Environmental Literature

Generally while I'm reading the assigned literature for the week, I make notations in the margins to comment on/remind myself about interesting sections, and I mark the page by tabbing the corner. When I'm done reading the entire selection, I can easily go back through it and find the tabbed pages in order to figure out what I should write about. This week, however, when I flipped back through the assigned selections, my method didn't help me to narrow down what I should write about -- literally every other page was tabbed.

This only goes to illustrate how fascinated I am by the writings of this era on the environment, the natural world, living in harmony with nature, the importance of ecology, and the interconnectedness of all living things (including, some would say, streams, rocks, mountains, forests, etc). In the introduction to the section on Environmental Literature, there is a quote by Tom Bissell, in which he comments on the "tradition of reflection upon nature and a stubborn activism upon its behalf ... from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson." I believe this tradition is exactly what inspires and moves me so much, although I have never been able to identify it as environmental before now. I grew up on a nearly self-sustaining homestead and was instilled with a great love of and respect for nature, so it was also natural for me to find and adore authors from Thoreau to Carson, as well as some of the others in this anthology: Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, and N. Scott Momaday included.

I first read Silent Spring as a teenager, and even then I recognized the power and beauty of Rachel Carson's rhetoric. She writes vivid, lingering descriptions down to such fine detail; it almost feels like watching a film pan slowly over a serene countryside, dwelling thoughtfully on various aspects of the landscape, picking up all the sounds and smells as well as the sights along the way. The connection she builds between the reader and the scene she paints is so sincere, it comes as a tragedy when she reveals the consequences of careless human actions in this idyllic setting. It is no wonder that her book literally changed the world.

Having never read Peter Matthiessen before, it was a pleasant surprise to find many sentiments and rhetorical strategies in his Wildlife in America as are found in Silent Spring. Matthiessen, too, seems to care deeply about the tiniest details of the environment he writes about, down to the fate of the last microscopic speck of eggshell from last of the now-extinct Auks. There was one line that struck me as unusual yet undeniably true in this excerpt: "There is some comfort in the notion that, however Homo sapiens contrives his own destruction, a few creatures will survive in that ultimate wilderness he will leave behind..." It may sound incredibly fatalistic, but I have actually had similar thoughts before. When I start to get overwhelmed by the destruction humankind is wreaking upon the Earth, I like to think that, whatever we do, the Earth itself will prevail. We may very well wipe ourselves off the face of the planet, and, unfortunately, we may take quite a few species with us, but we simply cannot destroy all life; it would be quite egomaniacal to think that we are that powerful.

This is not, of course, to say that I think we should just give up conservation or caring what we do to the environment. In fact, on a purely selfish level, we should realize that damaging any part of the Earth will somehow manage to come back to haunt us personally. As Edward Abbey put it, "All living things on earth are kindred."