Brower died in July 2018, leaving the butterflies and the oyamel fir forests bereft
of their greatest champion.
As Homero has written,
If we can save the monarch butterfly and Altamirano Hill, the landscape of our
childhood and the backdrop of our dreams, from the depredation of our fellow

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men, perhaps other human beings can save their hill and their butterfly, and all of us
together can protect Earth from the biological holocaust that threatens it. Because,
after all, is not the long journey of this butterfly through earthly time and space as
fragile and fantastic as the journey of the Earth itself through the firmament?
(Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 45–49)
In September 1991 the Group of 100 held an international meeting of writers, scientists and
environmentalists, The Morelia Symposium: Approaching the Year 2000. Homero and Betty
invited writers and scientists from 20 countries to Mexico to discuss the state of the world as
we approached the end of the millennium. (The 1991 and 1994 Symposia were supported by
the Rockefeller Foundation.) Symposium participants published the Morelia Declaration in
their own countries, and the Declaration, signed by more than 1000 writers, artists, scientists
and members of indigenous groups from 57 nations, was presented to the Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro in 1992. We warned that,
70% of the world’s population lives within 100 miles of the sea. The profligate use of
fossil fuels by the industrialized world is rapidly and irreversibly changing our climate.
Experts stress that the continued rising sea levels and global warming will lead to
massive flooding of coastal areas, creating millions of new environmental refugees on
an even greater scale than we witness annually in countries like Bangladesh.
(Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 344–47)
We called on world leaders at the Earth Summit to sign a Global Climate Change Convention.
Homero and Betty took part in the ’92 Global Forum, the parallel event to the Summit,
where legendary soccer star Pelé drew the biggest crowd, upstaging luminaries like the Dalai
Lama, Jacques Cousteau, Wangari Maathai, Dani Yanomami, Bella Abzug, Ted Turner, Jane
Fonda, Chief Oren Lyon, Al Gore, Jonathan Porritt, Ashok Khosla, Lester Brown, David
Brower, Gus Speth and hundreds more. During the Summit, videos of the Morelia
Symposium were broadcast on Mexico’s Televisa networks.
Homero shared his podium at the Open Speakers Forum with Tom Hayden, and they
urged the creation of an International Court of the Environment. Every night posters made
for the Grupo of 100 by Rufino Tamayo, Red Grooms and Roger von Gunten were taken
from our booth in Flamengo Park, and every morning we replaced them.
The First Ibero-American Summit was held in Guadalajara, Mexico, on July 19, 1991.
Homero was asked to address the 19 Latin American presidents, King Juan Carlos of Spain
and the prime minister of Portugal. He wrote a proposal (Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 155–58)
for a Latin American Ecological Alliance and asked Gabriel García Márquez to read it aloud.
The proposal, signed by Latin America’s leading authors, was published in Mexico’s La
Jornada, Spain’s El País and the New York Times.
A fundamental component of the proposed Alliance “to protect and preserve our nations’
biological diversity, working together in those areas where cooperation is feasible,” would be
the creation of an Amazonian Pact to save “the world’s richest and most complex ecosystem
and its most extensive genetic resources.” Two years earlier, Homero had published two
letters to Brazilian President José Sarney, signed by writers and artists from around the world,
calling on the eight countries whose territory is in the Amazon Basin to halt ecocide and
ethnocide in Amazonia. We said, “invoking national sovereignty to justify crimes against
nature strikes us as puerile and dishonest.”
Homero also suggested establishing a binational eco-archaeological park on the Mexican
and Guatemalan sides of the Usumacinta River; the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor was

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launched in 1997 to protect the region’s ecological connectivity. Today it is the route of drug
traffickers and illegal immigrants, while forests and a gamut of species are under threat in
many sections.
We asked for an agreement to protect sea turtles throughout their migratory routes in the
Americas; in May 2001, the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation
of Sea Turtles came into force.
Other recommendations to the 21 leaders were protection of America’s main migratory
bird flyway along its entire route; enactment of standards and laws throughout our countries
to prevent Latin America from becoming “the waste dump of the industrialized world”;
inclusion of our indigenous peoples in economic development plans, enabling them to live
off their ecosystems, and always with respect for their human rights.
The Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, an area of 19 million square miles surrounding
Antarctica, was established on May 26, 1994 at the International Whaling Commission
meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Homero had campaigned in the press against Japanese
and Norwegian whaling, and was able to get support for the Group of 100’s proposals from
Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, the head of Grupo Televisa, who said he loved to see whales swim
by while at sea on his yacht. He gave orders for notices to be broadcast throughout the day
asking viewers to call the Japanese and Norwegian Embassies demanding an end to whaling
(telephone numbers were provided), and he ordered ample coverage on news programs.
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari took note and instructed the Undersecretary of Fisheries
(who had offered Homero a 50,000-dollar bribe to stop opposing Mexico’s stand with the
Japanese) to get Mexico’s position from Homero Aridjis. Mexico voted for the Sanctuary.
After Serge Dedina (founder of Wildcoast and mayor of Imperial City, California) alerted
us in January 1995 to the plans of Exportadora de Sal, SA (ESSA, jointly owned by
Mitsubishi and the Mexican government) to build the world’s largest industrial saltworks at
the gray whale breeding and calving grounds at Laguna San Ignacio, in Baja California Sur,
Homero denounced the project to the media. As the Mexican government refused to hand
over the environmental impact assessment, we obtained a copy from John Twiss, the first
Executive Director of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, and the following month
Homero published “The Silence of the Whales” (Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 128–31), a
devastating indictment of the threats posed to the gray whale, the lagoon, and a host of
marine and terrestrial plant and animal species. Only 23 lines of the EIA mentioned the gray
whale. Six days later, the National Institute of Ecology turned down the project as presented
in the EIA. At first we campaigned alone, but soon realized we needed allies in Mexico and
abroad. Initially marshalling support from 17 American NGOs for a letter to Mitsubishi that
May, with funding from IFAW, the Animal Welfare Institute and Greenpeace Netherlands
we published a full-page ad in the New York Times and two Mexican newspapers. Sixty
environmental organizations from around the world endorsed the ad, amongst whose signers
were David Brower, Roger Payne, Octavio Paz, Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Atwood and Sir
James Goldsmith. We took the saltworks issue to the June 1995 International Whaling
Commission meeting in Dublin, while ESSA and Mitsubishi ran ads in Mexican and
American papers trumpeting their commitment to “environmental stewardship.”
We continued our strategy to involve as many individuals and groups as possible, sending
out a 100-page dossier to gray whale experts, organizations in Mexico, the US and Europe,
and the World Bank, forming an alliance with fishermen at the lagoon, filing successful
lawsuits against ESSA accusing the company of environmental negligence at its existing
saltworks at Laguna Ojo de Liebre and Guerrero Negro. At one of our press conferences a
well-known performance artist and her troupe staged an encounter between Mitsubishi

