Green Reading

In some ways, “green reading” is more American than apple pie, especially because the propagation of trees bearing sweet apples didn’t occur until the nineteenth century. Green writing, or writing in English dealing with the American environment, began with the shaky establishment of Jamestown. Later, what is called “nature writing” became a distinctively American genre. But it has always been considered a minor genre standing apart from the mainstream of American literature.

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) remains the most brilliant and influential study of the revision, in major works of imaginative literature, of the Western ideal of America as a redemptive garden safe from pollution by “dark satanic mills.” Marx’s book inspired many critics but did not engender a new school of criticism, let alone infiltrate the teaching of literature at any level, until the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in 1992. Although ecocriticism existed before ASLE, it had no organization identified with it.

The birth of ASLE and ecocriticism was acknowledged outside academe by Jay Parini’s admiring article, “The Greening of the Humanities” (October 1995), in the New York Times. Parini’s title implies a revolution that has not yet happened throughout the humanities, let alone other areas of study. In the nonacademic world, among people who still enjoy literature, green reading remains exceptional.

This seems odd given the paradigm shift in popular culture caused by a fast-growing acceptance of the basic hypotheses of global warming. You don’t have to be an academic to know what a “carbon offset” is. Yet ecocritics are absorbed in doctrinal battles among themselves while the validity of ecocriticism itself, when it attracts attention from outsiders, tends to come under attack.

Here are some questions that occur to me:

· What are the institutional imperatives and entrenched interests that resist ecocriticism as a worthy, non-exclusive approach to literature in its broadest sense and not just to nature writing?
· Can ecocritics find common ground, as scientists studying global warming have done, in spite of their legitimate debates and differences?
· Can green reading—which assumes that literature has a relationship to the environment much as human beings exist in relationship to their environments—become a noncontroversial way to read in a culture of people, at least younger people, dominated by the machine in the garden to the point that they don’t see the garden?
· Can green reading overcome another obstacle in American culture, namely, the large numbers and social power of people who sincerely believe that humans stand apart from nature and that the natural world has little importance compared with the kingdom of God?

James Fairhall, Department of English

Perspective from the Environmental Sciences

Science tells us how the natural world works, but not how we want it to work. The distinction is critical but rarely considered. It is often convenient to adopt our values from nature (as in what is “natural” is “right” or “best”), but values are a uniquely human phenomenon. At this time, even the decision to leave nature alone must be deliberate, made because we value that action after we’ve considered the history of the place, the genius of the place, our hopes for the future and the consequences of alternative management strategies. We are part of and separate from nature and recognizing how each informs our values and our interactions with nature are a large part of our challenge for the future.

As a science educator, I have spent much of my life explaining how the natural world works. I sprinkle liberal doses of the wonders of nature, our impacts on the natural world and the importance of nature to our own survival. My hope has been that with knowledge comes understanding, respect and changed values. But, if our behavior reflects our values, then this strategy is not working. My questions for the weekend retreat have to do with how the humanities can contribute to, as Bill likes to say, changing minds and hearts. Are there ways to connect more deeply to nature and to identify that which we value in nature, not just when convenient, but because nature has value – both intrinsic and instrumental. We need to find out who we are in nature, and while this must be informed by our knowledge of how the world works, we clearly need more than scientific ways of knowing to feel this connection. How can the humanities contribute to bridging the gap between what we know and how we feel; between understanding how the world works and how we want it to work?

Judy Bramble - Environmental Science Program

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

In her 2005 collection of essays, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, philosopher and cultural studies critic Elizabeth Grosz questions the conceptual primacy of culture over nature in contemporary critical discourse. She also asserts a concept of nature as a material reality or set of events/forces that not only “incite” culture, but continually shape it by consistently posing problems from the “outside.”

Though I concur with her general critique I question her constant references to nature as “matter” and “ground.” In contrast to this rhetoric of matter, I place Judith Butler’s rhetorical concept of “materialization,” a dynamic process by which bodies come to “matter” without arresting or completing the process of becoming. Butler uses this term primarily with reference to human bodies, but it could be applied to the natural world at large. Butler’s term is also consistent with the normal science of contemporary physics which replaces the concept of matter with energy and information.

