Talkin' the Talk: Ecospeak

Ok, I'm just going to jump right in here, so put on your scuba gear quickly. (I don't know what I mean by that.)

In Ecospeak, Killingsworth and Palmer argue that the terminology we use to talk about environmental issues eventually becomes too familiar, resulting in a flattening or hardening of meaning. Things get oversimplified, and terms/phrases/titles that carry heavy connotations eventually become tagged with some sort of stereotype or stripped-down version of what it use to mean. They cite the abortion controversy as suffering from this oversimplification; anymore the pro-life camp seems to exist solely to contradict the pro-choice stance and vice versa. The environmental language that has suffered this "strippage" is what Killingsworth and Palmer call ecospeak. So, it's got me thinking: How do we navigate the crowded room of ecospeak?

Oftentimes, environmental debates where each side has invested interest go nowhere, kind of like this:



Speaking to my moccasins in French would be productive. And if you're wondering what the GM guy had to say about this...




(PHEW! Thank GAIA I didn't wear my jacket with leather elbows today.)

I find it so striking that these videos (and the more general conversation they represent) depict the way ecospeak is used by various camps to display their severe distrust of other stances. Killingsworth and Palmer's diagrams (11,14) attempt to depict these relationships, but when I think about these debates being argued by real humans with real interests/values, it's evident that diagramming relationships is impossible. At first I was thinking of ecospeak in terms of Orwell's "Newspeak" in 1984, which Killingsworth and Palmer actually allude to; I thought of ecospeak as a voiceless, white-washed language that doesn't hold any real meaning. Environmentalist, for example, represents nothing more than a tree-hugger with a protest sign. But it's easy to forget about the emotions that charge such vocabulary usage. The GM guy was furious at the mere existence of *academic* environmentalists. (He really took a stab at us, didn't he? Especially at the "fuzzy haired" professor...) The environmentalist was appalled with the developmentalist (the GM guy). I guess what I'm saying is this: We use ecospeak to control our audiences or opponents by pegging them with a single identity (12), but how do we get around doing this when we're so emotionally attached to our cause and everyone seems to be playing their roles so nicely?

Another character in this soap-opera of environmental rhetoric is the public. Killingsworth and Palmer, and a few others who we read, note that ultimately the public's voice carries environmental issues to the government, where change can apparently occur. K&P suggest that it's our legislative demand and voting power that act as catalysts, but does anyone else think that
is idealizing the role of the public? For me it's always difficult to distinguish who determines public interest and values: the public, the government, or commercialism, or someone/thing else? With this in mind I found Cooper's take on the activist group Nature Conservancy interesting. Their characterization of themselves presents their mission as peaceful and free from the messy hands of the government, but as we know it's just not so simple.

The LOCAL and the local

Last week in class I mentioned something about whether or not the terms global and local are strictly limited to geography. I couldn't really vocalize it then, but after our class discussion and reading Heise, I realized that what I was trying to vocalize was the idea of scale and relevancy. Heise discusses in chapter three the problem of scale in the local: what is local can be as small as a corner of a room, or as big as a country (or bigger). So with the range of local being potentially huge, the implications of local in various (con)texts can lead to a greater understanding of what we mean when we say local.

For example, in Momaday's "A First American Views His Land" time seems play a integral role in the local, as we are given glimpses of sustenance spanning in time from Paleo-Indian survival to the Native American "conservationist" hunting. Momaday discusses the trust shared by land and humans of these times, suggesting both a timeliness and a timelessness of a relationship with the local. Also, a lot of the pieces we've read (Sanders and Berry come to mind) claim that a staying put is the only way to foster a sense of place--really we can only know the local. If we can only know the local, and as Momaday states, land is sacred in racial memory (580), then what is local certainly has the ability to be geographically distant, yet emotionally and mentally close.