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employees and gray whales. In March 1997, now working with NRDC and IFAW, we
brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pierce Brosnan and Glenn Close to see the whales, using
their celebrity status to attract broad media coverage. Subsequent trips (we called them
“missions”) included Mexican lawmakers and entertainment figures and European parliamen-
tarians. Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, whom Homero knew from his days as Mexican
ambassador there, called to ask what he could do, and at Homero’s request he wrote a letter
to President Ernesto Zedillo, which we made public.
It was in November 1997 that Homero received the first of a series of telephoned death
threats, possibly connected to his opposition to the project (or perhaps to his recent election
as International President of PEN, the worldwide association of writers).
Millions of people in Mexico, the US and Canada wrote to Mitsubishi opposing the
saltworks, a coalition of Mexican and American groups plastered Mexico City with signs on
billboards, there were boycotts of Mitsubishi in California, and a UNESCO delegation came
to Mexico at our behest to determine whether Laguna San Ignacio should be declared a
“World Heritage in Danger” site.
President Zedillo cancelled the project on March 2, 2000, claiming it would destroy the
landscape. The real reason was Zedillo’s discovery that the majority of the profits would go to Japan.
We have chronicled the campaign in such detail because opposition to the saltworks in the
gray whale nursery at Laguna San Ignacio will go down in history as the biggest environ-
mental battle ever in Mexico.
Thanks to the Group of 100, thousands of tons of powdered milk contaminated by
radioactive fallout from Chernobyl and purchased by the Mexican government were returned
to Ireland before they could be distributed throughout the country. Twice we thwarted a
project to build a series of dams along the Usumacinta River in the Mayan region of the
Mexico/Guatemala border. We successfully engaged in a lawsuit to prevent the construction
of a toxic waste facility in the Lake Texcoco area, and were instrumental in persuading the
government to sign the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
We took part in forums in Mexico to argue for inclusion of environmental concerns in the
main body of the North American Free Trade Agreement text, and not as sidebars. Homero
appeared before a Senate committee in Washington, DC, to talk about NAFTA’s impact on
Mexico.
The Group of 100 was co-petitioner in the first two suits accepted for consideration by
the Commission for Environmental Cooperation of the North American Free Trade Agree-
ment, the first in connection with a massive migratory bird mortality due to tannery
discharges into the Silva Reservoir in the state of Guanajuato, the second opposing construc-
tion of a cruise-ship pier in Cozumel. On November 12, 1996, in response to a legal
challenge by the Group of 100 to an attempt by the government to weaken rules for the
submission of environmental impact assessments by industries, a federal court made a ruling in
favor of the Group, which was the first instance in Mexico of federal courts acknowledging
the judicial standing of a non-governmental group, and of any individual concerned about the
environment, to legitimately question an official act that affects the environment.
All our campaigns were carried out through and reported in the Mexican and foreign
media, and Homero published more than 500 opinion articles covering the issues we
addressed. Once in the 1980s he asked La Jornada editor-in-chief Carlos Payán why an article
hadn’t been published on the front page as usual, to which Payán replied, “Ask me why I can
publish them at all.”
We benefited from the knock-on effect of engaging international partners. Our press
conferences, often held jointly with other Mexican or American NGOs, were well attended,

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and often eventful, as at the Cozumel pier meeting when Homero defended himself from the
Secretary of the Environment’s slanderous charge that he was acting out of “financial
interest.” This same Secretary once sent a car to our house to bring Lincoln Brower to her
office for a meeting, in an attempt to prevent the press conference about logging in the
monarch reserve we were holding that morning.
While opposing the saltworks in San Ignacio Lagoon we were accused of being paid by
the competition in Australia, and a cartoon of Homero as a bearded barefoot hippie was
published in a Baja California newspaper. During that campaign a prominent Mexican
environmental lawyer hinted to him that “there is money to be made from the saltworks.”
When we were fighting the Lake Texcoco toxic waste facility, a man followed us to Los
Angeles to offer Homero a million-dollar bribe to lay off.
In December 2016, Homero and colleague James Ramey published “Instead of Trump’s
Wall, Let’s Build a Border of Solar Panels” (Aridjis and Ferber 2017: 180–82), proposing our
idea in an op-ed in the World Post/Huffington Post that went viral, receiving 1 million likes on
Facebook. The editors sent the article to Ivanka Trump, and it made its way to her father,
prompting him to boast at a June 21, 2017, rally in Idaho that “We’re thinking about
building the wall as a solar wall so it creates energy and pays for itself. . . . Pretty good
imagination, right? Good? My idea.” However, Trump’s twisted version of our idea was to
put the panels on top of the concrete slabs. Despite the widespread appeal of a solar border,
the proposal fell on deaf ears, for we learned that at the highest levels of Mexico’s
government it was not viewed as useful to their negotiating position on NAFTA.
As a pioneer in Mexican civil society, the Group has worked with psychologists,
physicians, consumer protection organizations, cultural anthropologists, chemists, biologists,
filmmakers and like-minded organizations within and outside Mexico. A sampling of signers
of the Group of 100’s ads, statements and letters since 1985 includes writers Chinua Achebe,
Vassily Aksyonov, Isabel Allende, Jorge Amado, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Paul
Auster, Andrei Bitov, Yves Bonnefoy, Breyten Breytenbach, A.S. Byatt, Guillermo Cabrera
Infante, Bei Dao, Kiran Desai, Junot Diaz, Rita Dove, Kjell Espmark, Laura Esquivel,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Allen Ginsberg, Günter
Grass, Paavo Haavikko, Seamus Heaney, Edward Hirsch, Miroslav Holub, John Irving,
Tahar ben Yelloun, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Peter Matthiessen, Gita Mehta, W.S. Merwin,
Czeslaw Miłosz, Neel Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, Juan Carlos Onetti, Orhan Pamuk,
Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Nélida Piñón, Elena Ponia-
towska, Augusto Roa Bastos, Ernesto Sábato, Simon Schama, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Vikram
Seth, Kazuko Shiraishi, Gary Snyder, Tomas Tranströmer, Yuko Tsushima, Vassilis Vassilikos,
Per Wästberg, Terry Tempest Williams; scientists and environmentalists Gert Bastiaan,
Lincoln Brower, Lester Brown, Sylvia Earle, Paul Ehrlich, Maneka Sanjay Gandhi, Sir James
Goldsmith, Petra Kelly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Thomas Lovejoy, Amory Lovins, Bill
McKibben, Evaristo Nugkuag, Jonathon Porritt, Peter Raven, F. Sherwood Rowland, Scott
Slovic; artists Pierre Alechinsky, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Fernando Botero, Leonora Carring-
ton, Gabriel Figueroa, Antony Gormley, Sebastiao Salgado, Rufino Tamayo; entertainment
figures Ingmar Bergman, Gunnel Lindblom, 75 actors from the Swedish Royal Dramatic
Theatre, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Oliver Stone, among others.
Homero’s lifelong commitment to the natural world and to literature began at the age of ten,
when he nearly killed himself with a shotgun he had dropped after deciding against aiming it at
a flock of birds. His accident led him to books and to writing, his near-death experience
permeates his life and sensibility as a writer, and the birds sparked a passionate concern for the
environment. He understood that somehow his own survival was connected to theirs.