While I thank Grosz for showing me what nature has “done for me lately,” I attempt to return the favor by bringing Judith Butler into the discourse:

Can we conceive nature as a process of materialization rather than a material ground for culture?

How would this affect views of nature within cultural studies and the humanities in general?

How would this concept be received by environmentalists/biologists?

Are the discourses of quantum mechanics, biology, and cultural studies at all compatible in this sense?

Christine Skolnik, Dept of English

The Naturally Savage Other: What Can We Learn from Him, Her or It?

Our interactions with, attitudes toward and images of nature seem absolutely central to questions of ecological restoration, the enhancement of biodiversity and related issues of economic vitality and quality of life. In fact, it seems to me that those questions cannot be answered without seriously considering those interactions, attitudes and images.

As someone steeped in History of Religions and the Visual Arts with a specialty in pre-Conquest Mexico–which for me means the intersection of Textual and Visual Interpretational Theories, Studies of Western and non-Western Religious Traditions, Ethnohistory, and Comparative Ethics–I find myself drawn to the interpretation of and ethical issues behind images of the "Savage Other" and their close alignment with images of Nature.

We have a 500 year plus Western tradition of viewing the "Savage Other" in a dichotomous way as either the idealistic "noble savage" or the less than ideal "nasty/ignorant/childish/bestial savage." These images also are closely tied to nature itself as either noble, fruitful or sacredly splendid; or in need of improvement for human use, or potentially and impossibly destructive and hence the cause of inevitable suffering (disasters, disease, etc.. . .). The Noble Savage inhabits the first natural environment, living in perfect harmony with it; the Nasty Savage inhabits the second, and as with his/her environment, has not yet learned to civilize either it or him/herself.

So. . .

1. What is the history of these noble/nasty images of nature and nature's savage inhabitants?

2. How are relationships among people, nature and sacrality understood in this history, and what concepts of time, place and morality do they project?

3. How are comparable relationships and concepts understood (if at all) in differing non-Western contexts?

4. And what can we learn from those non-Western contexts that might help us understand our relationships with healthy ecosystems, biodiversity, economic vitality and quality of life?

Kay Read
Religious Studies and Institute for Nature and Culture

The Role of Science and Aesthetics in Our Understanding of Nature

In Critical Fragment Nr. 115, Friedrich Schlegel remarks: “all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.” Written in the swell of revolutionary fervor, both of the political kind – the French Revolution, and of the philosophical kind – Kant’s Copernican Revolution, Schlegel’s push to unite such disparate realms of human inquiry was revolutionary in its own right. And it was a call echoed by many German romantic thinkers as they sough to push their contemporaries to rethink the relation between scientific and aesthetic methods.
Now, some two hundred years later, the disciplines are even more isolated from each other than ever before, so I think it is worth re-examining what might be gained by a more unified approach to understanding nature. I take my lead from Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who claimed that the empirical methods of the natural sciences were necessary but not sufficient to achieve an understanding of nature. To come to an ever more complete understanding of nature (which in broad strokes can be understood as a collection of living forces), one needed to understand not only mechanistic laws, but also the very idea of nature as a whole. For Humboldt the realm of value, especially aesthetic value (ideas of beauty, pleasure, play), is essential to our understanding of nature. Those who approach nature with only empirical methods threaten to kill the “living breath of nature.”
--What is the “living breath of nature”?
--What does an aesthetic-scientific approach to nature amount to?
--How does the presentation of nature change when we are interested in depicting both the quantifiable and the non-quantifiable aspects of nature?
--What pleasures does nature offer and why are these pleasures valuable to us?

Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert
Department of Philosophy

Ecological Restoration: What Good Is It?

The practice of ecological restoration raises many urgent questions for the arts and humanities disciplines.

Some of these have to do with the value of restored, “reproduced” ecosystems. What are we to make of them? What value do they have, especially in comparison with their “natural” counterparts? Are they “natural” or not. Are they authentic or, as some have argued, “fake”?

Others have to do with the practice and experience of restoration itself and of the relationship with nature it entails.

Are humans part of nature or in some way apart from it? What is the value---or disvalue---of the manipulation, abstraction and alienation restoration entails? How are we to derive full value from the experience of restoration? What is the relationship between action, how we think and talk about that action, and the value it generates?