For both hooks, what is local is/can be bodily. In "Touching the Earth" hooks, much like Momaday, recognizes feelings of locality in racial memory. However, she furthers this notion in her discussion of the connections between land (and displacement) with the body, stating, "Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white-supremacist assumptions about black identity. Learning contempt for blackness, southerners transplanted in the north suffered both culture shock and soul loss" (106). Such a large scale displacement and diaspora as the one hooks discusses equates the idea of local with a collective and physical body. The further one becomes from the geographically local, the more estranged the bodily local becomes. In a foreign place, the body becomes foreign.

Local takes on a more common identity in Di Chiro's "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice"--that of the city/neighborhood. But when considering hooks' and Momaday's emphasis of the local as being bred in the bone, we realize that there's much more at stake in Environmental Justice activism than even human lives. A sense of individual and community identity is woven through the local, and poisoning the inhabitants means poisoning a race, a culture, a body.

So, hopefully this exemplifies my questioning of the local from last week, which was spurred initially by Berry's claim that "practice can only be local" ("Preserving the Wilderness" 518). If we open up our perception of what it means to be local, then maybe this statement is less absolute than we originally thought.

Also, I've been noticing how much of my favorite music employs ecocritical tropes. If you have a few minutes to listen to beautiful music and are curious about what goes through my head while I'm washing dishes, here you go; the lyrics end around the 3 minute mark:

(How can I make it so it doesn't cut off the video frame? It's the smallest YouTube embedding size available.)

Desperate Landscaping

While eating breakfast this morning, I was immediately struck by yet another piece of exquisite journalism on NBC's Today Show. Check out this clip on "Desperate Landscaping"-- an interesting representation of suburban toxicity and destruction:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Spirituality and Searching: Berry and Garrard

I mentioned in my last post and in class that I have been getting lost in the ideal of spirituality and nature, finding it difficult to draw lines between science, ecology, religion, and spirituality. Not that lines need to be drawn, but figuring out how these concepts interact with each other and reconcile or accentuate their differences is a personal mess I'm trying to muddle through. I guess you could call it spring cleaning.

So, not unexpectedly, Wendell Berry's "Preserving Wildness" got my ball rolling, especially when considering Garrard's characterization of Berry's sacred relationship with nature. As mentioned in my last post, I read Garrard as pretty much a blank slate. (I had read Berry before, but on a totally nonacademic, uncritical level, so I stand by my blank slate.) His discussion of Berry in "Dwelling" only stood out as an area where Christianity is dragged into the already-complicated mix of concepts in Ecocriticism. However, looking back I can't help but feel like Garrard is implying that Berry's Christian ecology (hmmm...could we call it that? Does that exist?) somehow makes his message easily dismissible. Maybe I feel this way because of Garrard's use of quotation marks, or the fact that he argues that Berry's "neo-Jeffersonian utopia" is, well, a neo-Jeffersonian utopia, thus an oppressive system where outsiders are, according to Garrard, "less human" than insiders. Essentially, I do not think Berry's work is exclusively guilty of such oppression; what ideology doesn't, in some way, consider outsiders to be less? In a way, a feminist regards a misogynist to be less human, right?

It seems as if Garrard is simply brushing aside Berry, characterizing him as just another white, Christian farmer who uses his Christian ideology to make sense of oppression.

Instead, I think Berry's incorporation of religion and ecology/agrarianism fosters a sense of equality. For instance, in "Preserving Wildness" Berry surveys the status of humans and nature: "It is a spiritual predicament, for it requires us to be properly humble and grateful; time and again, it asks us to be still and wait. But it is also a practical problem, for it requires us to do things" (518, emphasis in original). Here he is clearly pitting humans, that is everyone inside and outside of the farming/white/Christian communities, against something bigger like nature or god or whatever--not against each other. I see where his use of "properly" here may be somewhat problematic, suggesting some standard set by someone "in charge," but I also see a greater call of unity. Later, Berry's discussion of nature and human sameness and differences also unifies, noting the inherent similarities of all humans. (I have more to say about this, but for the sake of brevity I'll cut it short.)