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After 19 days in the hospital, Homero returned home, to spend his days reading, writing
and playing chess, as sports were forbidden to him. Concern for the natural world has
constantly inspired his poetry and prose. Well before 1975, when scientists discovered that
monarch butterflies migrate from southern Canada and the northern US to the oyamel forests
in Michoacán and the State of Mexico, he had written in The Child Poet (1971, English trans.
2016) about the monarchs, which were part of his childhood landscape. Maria the Monarch
(2014, English trans. 2017) is an adventure story set in Contepec, featuring two cousins and a
magical butterfly who save the lives of millions of monarchs. In the appendix, “The
Monarch: A Tireless Traveller,” Betty has compiled all the facts a young reader needs to
know about the butterflies. Searching for Archelon, An Odyssey of Seven Sea Turtles (2006),
starring a female leatherback turtle who leads six of her fellows on a journey through today’s
oceans in search of Archelon, ancestor of all sea turtles, has been called a Lord of the Rings of
the seas.
Perhaps because he learned about the fragility of life at an early age, the possibility of a
man-made apocalypse has always haunted Homero. His first millenarian fantasy was the play
A Spectacle of the Year Two Thousand (1981), when a Divine Light appears in Mexico City’s
Chapultepec Park during the last instants of the year 1999. Next he wrote The Last Adam
(1986), a reversal of Genesis in which all Creation is destroyed in six days and the last man
and woman join in a final coupling on earth. The final installment of his apocalyptic trilogy is
the play The Grand Theater at the End of the World (1989), a re-imagining when the world no
longer exists of their favorite episodes of world history by a group of actors who have
survived a nuclear hecatomb.
He traveled back to the end of the first millennium in The Lord of the Last Days (1994,
English trans. 1995), when the arrival of a blood-red comet was interpreted as an omen of the
end of time. His growing obsession with the apocalypse finally resulted in a book-length
reflection on the last 1000 years which, in homage to Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of the same
name, he called Apocalypse with Figures (1997).
Constant immersion in the grim reality of Mexico City inspired Homero to write The
Legend of the Suns (1993), a mythological-environmental thriller and mosaic of daily life in
Mexico in the year 2027. According to Aztec legend, the era of the Fifth Sun, which is the
present era, will end with earthquakes, and the tzitzimime, or monsters of twilight, will
devour the remains of humankind and take over the world. When you live in a megalopolis
like Mexico—Tenochtitlan—Federal District, you know that myths can come true.
Our recently published News of the Earth (2012, English trans. 2017) is a wide-ranging
compendium of Homero’s writings in defense of nature and the environment, including
detailed documentation of the Group of 100’s most important battles and victories since
1985. It is also a biography of Homero’s relationship with the natural world and a history of
the rise of environmental awareness in Mexico, and abounds with examples of how we have
communicated environmental experiences, our ideas and the urgency of taking action to
officials and the public at large.
Today the challenge of capturing attention and provoking desired and necessary changes in
behavior and legislation is daunting. In Mexico, the government has become more adept at
censorship, and the media less likely to publish denunciatory news, bending to official
pressure or business interests.
More than 4 billion people are Internet users, and over half the world’s population (7.6
billion) is online. More than 3 billion use social media, and more than 5 billion have mobile
phones, most of them “smart.” Hordes of non-governmental organizations vie for attention,
claiming that “the survival of elephants depends on you, Betty”—and on your contribution,

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“Homero, tell Facebook to shut down wildlife traffickers” and suchlike. How to deal with
Facebook fatigue, Twitter tantrums, Instagram itch, YouTube yammering, persistent polar-
ized perspectives? Massive MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”) reactions ensue. How can we
particularize and capture attention these days? Is AVAAZ (a U.S.-based online global activist
network) the answer? How much clout does a petition signed by a million people really
carry? AVAAZ claims 48 million members worldwide, and takes credit for 100+ victories. Of
course, claiming a victory is a powerful fundraising tool. However, as Tacitus wrote, “It is the
singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster
is attributed to one alone” (Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Chapter 27). As most
environmental battles have an array of combatants, it’s usually difficult to ascribe an
accomplishment to one participant group or individual.
How can we reach outside the tribe, go beyond preaching to the choir? Would a
YouTube beauty vlogger showing monetized videos send environmental messages? YouTube
is a black hole, where fake news jostles for attention with fragments of Nijinsky dancing
Afternoon of a Faun, a treasure trove of music, entire films, informational clips. “Green living
influencers” are all pitching products. What if PewDiePie, a Swede who purports to serve
comedy to 63 million subscribers, told his viewers to banish plastic bags from their lives?
In the run-up to Mexico’s July 1, 2018, elections, on May 12 my labelling the presidential
and Mexico City mayoral candidates as “environmental illiterates” during a newspaper
interview became a trending topic on Mexican social media, bobbing on the surface for a
day or two, before sinking into the vast ocean of each day’s 500 million tweets worldwide.
The volatility of a trending topic limits its impact.
How can we market the Earth’s survival? What we’re offering our “consumers” are
normal weather patterns, healthy ecosystems, undiminished biodiversity, oceans cleared of
garbage patches. Pope Francis used his bully pulpit to issue the environmental encyclical
“Praise Be,” which presumably carried weight at the 2015 Paris climate conference. More
recently, at a Vatican conference held in July 2018 on the anniversary of “Praise Be,” he
warned that “There is a real danger that we will leave future generations only rubble, deserts
and refuse.”2 Millions listen to the Pope’s voice, one of the most influential in the world.
Other spiritual leaders have followed his lead. Perhaps they will be more successful if they
steer their followers to specific concrete actions.
This year, in many countries, governments, manufacturers and stores have been attempting to
reduce the vast amounts of plastic waste, above all single-use plastic products such as bottles, cutlery,
straws, packaging, and flimsy plastic bags. Straws seem to be on the way out. This can only work if
bans are introduced and enforced. As mentioned previously, Homero periodically talks about
plastic pollution and what viewers can do about it on his biweekly news commentaries.
What might be effective? The use of celebrities (as in our San Ignacio missions), age-
appropriate environmental education for children from pre-school through university (which
Homero tried to push when he was Mexico’s ambassador to UNESCO), larding films, TV
series and pop music with environmental messages. Give people something concrete to focus
on, that symbolizes the larger issue or problem, and sets them to thinking they might be able
to do something about it. On August 6, 1995, 40 years after the United States dropped Little
Boy on Hiroshima, Homero and Betty stood in front of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico holding
a wooden scaffolding of chattering skulls and a sign festooned with tippling tin skeletons that
read “Le Théâtre Atomique de Jacques Chirac” to protest French nuclear testing at Muroroa
Atoll. To the consternation of some reporters, we poured a bottle of Sancerre on the ground.
We attracted media attention in Mexico, educated some of the population, but most probably
had no impact on French policies.

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How can we foster involvement in conservation/ecological issues? How can we challenge

ignorance, desire and greed? An abyss gapes open between what people know and believe
and what they are willing to do. We must aim to make people feel losses in nature as their
own.

Notes
1 https://ca.usembassy.gov/leaders-statement-north-american-climate-clean-energy-environment-
partnership/
2 Pope Francis spoke to around 300 participants in a July 5–6, 2018, international conference called
“Saving our Common Home and the Future of Life on Earth,” held in Vatican City for the third
anniversary of the publication of Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical, Laudato Si.

Works Cited
Aridjis, Homero. Apocalipsis con figuras. Taurus, 1997.
Aridjis, Homero. El último Adán. Joaquín Mortiz, 1986.
Aridjis, Homero. Espectáculo del año dos mil. Joaquín Mortiz, 1981.
Aridjis, Homero. La búsqueda de Archelon: odisea de las siete tortugas. Alfaguara, 2006.
Aridjis, Homero. La leyenda de los soles. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993.
Aridjis, Homero. Maria the Monarch. Translated by Eva Aridjis, Mandel Vilar Press, 2017.
Aridjis, Homero. The Child Poet. Translated by Chloe Aridjis, Archipelago Books, 2016.
Aridjis, Homero. The Lord of the Last Days: Visions of the Year 1000. William Morrow, 1995.
Aridjis, Homero, and Betty Ferber. News of the Earth. Mandel Vilar Press, 2017.
Escobedo, Helen. “Black Garbage, Black Future” (1991). www.universes-in-universe.de/woven-maze/
escobedo/basura.html
Leaders’ Statement on a North American Climate, Clean Energy, and Environment Partnership. 29 June 2016.
https://ca.usembassy.gov/leaders-statement-north-american-climate-clean-energy-environment-
partnership/
Tacitus. The Agricola and Germany of Tacitus. Translated by A.J. Church and W.J. Brodribb, Palala Press,
2016.

