Teaching environmental imagination.

Abstract

In his path-breaking book, The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell argues that changes in environmental policy and action depend upon changes in the ways we imagine the world around us and our relation to it. Building on this book and its critical reception, I have designed a course intended to introduce environmental literature and thought to first-year college students. This essay describes the premises, structure and methods of the course, and suggests ways of steering students away from simple preconceptions toward an awareness of the complex and occasionally contradictory values and ideas that make up any view of the world around us.

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According to Lawrence Buell, the current "environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity's relation to it" (2). For the last several years I have been developing a course on environmental writing of various kinds. The course is called "The Environmental Imagination" in homage to Buell's first book in the field of ecocriticism- I have taught it as a first-year seminar both at Wesleyan, my home institution, and at Princeton. In both institutions it has been part of an elective seminar series, not a composition program. My goal in both places has been to challenge students to rethink their assumptions about nature and their relations to it, their "environmental imaginations." Like Buell, I believe that such rethinking prepares students to confront environmental issues responsibly, regardless of their political persuasions.

The notion that critically self-conscious environmental imaginations produce environmentally responsible citizens may seem self-evident, but some environmental activists and critics dispute the claim that changing the way we see, conceive, and imagine the natural world necessarily changes the way we act in and on it. At the end of a recent public debate with Buell (ASLE conference, Boston, June 2003), for example, Leo Marx, the author of The Machine in the Garden (1964), remarked that changing people's minds is all very well, but it doesn't in itself change the way they behave or the effect they have on the world. Buell agreed, and so do I. Reading Thoreau and Dillard, Carson and Cronon, ecofeminists and environmental justice advocates, does not by itself produce responsible environmental action. What such reading does produce, I would argue, is a deeper, more mature understanding of human conceptions of environment and an awareness of the very real personal, cultural, and ideological implications of environmental policy and action on people and the world. This, combined with scientific knowledge and a grasp of social and economic thinking, should help make students responsible stewards of the world they are inheriting.

The course is organized in sections, each containing both literary and non-literary writing, and all intended to complicate the students' understanding of environmental thinking. I introduce this model with a short section on landscape, beginning with some images by Cole, Bierstadt, Adams, and Currier and Ives, to discuss in very general terms how they situate the viewer and what response they are likely to elicit. We then compare these images to some very brief descriptive passages by Muir (My Last Summer in the Sierras), Cather (O Pioneers!), Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), Abbey (Desert Solitaire), and Poe ("The Domain of Arnheim"), and I introduce the notions of the sublime, the picturesque and the beautiful both as historical concepts and as helpful ways of categorizing landscape, images, and responses.

I next ask students to visit a nearby site that I have chosen and write a short descriptive essay about it, trying to move beyond mere enumeration of detail to convey a fuller sense of the scene. When they have finished their essays, I ask them to read D. W. Meinig's "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene" and some material about the human and natural history of the site they have visited. We then discuss what they saw and what they failed to see in the scene, and how knowledge of its history changes their perception of it.

At Wesleyan, we gather at the highest point on campus and look down on the college buildings, the city of Middletown, the Connecticut River, and the hills beyond. The handout includes information on the geological history of the area, the history of Middletown as a port, an industrial city, and a post-industrial community, the making of the campus, and some recent environmental events in the area, such as the separation of storm sewers from waste sewers to prevent further pollution of the river, or the arrival of the woolly adelgid and the consequences for native hemlocks.

At Princeton, we gathered on a bridge over a lovely large lake full of ducks and geese and racing shells. The informational readings included geological and natural history, but also the surprising history of the lake as a hundred-year old, three-mile-long, manmade "intercollegiate rowing facility" (as it is called on nearby signs) paralleling a much older canal, built by immigrant workers in the 1830s.

In both places, the exercise challenges students to question their own first uninformed impressions of the world around them, and to see it in historical, cultural, and scientific terms as well. As a follow-up, we read a set of chapters from Anne Matthews' Wild Nights and John McPhee's The Pine Barrens, both of which challenge received ideas, the first about nature in Manhattan, and the second about culture in a little-known region of New Jersey.

The next section of the course raises fundamental questions about the relations between human beings and the natural world by focusing on narratives of creation. The Native American stories we read tend to be holistic but vary in their treatments of gender and their attitude towards other groups and peoples. The two creation stories in Genesis emphasize human dominance but also human stewardship. Readings from Darwin and from David Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea demonstrate both the threat that the theory of evolution poses to traditional cosmologies and the new cosmological possibilities it opens.

From here we move on to discuss various kinds of "nature writing." We begin with the Romantic effusions of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," and then read Joyce Carol Oates' vehemently anti-Romantic "Against Nature," and an excerpt from Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, which I would call post-Romantic. After this we spend three weeks on Thoreau, Dillard, and Abbey, emphasizing the role of the environmental imagination in the production of literary texts and the promulgation of attitudes towards nature. Here we pay attention to style as well as ideology, and discuss the texts as aesthetic works that use language, rhetoric, literary and cultural allusion, and the vivid depiction of actual scenes to complicate overly simple assumptions. We read "Walking" against "Ktaadn" to confront Thoreau's differing notions about the wild; we contrast Dillard's self-deprecating, golly-gosh persona with her vast knowledge and her serious commitment to theological meditation; we read Abbey's avowed commitment to surfaces and appearances (xiii) in the context of his repeated allusions to God (especially evident in "Down the River"), who may be absent from Abbey's world but is certainly present in his mind.

Having established the wide variety and inner complexities of views of the natural world, we go on to explore their possible ramifications in the realm of policy and action. How, we ask, can a writer's clearly conceived, forcefully expressed set of assumptions have an effect in the world?