Also, I'd like to hear thoughts on technology, ecology, and spirituality. Is technology always an opponent to a spiritual nature, as Berry sometimes suggests? (I thought Garrard's remark that Berry even opposes technology in agriculture is somewhat overblown, as Berry recognizes the inevitability of technology and constantly wrestles with ways in which to coexist with it. I mean, come on, the man drives a car.)

More to come on this...

Garrard and Ecocriticism

Plainly put, I think Garrard's Ecocriticism is a good place to start for someone who, like me, is new to a more formal, constructed study of ecology in English studies. Garrard's approach, or at least his goal, is to provide a horizontal snapshot of ecocriticism as a critical lens, as he provides a run-down of theoretical positions (ecofeminism, cornucopia, Heideggerian Ecophilosophy, deep Ecology, Eco-Marxism, etc.) to verse the reader on terminology and ideology. Garrard constructs this snapshot by using tropes, which act both as an organizational tool and a diving board of sorts. For example, the chapter/trope on "Dwelling" provides Garrard with a space in which to discuss the give-and-take relationship (or lack thereof) between humans and land. But, like the other tropes, "Dwelling" allows space for Garrard and ideally the reader to dive into the current discussion about Georgic Ecology (am I using this term correctly?) and the "Ecological Indian," using key figures, in this case Wendell Berry, John Berger, Kirkpatrick Sale, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich, to propel the discussion of given topics. At the end of most chapters--all except "Animals" I think--Garrard problematizes the trope.

So, all in all, I felt exposed to new ideas and names in reading Ecocriticism, which is great. However, because I'm not well-versed in ecocriticism (yet), I feel vulnerable to Garrard. I have little to base his "facts" off of, and while he frequently criticizes oversimplification in various aspects of scientific approaches, I can't help but wonder if he's guilty of oversimplification with this text. Can the ideologies presented in "Positions" really be so easily divided and summed up as to fit nicely in Garrard's box? Do Garrard's dismissals and approvals fairly represent general consensus among ecocritics? Probably not.

Despite my feelings of vulnerability, I found a majority of Garrard's work to be a great spring board. From the first few pages onward I was amazed at the number of dimensions ecocriticism embodies. Religion, gender, class, capitalism, health, geography, sexuality, literature/humanities, science--the number of subjects and lenses associated with ecocriticism goes on. Although we're focusing on English studies in class, I think we should keep in mind the reach that ecocriticism truly has and the holistic values it encourages.

Here are a few specific questions/ideas:

• Garrard creates a lot of opposition within the eco-critic community, which made me wonder if these separations are over-shadowing the unified cause? Is there a unified cause at all?
  
• How does the consideration of time in elegy, idyll, and utopia change or represent the way we view time and the environment now? Do we feel like we're running out of time to "save" the environment?
  
• Do we gain anything from positing the old world pastoral against the new world idea of wilderness?
• What exactly is the back-to-the-land Maoist catastrophe Garrard refers to on pg. 115?
• Towards the end (page 151-ish) Garrard discusses the effects of nature documentaries on the general public's perception of nature. I'm intrigued by this idea in a way that's hard for me to solidify. Does it really matter if shows like Life or Planet Earth create Hi-Def, slowed down, sped up, saturated images of nature? Are these shows a celebration or commercialization of nature? And (how) do these effects, or more generally nature documentaries as a whole, change/shape/destroy/inhance/create our images of the pastoral/wilderness/dwelling/pollution/apocalypse/animals. Is that all we can really know of certain tropes?
• Are Christianity and Ecology inherently at odds as Garrard seems to suggest? The whole idea of religion, both monotheistic and polytheistic, really seems to complicate and be complicated by the environment. What can I/we make of this? I always looked at nature, especially the weird stuff, as a sign that there must be something in/up/out/down there to create such an intricate system. But Garrard gives me the feeling that a true ecologist/ecocritic values scientific beliefs over religious ones, which are admittedly human constructs that when interpreted literally are often ridiculous (to me). But where does spirituality fit in?