401
 INDEX

A Rocha 37, 40, 42, 48 Aslam, Nadeem 98

Abbey, Edward 199, 212, 234, 235, 236 Attig, Thomas 67
Abram, David 111, 112, 113, 115, 288, 326, 329, Atwood, Margaret 396
330, 355 Auger, Charles P. 226, 227, 238n9
Acampora, Ralph 68 Austin, Mary Hunter 199
Activism at ground level 60
Adams, William M. 339, 340 Babel, Isaac 47
Adamson, Joni 5 Bacigalupi, Paolo 246
Agamben, Giorgio 134, 135, 136 Bacon, Francis 267
Agofure, Joyce Onoromhenre 8 Bailey, Sinead 348
Ahmad, Aijaz 55 Baker, Brenda 131
Aikin, Roger 160 Bakhtin, Mikhail 17
Ajzen, Icek 215 Baldwin, Andrew 130, 131, 132
Akin, Fatih, The Edge of Heaven 293 Balmford, Andrew 359n13
Alaimo, Stacy 2, 204, 206, 207, 301, 308, 311n1 Bandyopadhyay, Nibedita 8
Albarracín, Dolores 215 Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby 104
Alberani, Vilma 225 Banks, Marcus 225
Alex, Rayson K. 9, 364, 370 Barad, Karen 110, 111, 112
Ali, Ahmad 98 Barclay, Barry 363, 364, 365, 366
Ali, Rozali Mohamed 340 Barnard, Mason 250
Alice in Wonderland 127 Barringer, Tim 158, 159, 162, 163
Allers, Roger 47 Barrett, Ross 189
Allum, Nick 144 Bartlett, William 163
Alonso, Agustin 179 Bashō 80, 81
Amazon Mechanical Turk 150 Bassey, Nnimmo 189
Amin, Adibah 343 Bassler, Bonnie L. 112
Amoore, Louise 138 Bastian, Beverly E. 239
Anderson, Ben 129, 130, 132 Bate, Jonathan 87
Anderson, Reverend John 40–42 Bateson, Gregory 126
Anthropocenic awareness 201, 209 Batur, Pinar 9
Anthropo-zoo-genesis 63 Bauckham, Richard 36, 39, 49
Arendt, Hannah 270 Bauer, Martin W. 179
Arguedas, José María 291, 292 Bauman, Richard 238n3
Aridjis, Homero 6, 391–401 Beard, Frank 161
Aristotle 17, 267, 270 Beck, Ulrich 239n21, 327, 337, 381
Armbruster, Karla M. 200 Beebe, William 272
Art history 155, 156, 163 Bell, Lucy 100

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 Index

Bellow, Saul 47 Burbery, Timothy J. 39

Bennett, David 47 Burdette, Hannah 322
Bennett, Jane 110, 269, 271, 272 Burke, Kenneth 120, 127
Berard, G. Lynn 225 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, Tarzan of the
Berg, Maggie 150 Apes 355
Bergman, Charles 4 Burroughs, John 199, 266
Bergstrom, Randolph 239n22 Bush, President George W. 168
Berkes, Fikret 281, 288, 289n2 Buson 81
Berman, Sabina 293 Butler, Samuel 124
Berman, Steven H. 178 Buxton, Nick 130
Berry, Wendell 199
Beston, Henry 199, 266 Callison, Candis 148
Bettini, Giovanni 131, 132, 140 Caminero-Santangelo, Byron 189, 212
Beudel, Saskia 8 Canadell, Pep 271
Bhaba, Homi 251 Cantrill James 3, 4, 114
Bhat, Sunanda 368, 369, 370 Capstick, Stuart B. 145
Bialock, David 279 Carlson, Allen 239n22
Bierstadt, Albert 161 Carroll, Siobhan 27
Biosemiotics 109 Carson, Rachel xix, 8, 121, 199, 200, 201,
Birk, Rabbi Rebecca 47 265–74
Bishop, Elizabeth 24 Carter, Mary Ann 306
Black, Richard 131 Castillo, D. 141n3
Blackmore, E. 150 Castro, Paolo de 225
Bobock, James E. 225 Cecil the lion 47
Boetzkes, Amanda 32 Chakma, Dilip 364
Boggs, Coleen Glenney 217 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 93, 271
Bohm, David 23, 114 Chambers, Claire 99
Book of Eli, The 32 Champagne, Duane 364
Bookchin, Murray 252 Charles, Daniel 260
Bookless, David 38 Charnela, Janet M. 329
Booth, Wayne C. 92 Chatman, Seymour 92
Borden, Richard 352, 359 Chawla, Louise 352
Born Free 356, 357, 358, 359 Chen, Hong 10, 385
Bortolussi, Marisa 217 Chernobyl Syndrome, The 175–85
Botkin, Daniel 126, 375 Chora 80
Bowie, Alasdair 342 Christensen, Jon 5
Bowker, Geoffrey C. 239 Christenson, Laird 215
Boyle, Danny, 28 Days Later 138 Cialdini, Robert B. 148
Braddock, Alan C. 7, 8 Cilano, Cara 99
Brandão, Izabel F.O. 9, 301, 309, 311, 312 Cixous, Hélène 33
Breña, Mariana Ortega 104, 105 Clark, Jamie 148, 149, 151
Bromet, Evelyn J. 179 Clark, Timothy 127, 200, 201, 378
Brooks, Paul 265, 272 Clayton, Susan 352, 354
Brower, David 395, 396 Clements, Frederic 119
Brower, Lincoln 394 Clemmons, Zinzi 140
Brown, Stuart 4 Clifford, James 294, 295
Brown, Theodore 172 Climate migrant 130–32
Brownell, Ginanne 218 Cloud, John 272
Browning, J. 141 Cobanoglu, Özkul 332
Bruchac, Joseph 49n8 Coetzee, J.M. 64
Brulle, Robert J. 144, 168, 337 Cognitive narratology 84
Bryant, Raymond L. 348 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 112, 113, 114, 134,
Bubandt, Nils 114, 115 136, 139
Budianta, Melanie 380 Cohn, Dorrit 90
Buell, Frederick 139, 140, 248, 382 Cole, Thomas 8, 155–65
Buell, Lawrence 1, 2, 38, 85, 86, 92, 135, 139, 201, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 6, 26, 27, 28, 245
205, 212, 217, 243, 265, 266, 272, 385, 390n6 Colgrave, Nick 216