How do science on the one hand and rhetoric on the other contribute to this effect? Here we focus on deep ecology (Devall and Sessions, "Deep Ecology," Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique" and others) and the environmental justice movement (Bullard, "Environmental Justice for All," DiChiro, excerpts from "Nature as Community" and selections from The Environmental Justice Reader). In order to bring out the strengths and weaknesses of these positions, I divide the class in half for a panel/debate, asking each group to make a strong case for one of them, and to prepare to respond critically to the other group's presentation. A small group of judges/senrekeepers provides a useful summing-up from the students' point of view. After the debate, we read some polemics, asking why they were effective in their times, and have been remembered ever since. The obvious text is Carson's Silent Spring, a combination of science and rhetoric. I have also used Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Michael Pollan's "The Idea of a Garden."

The final pre-planned section of the course addresses two issues at once: the question of nature and gender and the ways in which fiction can embody and even advocate an environmental imagination. We begin with some essays, including Sherry Ortner's classic, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" and Sigurd Olson's hymn to virility, "Why Wilderness?" Jewett's "A White Heron" and excerpts from Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her help us explore imagined relations between woman and nature, while a selection of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories provides a literary embodiment of the masculine nature mystique. These brief readings are followed by two more extended literary works, Faulkner's "The Bear," in which wilderness and manliness are closely related (and profoundly threatened) and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, in which five generations of Native American women confront a man-made environmental disaster. My goal is to show how literature creates complex views of the world, rather than simply embodying a single ideological position. In all of these texts, emotions, thoughts, and actions concerning the natural world depend as much upon conscious or subconscious assumptions about gender and (except in Jewett) racial identity as they do upon explicitly formulated ideas about "the environment."

The last two weeks of the course are more flee-form, and provide a chance for students to apply the course materials and concepts to other reading. For the first of these I ask students to read through a fairly large selection of poems, and to choose three that they would like to discuss. They submit their choices on email; I tabulate them and announce which poems we will be discussing. In class we read the poems aloud, discuss them, and ask ourselves how the work of the semester might be influencing our responses. As with the landscape descriptions at the beginning of the course, we consider how many different ways there are of responding to a single text, and how foreknowledge and ideological assumptions contribute to each reading. We spend the final week on the latest issue of Orion magazine. I ask students to buy the magazine and encourage them to read it from cover to cover, but I also assign certain pieces for their special attention. My purpose here is to demonstrate the relevance of the reading and thinking they have done to a set of up-to-the-minute texts and issues, not chosen or even known by me when the course began.

Student responses to the course have been gratifying. Official course evaluations and my own end-of-semester questionnaires suggest that it has in fact challenged some assumptions and changed some ways of thinking. Many students--a number of them science or social science majors--keep in touch after the course is over. They have had internships and post-graduate years with environmental programs in several parts of the world; they major in all fields, including especially English, American Studies, Government, Economics, and Earth and Environmental Sciences; several have also pursued Wesleyan's Certificate in Environmental Studies.

Teaching "The Environmental Imagination" has shown me that it is possible to descend from the ivory tower of literary studies and approach the world of significant action without giving up the intensive analysis of texts and ideas. Reading Thoreau, Carson, Hogan, Faulkner and the rest may not--indeed, should not--turn every student into an environmental activist, but my experience with this courses suggests that the ways people think and the actions they take in the world are closely related, and that influencing one cannot help but have some effect on the other.

References

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.

Adamson, Joni, Evans, Mei Mei, and Stein, Rachel, Eds. The Environmental Justice Reader. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Bullard, Robert D. "Environmental Justice for All." Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1994. 3-22.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! Ed. Susan J. Rosowski and Charles W. Mignon with Kathleen

Doneher. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Modern Library, 1998.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Devall, Bill and Sessions, George. "Deep Ecology." Deep Ecology. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985. 63-77.

Di Chiro, Giovanna. "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice." Uncommon Ground. Ed William Cronon. New York: Norton, 1996. 298-320.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York. Harper and Row, 1974.

Faulkner, William. "The Bear." Go Down, Moses. New York: Random House, 1942. 189-331,

Griffin, Susan. Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Guha, Ramachandra. "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation." The Great New Wilderness Debate. Ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998. 231-245.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. NY: Scribner's, 1938.

Hogan, Linda. Solar Storms. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. "A White Heron." Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1994. 669-679.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford UP, 1949.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.

Matthews, Anne. Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City. New York: North Point, 2001.

McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.

McPhee, John. The Pine Barrens. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1968.

Meinig, D. W. "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene." The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. Ed. D. W. Meinig. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. 33-48.

Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Against Nature." The Nature Reader. Ed. Daniel Halpern and Dan Frank. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1996. 226-233.

Olson, Sigurd. "Why Wilderness?" The Great New Wilderness Debate. Ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998. 97-102.

Ortner, Sherry. "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" Woman, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford UP. 67-87.

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Domain of Arnheim," The Complete Stories. New York: Knopf/Everyman, 1992. 893-907.

Pollan, Michael. "The Idea of a Garden." Second Nature. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991. 176-201.

Thoreau. Walden. A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod. New York: Library of America, 1985. 321-587.

"Ktaadn." A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod. New York: Library of America, 1985. 593-665.

"Walking." Walden and other writings. Ed. Brooks Atkinson, New York: Modern Library, 1950. 597-632.

William W. Stowe, Wesleyan University, CT

Stowe is Benjamin Waite Professor of the English Language at Wesleyan and a visiting professor at Princeton. He has published books and articles on American and French fiction, detective fiction, environmental literature, and travel writing.