What, more broadly, are the values that underlie an ethic, not just in an abstract, but in a practical, operational sense? How are they created and how are they built into conscience?

How are we to deal with the untoward aspects of experience, such as discrimination and killing, transcendence, hierarchy and authority?

What is our relationship to time and to the past and future?

William R. Jordan III
Institute for Nature and Culture

What Can Philosophy As Philosophy Bring to Restoration?

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone
in a world of wounds.”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

For a long time, philosophy provided the grounds for systems of inquiry. This doesn’t seem to be the case any more. The questions of what philosophy is and what it should do have become, which philosophy are we speaking of and who is speaking?

I think all of us here agree in some sense with the epigraph above. If it’s true in some way that the natural world needs our assistance to get better, what can philosophy do to help heal these wounds? Is the fractured condition of philosophy analogous to the wounded condition of nature?

One of philosophy’s remaining strengths is rigorous suspicion – suspicion of claims of truth, reality, beauty, morality, originality, naturalness, legitimacy, a fundamental ground.

Can there be a world without wounds? What if the world is “by nature” – in its being – always already wounded and thus unhealable?

Are we humans likewise wounded? This is sometimes asked in the form of the question, Are humans a part of or apart from nature? But aren’t we actually both at the same time, always already divided against ourselves (i.e., individuals – both not and very divided), incapable of fully grasping ourselves from inside yet unable to fully step outside ourselves and adopt a “view from nowhere” from which we could understand ourselves completely? Don’t nature and humanity (including philosophers) suffer the same existential wounds, from which we can never be healed?

How do we deal philosophically with the tension of being both part of and apart from nature? How does this effort supplement that of ecological restoration?

Randy Honold
Asst. Dean of LA&S; Philosophy; INC

The Implications of the Death of Descartes

On March 25, 2007, before a hushed crowd of over 1,300 people, Richard Wrangham, a leading figure in the study of chimpanzees, announced that Descartes was dead. There was very little applause.

I want to talk about the fact that we need to examine the implications of Descartes still being alive. And if he is what that means for Chicago Wilderness and other humans and nature interactions.

We still like to believe that the whole world works like clockwork while it is mostly that part of the world made of clocks that does. The rest of the world looks like a shimmering polytope. We should learn to make something of these facts. The ways we think about nature and humans and nature may still be our greatest obstacle to seriously finding our place within it. That place is one the ground floor of utter dependence.

The chimpanzees, if they survive another 50 years, are likely to beat us yet. The world continues to be quite happy with them and they in it.

Paul Heltne. Director, Center for Humans and Nature

Exploring the Role of the Arts and Humanities in Solving Environmental Problems

In 2004, the National Council on Public History (NCHP) and the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) held their first joint conference in Victoria, Canada as a vehicle to explore the crossroads of these two fields of inquiry. In the journal issue that emerged from this conference (The Public Historian, Winter 2004), guest editors Catherine A. Christen and Lisa Mighetto provide an overview of the innovative work occurring at this interdisciplinary junction, and buoyantly predict “a rich future for the burgeoning intersections and affiliations between environmental and public history.”

Though their optimism is encouraging, I would like to examine how integrated these fields are at the pedagogical level. To what extent do public history courses regularly incorporate environmental issues? Do public history courses that focus on Historic Preservation also focus on environmental conservation ? Likewise, how often do environmental history courses teach their students, say, how best to present their narratives to the wider public? For my presentation I would like to draw from available course syllabi (on-line or collected), in order to survey to what extent environmental history and public history intersections actually find their way into curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I will use this as a starting point to speculate about future directions for my own teaching as a public historian at DePaul.

Amy M. Tyson, Department of History

Chicago Wilderness and DePaul University

DePaul University has been a member of Chicago Wilderness since 1998. In the past four years Liam Heneghan has been a co-chair of the science team for the coalition. Recently, he lead a project to develop a Natural Science Research Agenda and is currently working in partnership with Lake County, DuPage County and Cook Country Forest Preserves and with McHenry County Conservation District to develop a conservation research program for Chicago Wilderness. The reseach program is designed in response to perceived knowldge gaps that limit the CW coalition in achieving its vision of accessible, interconnected, restored and healthy ecosystems that contribute to regional biodiversity, and to the economic vitality and quality of life for all residents in the Chicago metropolitan area.