403
 Index

Committee on Scientific and Technical Deraniyagala, Sonali 10, 373–78

Information (COSATI), The 227, 229, 230, Deng, Guosheng 389n1
231, 239 Descartes, René 267
Cones, John 45 Despret, Vinciane 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69
Connell, Raewyn 243 Devika, J. 55
Coole, Diane 109, 110 Diaconu, Mădălina 77
Cooper, Melinda 129, 130, 138 Díaz, Juno, “Monstro” 130–40
Cooper, Susan Fenimore 199 Dillard, Annie 199
Coppelion 352 Diller, Ann 294
Corbett, Julia B. 4, 7, 145 DIM (Discrete Incident Mentality), definition
Corner, Adam 148, 149, 151 of 168
Cortazzi, Martin 95 Dirlik, Arif 55
Cory, Pamela Libre 378 Directionality, definition of 156
Cosmopolitan communication 9, 291, 293, 294, Dobson, Andrew 151
297, 299 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 217
Costello, Bonnie 92 Doyle, Julie 26
Cox, Robert 4, 56, 108–09, 115, 143 Dreese, Donelle N. 190
Craffert, Pieter F. 328 Dunlap, Riley 147
Cramer, Jacqueline 239 Dunning, Thad 216
Cranston, CA 6 DuPont, Robert L. 179
Creswell, John W. 354 Dürer, Albrecht 399
Crist, Eileen 119 Dussel, Enrique D. 136
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) 6, 16–17, 18, Dwyer, John F. 299
19–21, 71; Transitivity 19–21; Modality 21–22;
Theme 23–24; Resources 24 Easterlin, Nancy 85, 89
Crofutt, George A. 161 Eco-apartheid, definition of 244–45
Cronon, William 160, 164, 328 Ecocriticism: Definitions and history 1–3, 6, 84,
Cuarón, Alfonso 133 85, 87, 155; material ecocriticism 2, 7; queer
Cubitt, Sean 291 ecocriticism 2; posthuman ecocriticism 2;
Culhane, Paul J. 231 empirical ecocriticism 8, 9; and landscape 39;
Culler, Jonathan 88 and postcolonial texts 54; and ecolinguistics 71;
Cultural ecology 59 and narratology 84–88; and science and
Cunha, Helena Parente 302, 308, 309, 311 technology studies 118; experimental
Curtin, Deane W. 56, 253 ecocriticism 211–220; postcolonial ecocriticism
55, 190, 194, 253; and the figure of the
Dados, Nour 243 translator 292; planetary focus 291, 295
Dahlstrom, Michael F. 95 Ecolinguistics 16, 71, 77, 82
D’Amore, Chiara 302 Ecological identity 9, 352–58
Dara, G.G. 187 Ecological uncanny 6, 27, 28, 29, 33
Darier, Eric 239n20 Ecomedia 9, 44, 351–58
Dark Pastoral 280 Econarratology 7, 91
Darwin, Charles 27 Ecophobia 21, 205
Dawson, Paul 95 Egan, Gabriel 200
Dawson, Robert 40 Ehrlich, Paul xix
Daly, Tara 323 Eisner, Michael 46
Day After Tomorrow, The 356, 359n13 11th Hour, The 394
De Gortari, President Carlos Salinas 393, 396 Eliade, Mircea 304
De la Cadena, Marisol 370 Elsner, Gary H. 239n22
De la Madrid, President Miguel 393 Emmett, Robert S. 200
Decadent sublime 31 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 18, 19, 234, 351
Dedina, Serge 396 Eng, Chuah Guat 343, 346–48
Deep ecology 335 Engels, Friedrich 139
Deep Noto 280, 281, 282, 283, 289, 290 Environmental communication: Relationship with
DeGraff, Noni 137, 139 ecocriticism xviii, xxi, 3–5, 10, 44, 224; as
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 190, 191 a “crisis and care” discipline 56; definitions 108;
Delshad, Ashlie 143 focus on individuals 143; an expanded view
DeMello, Margo 215 150–51; and art 188; and eco-shamanism 327

404
 Index

Environmental humanities 5, 184, 199, 200 Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 8, 255–62
Environmental impact assessment (EIA) 49n15, Genova, Nicholas de 132
232, 233, 234, 235, 342, 347, 396 Genette, Gérard 87, 88, 89
Environmental impact statement (EIS) 224, 232, Gerrig, Richard 99
234, 235, 236 Gersdorf, Catrin 235
Erickson, Bruce 2 Ghosh, Amitav 167, 250
Escobar, Arturo 252 Giddens, Anthony 110
Escobedo, Helen, Black Garbage, Black Gilcrest, David W. 85, 90
Tomorrow 391 Ginsberg, Allen 396, 398
Estok, Simon C. 205 Glasman, Laura R. 215
Etenga, Inya 197 Global North 132, 138, 242, 250
Global South 242–43, 250, 251, 252, 314, 322
Fahlquist, Jessica N. 177, 178 Globalization 56, 98, 188, 190, 191, 244, 246, 343,
Fallaci, Oriana 217 344, 345, 346, 347, 348
Farace, Dominic J. 225 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems
Farid, Lily Yulianti 10, 373, 379–82 (GIAHS) 280
Fearless Collective 314–24 Glotfelty, Cheryll 1, 3, 4, 6, 39, 85, 89
Ferber, Betty 6, 391–401 Godzilla 352
Ferreira da Silva, Edilane 9 Goebel, James R. 8, 239n23
Fiege, Mark 266, 268, 269 Goffey, Andrew 239
Field, Dawn 126 Goldman, Alan H. 219
Finchley Progressive Synagogue (FPS) 47 Goldsmith, Sir James 396
Finding Nemo 46 Gooch, Liz 342
Fischer, Ernst 188 Goodbody, Axel 93, 94
Fleischer, Richard 45 Goodman, Sheri 129
Fludernik, Monika 88, 91, 95 Gore, Al 93
Forns-Broggi, Roberto 9 Gough, Noel 352, 359n8
Fortuny, Kim 103 Gough, Stephen 352, 359n8
Foster, Charles 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70 Graphic adaptation 26, 34
Foucault, Michel 130, 230, 231, 233, 238, 311 Gray, Alan J. 258
Fourth Cinema 363–66 Grayson, Andrew Jackson 160
Fowler, Roger 18 Great Acceleration, the 167, 266
Fox, President Vicente 393 Green, Melanie C. 217
Fraley, Robert 261 Gregory, Marshall W. 213
Franzen, Jonathan 89 Grey, Geoff 271
Frears, Stephen, Dirty Pretty Things 293 Grey literature, definition of 225
Frese, Kasha 315 Grupo de los Cien, El 6, 391–401
Friedman, Jonathan 170 Gu, Ruizhen 386
Fromm, Harold 1, 3, 4, 39 Guattari, Felix 302
Frost, Samantha 109, 110 Gudynas, Eduardo 299
Fujimura, Konoe 356 Guggenheim, Davis 46, 50n27
Fuller, Matthew 239n26 Guha, Ramachandra 138, 164, 250, 251
Furihata, Shinichi 352, 353 Gussow, Alan 239n24
Furman, Andrew 36, 37, 43, 44, 47, 48 Gustafsson, Tommy 351
Gutiérrez, Miguel 9, 293–99
Gadgil, Madhav 61 Guttman, Anna 248–49
Gagliano, Monica 109
Gaia 124, 330, 331, 375 Habel, Norman 37
Gan, Elaine 110, 114 Haddock, Geoffrey 215, 217
Ganesh, Shiv 151 Haeckel, Ernst 158
Ganz, Marshall 57 Hagino Atelier 282, 289
Garcia, Loreley 310–11 Hagino, Yuki 281, 283, 287, 288, 290n6
Garrard, Greg 5, 18, 39, 215 Haidt, Jonathan 219
Gast, John 161 Haiku poetry 80–82
Geertz, Clifford 358 Hajib, Yusuf Khass 326
Geffen, David 46 Hakemulder, Jemeljan 217
Geiger, Nathaniel 143 Hall, Brian 162

405
 Index

Hall, Shane 7 Hu, Howard 179

Halliday, Michael 16 Hubback, Theodore 339
Hallowell, Christopher 168 Hudson, W.H. 266
Hallowes, David 245 Huggan, Graham 55, 60, 194, 212, 253, 381
Hamako, Eric 141n3 Hughes, Ted 10
Hamid, Mohsin 98–104, 106 Hull, Matthew S. 239n26
Handley, George 190, 191 Hunt, Alex 242
Hanif, Mohammad 98, 99 Hunt, Lynn 213
Hanquinet, Laurie 216 Hussain, Sara 324
Hansen, Anders 4, 5 Huxley, Julian 121
Haraway, Donna 29, 30, 109, 110, 112,
123, 125 I Am Legend 32
Hardy, Thomas 217 Idris, S.M.M. 339
Harper, Richard H.R. 239n26 Ifowodo, Ogaga 189
Harper, Prime Minister Stephen 394 Ikuta, Shogo 351
Harrison, Melissa 78–79 Inconvenient Truth, An 46, 93, 356
Harrison, Sarah K. 104 Incredible Journey of the Butterflies, The 394
Haselton, Martie G. 214 Indigeneity 363–71
Hashmi, Alamgir 98 Ing, Dean 176
Haskell, David George 208, 209 Inglis, David 141
Hassan, Saliha 342 Ingold, Tim 71, 82
Hatanaka, Katsuya 352, 359n6, 359n8 Ingram, David 359n15
Have You Seen the Arana? 9, 363–71 Iovino, Serenella 86, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115,
Havenaar, Johan M. 179 116n2, 203
Hawkins, Gay 31 Irmscher, Christoph 8, 156, 158
Haye, Ben 130 Issa 80–81
Hayes, Nick, The Rime of the Modern Mariner 26–34 Ito, Koji 286, 287, 288, 289
Head, Dominic 86 Ivakhiv, Adrian 356
Heberlein, Thomas 213, 214, 215, 216, 219
Hekman, Susan 2 James, Erin 85, 91
Heise, Ursula K. 5, 85, 90, 93, 249, 279, 292, 351, James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady 18
359n3, 359n4 Jameson, Frederic 311, 379, 382
Hemingway, Ernest 21, 23 Janovy, John, Jr. 208
Hendee, John C. 239 Janssen, Marco A. 145
Hepburn, R.W. 267, 268, 271 Jarvis, Matthew 212
Herman, David 87, 88, 89, 90, 95 Jasanoff, Sheila 239
Herndl, Carl 4 Jax, Kurt 158
Hertz, Neil 32 Jaws 45, 46, 47
Herzog, Harold 217 Jefferies, Richard 266
Hilst, Hilda 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 310, 311 Jeffers, Robinson 375
Hiltner, Ken 2 Jensen, Derrick 144, 193
Hindman, Doug 147 Jeong, Chun Phuoc 341
Hirsch, Marianne 34 Jewett, William 160
Hirsch, Philip 347 John, Haritha 364
Hiyane, Akira 352, 359n6, 359n8 Johnson, Claudia Durst 215
Hoffman, Andrew J. 147, 148 Johnson, Dan R. 217
Hoffman, Jeff 170, 173 Johnson, Hildegard Binder 160
Hogeweg-de Haart, Huberta P. 238 Johnson, Vernon 215
Holbert, Keith E. 179 Joshi, Ruchir 244–49, 251
Holocaust 34 Judeo-Christian tradition 37
Hopewell, Sally 225 Jung, Carl G. 305
Hoppal, Mihaly 328 Jurassic Park 27
Horn, Cindy and Alan F. 46
Hornsey, Matthew 143 Kääpä, Pietari 351
Hossein, Atiya 98 Kagen, Richard 322
Houser, Heather 5, 125 Kahn, Peter 169
Howe, Irving 47 Kathirithamby-Wells, J. 339, 340

406
 Index

Kato, Norihiro, Amerika no Kage [The Shadow of Leiserowitz, Anthony 143, 355, 356
America] 359n9 Leopold, Aldo 82, 199, 289
Katz, Eric 37, 43, 44, 50n21 Leutze, Emanuel 161
Katzenburg, Jeffrey 46, 47 Lewis, Victor 265
Kauffman, Stuart 110, 116 Liepold, Annka 8
Kay, Jackie 15, 19, 24 Lilienfeld, Scott O. 213
Kazin, Alfred 47 Lincoln, Kenneth 239n24
Keats, John 27 Lindemann, Raymond 122, 123, 124, 125
Keen, Suzanne 213, 217 Linneweber, Volker 352
Kellogg, Ronald T. 219 Lion King, The 47
Kennicott, Philip 160 Lister, Adrian 48
Kerridge, Richard 93 Litton, R. Burton, Jr. 239n24
Khan, Sorraya 98 Llosa, Mario Vargas 294
Khan, Uzma Aslam 98, 99, 104–06 Lockwood, Alex 266
Kidner, David W. 299 Lockwood, Jeffrey 309
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie 3, 4, 6, 266, 267 Loh, F.K.W. 342
Ki-Moon, Ban 243 London, Jack, The Call of the Wild 19
King James Bible 36 Long-term environmental perspective 8, 167–74
King Juan Carlos 395 Lopez, Barry 66, 199, 206
King Philip (Metacom) 164 Lord, Barry 148
Kingsolver, Barbara 93–94 Lorenz, Konrad 63, 65, 67
Kinzig, Ann P. 144, 148 Losey, John 258, 263n18
Kirby, Vicki 111 Lotka, Alfred 122
Kitō 81 Lousley, Cheryl 5
Klug, Lisa 45 Love, Glen 3, 211
Knickerbocker, Scott 87, 90 Love, Rhoda 3
Knobe, Joshua Michael 216 Lovelock, James 124, 330, 375
Kohn, Eduardo 109, 114 Luhmann, Niklas 119
Koopman, Colin 239n18 Luke, Timothy W. 239n20
Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin 158, 159, 160, Lusted, Marcia A. 177
162, 163 Lynch, Diahanna 258, 263n18, 263n21
Krajewski, Marek 218, 219 Lynch, Tom 204, 205
Kraus, Stephen J. 215 Lyon, Thomas J. 201
Krug, Don 189 Lytle, Hamilton 272
Kuhn, Thomas 172
Kuletz, Valerie xx Macdonald, Helen 63–70
Kusserow, Karl 156 Macfarlane, Robert 79–80
Kutadgu Bilig 326, 327–28, 332, 334, 335, 337 Machiavelli, Niccolo 327
MacLean, Gerald 310
La Guerra por otros medios [War By Other Madagascar 47
Media] 292 Madan, Aarti Smith 9
Labov, William 88 Mahurkar, Uday 249
Landry, Donna 310 Maio, Gregory R. 215, 217
Lanham, Richard 119, 120, 127 Makhijani, Arjun 179
Lassman, Michael 48 Malamud, Bernard 47
Latchaw, Joan 39 Małecki, Wojciech 8, 9, 215, 216, 218, 219
Latour, Bruno 110, 140, 252 Malette, Sébastian 233
Laudato Si 42, 45, 400, 401n2 Malik, Girish, Jal 244, 249–253
Lazarus, Neil 55 Maner, Jon K. 217
Le Guin, Ursula K. 172 Manga 359n4
Leal, Robert 39 Maniam, K.S. 343, 346–47
Lear, Linda 265, 266, 269, 272 Maran, Timo 109
Lee, Kenny Cheh Sonn 340 Marcone, Jorge 291
Leed, Eric 329 Margalef, Ramón 126
Leff, Enrique 299 Margulis, Lynn 124, 125, 126
Lehtimäki, Markku 7, 85 Márquez, Gabriel García 395, 398
Lepore, Jill 164 Marris, Emma 289