In tandem with this process, Dr Barbara Willard, an executive council member, of INC has helped develop a social science research agenda for the coalition.

The planning of both projects took several years during which ongoing research on topics of concern to Chicago Wilderness were pursued at DePaul University (especially on the impact of invasive species on ecosystem properties) while at the same time we surveyed a broad range of constituencies with the CW coalition to establish an research agenda (http://condor.depaul.edu/~lumek/CWRA.pdf).

INC now has a vision of launching a similar project involving humanities issues and research.

This project would model itself on the natural science research agenda project though on a smaller scale initially, and with some different research methodologies. For example although we would begin by interviewing CW personnel to understand their concerns and needs, and may indeed interview other prominent individuals and institutions throughout the region, we would also conduct extensive secondary research to learn and consolidate information about cutting-edge environmental theories and practices in the humanities Some possible areas of research are as follows: the rhetoric of environmentally conscious advertising and PR, representations of environmental issues and environmental symbols in architecture and the fine arts, environmentalism and religion, the integration of environmental science and consciousness education at all levels of the curriculum, the environment and psychological health, and (of course) restoration as performance.

The ultimate vision here is to have a humanities and design arts program that would clear the intellectual path necessary for Chicago Wilderness to achieve its vision of its vision of accessible, interconnected, restored and healthy ecosystems that contribute to regional biodiversity, and to the economic vitality and quality of life for all residents in the Chicago metropolitan area.

Liam Heneghan, Environmental Science Program

Nature’s history: Are we ignoring a critical narrative in our conservation approaches?

Many histories can be told about a landscape. Some can be told through written histories or oral traditions of peoples who have lived there. Some can be told by the evolutionary past or life history of a particular species. There are also histories that can be imprinted into an ecosystem itself. An ecosystem’s ecological patterns and processes are more than a statement or an account of the current interactions among the different ecosystem components, including the humans who live there. These patterns and processes also recount a history of inter-relationships of the living communities and non-living features which have contributed to the development, characteristics, and dynamics of the current landscape. The ecosystem’s history is therefore as determinative of its future possibilities as its genetic material. An ecosystem can tell a story that has its own emergent features, different from but inclusive of the genes, organisms, populations and written human accounts of that place. Are we listening to these narratives as we do our conservation work? As we consider how ecosystems might respond to climate change, we need to ask ourselves seriously about how these histories might affect our developing relationship with nature. Can we use these narratives to build resilience into our ecosystems? If we need to focus on building ecological resilience and connectivity (for example, in the climate change context we can imagine the need for interconnected networks of soil types) do we need to change our approach to restoration?

Brooke Hecht, Center for Humans and Nature

Earth Oracles: Poets as Interpreters of the Natural World

Since the Enlightenment, arts have been considered part of the human sphere, unrelated to natural science. The artist’s source of inspiration has been located in human consciousness (or the human unconscious) rather than the non-human world. But a strong counter-tradition of arts as expressing values beyond the human can be found. The British Romantics share with traditional Inuit poets, for example, a concern with observation and expression of the natural world through human speech. Nineteenth century New England women nature journalists and twenty-first century fantasy writers both assume an oracular artistic stance, speaking for the non-human residents of the natural world and, often today, warning fellow humans of environmental change and degradation. Some poets and other artists similarly employ an oracular voice rather than the more common personal and confessional one, creating work in which the individual is contextualized within nature and/or assume a non-human persona to draw attention to the self-ness of animals, birds, and “inanimate” members of the world community.

Because I am a poet, I focus my attention on that rather than other arts, and what follows is not meant to exclude other arts.

--How might scholars be encouraged to address the tradition of oracular art and to create a canon of such work?
--How might poetry be used in schools to encourage identification by children and young adults with nature?
--How might published poets be brought together to share their oracular work and to encourage more?
--How might school programs bring together arts and sciences to enhance student identification with the value of nature?
--How might existing programs (such as “One Book One Chicago”) be used to encourage awareness of the artist as articulator of natural systems?
--How might existing institutions (such as the Botanical Garden) encourage area artists to address scientific and natural history issues in their work?

Patricia Monaghan, School for New Learning