407
 Index

Martinez-Alier, J. 138 Muecke, Stephen 31

Martucci, Elise A. 212 Muir, John 199
Marx, Karl 139 Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo 55, 56, 244, 342
Marx, Leo 1 Mulligan, Martin 339, 340
Marzec, Robert 130, 132 Murphy, Patrick D. 8, 174n1
Mas, Keris 343–44 Murray, Les 38
Material ecocriticism 2, 7, 86, 110, 111–15, Murray, Raymond 179
203, 204 Music Tree, The 293
Matheny, Albert 256, 262n5 Musk, Elon 171
Matthewman, Sasha 215 Myerhoff, Barbara 328
Mauch, Christof 266
Maus 34 Nabhan, Gary Paul 394
Mazzarella, William 235 Naguib, Pellow David 192, 194
Mazel, David 1, 235 Nakagaki, Kotaro 352
Mazzeno, Laurence W. 217 Nakamura, Yuko 359
McCright, Aaron 147 Narrative 84; see also Psychology of narratives
McEwan, Ian 93 Narratives of community 385
McGlamery, Patrick 225 Nash, Katherine Saunders 92
McGranahan, Lucas 220 Nash, Roderick 39
McKibben, Bill 36, 37, 48, 49n14, 199, 398 National Environmental Policy Act of 1969
McKimmie, Tim 225 (NEPA) 231, 233, 234, 236
McMurry, Andrew 6 Nature writing 8, 199–210, 265–74, 351
Medina, Paula Abal 104, 105 Navajo people, The xx
Meera, K.R. 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61 Nayar, Pramod K. 6, 26, 27, 32, 101
Melville, Herman 212 Nehru, Prime Minister Jawaharlal 249, 250
Mendieta, Eduardo 136 Nichols, Austin Lee 217
Menzies, Charles R. 289 Nichols, Shaun 216
Merchant, Carolyn 352 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 92
Merrigan, Shelia D. 225 Niemann, Michelle 5
Merwin, W.S. 211, 212, 398 Nietzsche, Friedrich 120
Metaphor in scientific communication 118–19 Nisbet, Matthew C. 144
Miall, David S. 219 Nixon, President Richard M. 231
Middle Passage, The 32 Nixon, Rob 5, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 137, 138,
Mies, Maria 306 209, 248, 265, 272
Miller, Angela 158, 159 Noda, Kenichi 351
Milmo, Emilio Azcarraga 396 Nolan, Michael 38
Milstein, Tema 56, 170, 173 Nomura, Shinya 286, 288
Minkoff, Robert 47 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs in
Misak, Cheryl J. 220 China) 384–90, 391–401
Mishra, Arunima 364 Norgaard, Kari 143, 147, 149
Mishra, Rakesh 251 Novikau, Aliaksandr 178
Mitten, Denise 302 Nuclear New Mexico xviii, 6
Miyashita, Akitoshi 148 Nuclear tourism xviii
Miyazaki, Hayao 351 Nuclear weapons xix
Mohd, Rusli 340 Nwagbara, Ezeoechi 190, 192
Mohideen, S.F. 339 Nye, David E. 200
Monani, Salma 356 Nyman, Jopi 215
Moncrief, L.W. 37
Monnet, Livia 352 Oatley, Keith 217
Mononoke Hime 352 Obama, President Barack 394
Moremon, C. 141n3 Obi, Cyril 189
Morita, Keitaro 9 Ochuko, Tanukari 190
Morrison, Ronald D. 217 Odum, Eugene 125
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona (Cate) 2 Odum, Howard T. 118, 125, 126
Morton, Timothy 2, 27, 268, 273; Hyperobjects 32, Ofeimun, Odia 189
33, 207; ecological art 155, 156; critique of Ojaide, Tanure 187, 189–98
nature 164 Okada, Masahiro 352, 359n6, 359n8

408
 Index

Oliver, Mary 23–24 Pope Francis 401n2

Olson, Valerie 238n1, 239n19 Portugal, José Alberto 294
Omi, Michael 131 Postcolonial, the 55–56, 99, 104, 194
O’Neill, Robert V. 125 Potts, Alex 188
Ondaatje, Michael 373, 398 Powell, John Wesley 235
Ooi, Yang-May 343, 344–46 Powers, Richard, The Overstory 18
Opel, Andy 290 Prabhu, Gayathri 7, 8
Opie, John 239 Prado, Adélia 302, 306, 307, 308, 310, 311
Opkan, Ezekial 194 Price, Derek J. de Solla 228, 229, 239n14, 239n15
Opotow, Susan 352 Price, Huw 220
Oppenheimer, Robert xix Primack, Richard B. 200
Oppermann, Serpil 7, 85, 86, 87, 112, 113, 114, Prince Charles 260
115, 116, 203 Princen, Thomas 172, 173
Oravec, Christine 3, 4, 114 Prody, Jessica M. 60
Oreskes, Naomi 269 Psychology of narratives 217
Ortiz, Simon J. xix, xx, 237–38 Purdy, Jedediah 125
Orwell, George 18
O’Sullivan, John 160 Quesada, Sarah 138, 138, 139
Osundare, Niyi 189, 192
Otherness discourses 38 Rahman, Tariq 106
Otsuni 81 Rainker, H. Bruce 119
Ovsyannikov, Pavel 176, 177 Raji, Remi 189
Özdag, Ufuk 9 Ramakrishna, Sundari 340, 341
Ozick, Cynthia 47 Ramey, James 398
Rangarajan, Swarnalatha 2
Pace, Andrew K. 225 Rao, Mark 342
Pai, Shalaka 315 Ravichandran, T. 8
Palmer, Alan 90 Raymond, Leigh 143
Palmer, Jacqueline S. 3, 4, 6, 266, 267 Reece, Erik 208
Palmer, Joy A. 352, 355, 359n6, 359n8 Representations of nature 86–87, 200, 201, 352
Palmer, Walter 47 Revkin, Andrew 168
PAN (Present as Always Normal), definition of 168 Reynolds, John 365
Pandey, Jyoti Singh 315 Rhetorical theory of narrative, the 84
Parenti, Christian 130 Rich, Adrienne 85, 211, 212
Parham, John 46, 48, 50n26 Riles, Annelise 239n26
Parthasarathy, Aarthi 315 Risk communication 8, 175–84, 373, 381
Pasternak, Judy xx Robinson, Daniel N. 220
Patkar, Medha 250 Robkin, Rabbi Yogi 38
Pawlowski, Boguslaw 216 Rodrigo, Miguel 296
Payne, Roger 396 Roeser, Sabine 177
Paz, Octavio 392, 396, 398 Roos, Bonnie 242
Pearce, Fred 172, 173 Rorty, Richard 220
Pearson, Susan J. 215, 217 Roth, Philip 47
Pelé 395 Rothstein, Hannah R. 225
Peña Nieto, President Enrique 393, 394 Routledge Handbook of Environment and
Pergament, M.I. 216 Communication, The 4–5
Petreaus, David 129 Routledge Handbook of Environmental Humanities,
Petrie, Duncan 365 The 5
Petterson, Otto 267 Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, The 2, 39
Pezzullo, Phaedra C. 56 Roy, Arundhati 250
Phelan, James 92 Royle, Nicholas 27, 28
Philippon, Daniel 213 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane 267, 269, 270
Phillips, Dana 86–87, 90, 119 Rucinski, Taryn 225–26
Pirzadeh, Saba 7, 246 Rueckert, William 1, 211, 212, 213, 215
Plato 269, 270 Rushdie, Salman 246, 293
Pohl, Frederik, Chernobyl 179, 181–83 Rushton, C. 141n3
Pohl, Rüdiger 214 Ruskin, John 76

409
 Index

Russian Formalism 88 Slovic, Paul 5, 213

Rust, Stephen 351, 356 Slovic, Scott xviii, 2, 4, 5, 87, 93, 155, 205, 212,
Rustad, Siri Aas 189 213, 242, 351, 375, 377
Rutherford, Paul 232, 233, 239n16 Slow violence 5, 7, 8, 99, 105, 106, 209
Rutherford, Stephanie 233, 234 Smail, Daniel Lord 168, 170
Ruxton, Graeme 216 Smardon, Richard C. 234, 239n12
Ryan, John 212 Smith, Adam 267
Ryōta 81 Snyder, Gary 22, 173, 398
Soares, Angélica 302, 306, 312n12
Sagan, Dorion 124, 125, 126 Social actors 146–49
Said, Edward 193 Sodikoff, Genese 28
Salih, Tayeb 293 Sörlin, Sverker 272
Sankaran, Chitra 9 Sorokowski, Piotr 216
Santmire, H. Paul 37 Soylent Green 45
Sarney, President José 395 Spielberg, Stephen 45, 46, 351
Saro-Wiwa, Ken 189, 194, 195, 196 Spivak, Gayatri 136
Satoyama 9, 279, 280, 281, 282, 289n1 Star, Susan Leigh 231, 238n1, 239n26
Saunders, Marshall 217 Steiner, Todd 393
Saussure, Ferdinand de 16 Stelmach, Orest, The Boy from Reactor 4,
Savvides, Nikki 217 179–83
Scale 118–28, 373; see also Long-term Stengers, Isabelle 65
environmental perspective Sternberg, Meir 91
Schauder, Stephen 112 Stibbe, Arran 6, 72, 81, 82
Scherer, Elizabeth 289n3 Stoll, Mark 266
Scheufele, Dietram A. 144 Stratton, J. 138
Schlenker, Barry R. 215 Stratton-Porter, Gene 199
Schöpfel, Joachim 225 Street art 9, 314–24
Schwartz, Astrid 158 Sturgis, Patrick 144
Scigaj, Leonard 85 Suggate, Jennifer 352, 355, 359n6, 359n8
Scott, Michael W. 267, 268, 269 Sukhenko, Inna 8
Seeber, Barbara K. 150 Suleman, Shilo Shiv 9, 314, 315, 317,
Seker, Fatih M. 327, 335 319, 324
Sekhar, Aruna Chandra 315 Sullivan, Heather I. 102, 280
Selby, Martha Ann 364 Swanson, Heather 114, 115
Sell, Jane 215, 216 Swim, Janet K. 143
Sellars, Wilfrid 220 Syme, Geoff L. 355
Selvamony, Normal 370 Sze, Julie 133
Sethi, Ali 98, 99
Sewell, Anna 215, 217 Tabuchi, Hiroko 171
Shakespeare, William, Julius Caesar 68 Takada, Kenichi 351
Shamsie, Kamila 98, 99 Takahashi, Tsutomu 351
Shanghai Daorong Conservation and Sustainable Takahata, Isao 352
Development Center 386-89 Tal, Kali 376
Shan-Shui 79–80 Tamayo, Rufino 392, 395, 398
Sharom, Azmi 342 Tan, Jun E. 341
Shaughnessy, John J. 218 Tanner, Thomas 352
Sheldrake, Philip 301 Tansley, Arthur 119, 120
Sheldrake, Rupert 64 Tapahonso, Luci 236–37
Shen Liping 387–89 Tardán, Isabelle 293
Shenoy, Preetum 169 Tarzan 355, 358
Shiva, Vandana 106, 244, 245, 250, 253, 306 Taylor, Diana 322, 324
Siddique, Osama 98 Teague, David 235
Sideris, Lisa H. 268, 270 Tedeschi, James T. 215
Significant life experiences research (SLE) 352–54 Thelen, Timo 289n3
Siegenthaler, Jennifer 189 Thiong’O, Ngũgĩ wa 189
Silko, Leslie Marmon xix Thomas, Greg M. 156
Singh, Nikhil 131, 132 Thomas, Gregory Owen 148

410
 Index

Thomas, Mariko 170, 173 Warren, Carol 347

Thomashow, Mitchell 352, 354, 359n5 Warren, Karen 301
Thoreau, Henry David 16, 18, 194, 199, 200, 234, Waste 30–33
266, 287, 351 Water 57–59, 243, 245, 253, 337
Tiffin, Helen 55, 60, 194, 212, 253 Watts, Michael 190
Tinai 367, 370 Weatherworld definition 71–72
Ting-Toomey, Stella 296, 297 Weber, Elke 169, 170
Tomlinson, H.M. 266 Webster, Murray 215, 216
Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) 9, WeChat 388, 389
280–90 Weems, Jason 160
Trexler, Adam 93 Weichselbraun, Anna 238
Trudeau, Prime Minister Justin 394 Weik von Mossner, Alexa 5, 85, 90,
Truettner, William H. 158 216, 219
Trump, Donald J. 17, 398 Weiss, Meredith L. 340, 342, 348
Trump, Ivanka 398 Wells, G.P. 121
Tsing, Anna 114, 115, 268 Wells, H.G. 121, 122
Tuan, Yi-Fu 65, 201, 202 West, Anna 217
Tuana, Nancy 102, 103 Wheeler, Wendy 109, 111
Tuckerman, Henry 1 White, Andrea, Radiant Girl 179–84
Twain, Mark 21 White, Gilbert 76, 120
Tyrell, Keith 150 White, Lynn, Jr. 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 48,
49n6, 49n18
Udenta, Udenta 188 Whitman, Walt 4, 211, 212
Ulman, Lewis 4 Widdowson, Harry 17
UMTRA xx Williams, Bruce 256, 262n5
Updike, John 167 Williams, Ernest 394
Uzuner, Buket 9, 326–338 Williams, Nigel 259, 262n1, 263n24
Williams, Raymond 245
Vacca, Roberto 243–44 Williams, Richard N. 220
Van Dooren, Thom 65, 69 Williams, Dr. Rowan, Archbishop of Canterbury
Van Dyke, John C. 235, 239n25 37, 42, 48
VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff, New Weird Williams, Terry Tempest 199, 378, 398
fiction 27 Williamson, Henry 266
Vickers, Valerie Grider 352 Willis, Nathaniel Parker 163
Vijayan, Pinarayi 61 Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula 351, 357,
Vilela, Arriete 302, 309, 310, 311, 312n10 358, 358n2
Vincent, Jeffrey 340 Wilson, Janet 365
Visual resource management (VRM) 234 Winant, Howard 131
Vogel, David 258, 263n18 Wohl, Ellen 208
Vogel, Steven 164 Wolfe, Patrick 237
Voie, Christian Hummelsund 8 Wood, Grant 258
Volk, Tyler 173 Woods, Derek 7, 9
Woodward, Kathleen 239n17
Wage, Frederick O. 215 Woodward, Wendy 7
Waddell, Craig 4 Woolfson, Esther 63–70
Wainwright, Alfred 78 Worden, Daniel 189
Waites, Elizabeth 376 Worster, Donald 123, 126, 158
Waititi, Kahurangi 363 Wright, Judith 38
Walcott, Derek 32 Wright, Richard 212
Walker, Alice 19
Wallace, Kathleen R. 200 Xiang, Ying 385, 386
Wallach, Alan 158 Xiao, Liangzhong 385, 386
Walsh, Richard 91, 92
Walt Disney Studios 46 Yadukrishnan PT 61
Wandersman, Abraham 178 Yaeger, Patricia 31
Wang, Aijun 384, 388 Yates, Chris 77–78
Wang, Yongchen 384, 388 Young, Neil 258–59, 263n22

411
 Index

Young, Robert J.C. 55 Zepeda, Ofelia 205

Yuki, Masami 9, 279, 289n1, 351 Zerubavel, Eviatar 147
Zhai, Wei 386
Zainal, Zainor Izat 9 Zhou, Xiaofang 386
Zapf, Hubert 59, 100 Zhou, Xiaojing 106
Zavestoski, Stephen 352, 354, 357 Zoller, Heather M. 151
Zedillo, President Ernesto 397 Zunshine, Lisa 90

412