Join the “Environment” Keyword Working Group
The goal of this project is to create a new “state of the field” inventory and analysis of the central terms we currently use in the study of environment and culture. Building on the momentum of the “Keywords in the Study of Environment and Culture” panel that we hosted at the 2008 ASA meeting, we intend to develop an expanded list of “keywords” in this field through collaborative conversation and scholarly exchange. Like Keywords for American Cultural Studies itself, the roots of this project may be found in the iconic “blank pages” at the end of Raymond Williams’s Key Words, and one of our goals is to inscribe our field more fully into those pages. At the same time, we wish more specifically to expand and reconsider the influential inventories already included in such important volumes as, for example, Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), Carolyn Merchant’s Radical Ecology (1992; 2005), and the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (2004), which have already offered powerful models for identifying and defining central terms for the study of environment and culture.
We invite colleagues from all disciplines and departments to join with us in this project. Our first step will be to develop, collaboratively, an expanded list of “keywords” in the field. We see the blog thus first as a space to discuss potential terms, in the process modeling and reflecting on the ways we see our disciplines (and inter-disciplines) contributing to the broader critical conversations surrounding environmentalism, environmental justice, sustainability, place, climate change, and other central topics. We thus also imagine this shared space, in other words, as a place to discuss the ways that different fields, in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, might work together to solve interlinked social and environmental challenges.
After we have generated an expanded list of terms, we will work (likely through the Keywords Collaboratory) to produce Keyword-style entries for a new volume on Keywords in the Study of Environment and Culture.
Vermonja R. Alston on “Environment”
In its broadest sense, the term “environment” indexes contested terrains located at the intersections of political, social, cultural, and ecological economies. In its narrowest sense, it refers to the place of nature in human history. In each of these usages, representations of the natural world are understood as having decisive force in shaping environmental policy and the environmental imagination. Conservation politics were inspired by interpretations of particular places as untouched by the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, while much contemporary ecocriticism has continued the mainstream preoccupation with wilderness traditions, pastoralism, and the Romantic impulse of nature writing. Environmental justice activists and some ecofeminists have questioned these preoccupations, as have indigenous and postcolonial writers and scholars across the Americas who point out that imaginative writing about “nature” has a long tradition among colonial settlers attempting to mythologize and indigenize their relationships to place. This polyphony of competing voices and genealogies may be best understood as an interplay among many environmentalisms.
In his Keywords, Raymond Williams (1983, 219, 223) notes that “[n]ature is perhaps the most complex word in the language . . . Nature has meant the ‘countryside’, the ‘unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man . . . nature is what man has not made.” At the heart of this conception of nature lies the sense that there exists inherent, universal, and primary law beyond the corrupt societies of “man.” While “environment” is not one of Williams’s keywords, “ecology” does make an appearance, even though the term was not common in the English language until the middle of the twentieth century. Ecology, defined as the “study of the relations of plants and animals with each other and their habitat,” replaced environment, a word in use since the early nineteenth century but derived from the mid-fourteenth-century borrowing from Old French, environ, meaning to surround or enclose (111). In American cultural studies, “environment” has undergone a renewal among scholars and activists, owing in part to resistance to the bracketing of “nature” and “wilderness” as privileged sites of national identity, and its acceptance as a shorthand for research on ecosystems and diverse environmental movements. Curiously, even as the term “ecology” is used less often, it has been condensed to a prefix in the names of social and intellectual movements, notably ecocriticism and ecofeminism.
In the late eighteenth century, a transatlantic Romantic movement coincided with U.S. independence to produce a nationalism whereby nature, understood as “wilderness,” came to underwrite a new national identity. A harmonious relationship with sublime, wild nature became a way of articulating civilized U.S. American purity against the perceived decadence of Europe. With Henry David Thoreau’s version of Transcendentalism, wildness” came to symbolize absolute freedom: “in wildness is the preservation of the World” (R. Nash 1982, 84). For Thoreau, preservation of wilderness was important for the preservation of civilization, though his own notion of wilderness was the pastoral, a liminal space between the technologically driven pursuit of progress and the savagery of wilderness. Lawrence Buell (1995) locates the “American environmental imagination” in the canonization of Thoreau as a naturalist by late-nineteenth-century ecologists such as John Muir. Muir developed an environmental ethos that was later central to the philosophy of deep ecology: first, abuse of nature is wrong; second, “nature has intrinsic value and consequently possesses at least the right to exist” (Payne 1996, 5). During this period characterized by increasing fear of Eastern urbanization, environmental protection became synonymous with wilderness preservation. Thus urban environments, along with the diverse human populations who inhabit them, mediated (and continue to mediate) perceptions of nonhuman, “natural” environments.
The narrow sense of “environment” as a discourse on wilderness protection has fueled criticism by ecofeminists, urban ecologists, and environmental justice activists. Ecofeminists suggest that human relationships with the natural world have been engendered by a masculinist impulse to imagine and experience the land as feminine. For Annette Kolodny (1975, 58), the pastoral impulse is at once a desire for exclusive possession, leading to exploitation, and an urge to protect the primal forest, so as “to return in order to begin anew.” In response, ecofeminism attempts to deconstruct the nature/culture dualism that situates nature, women, and ethnic minorities as passive “others” against which the Anglo-American male constructs himself. By linking the salvation of the planet Earth to issues of social equality, ecofeminism contributes to our understanding of the place of human structures of domination and power in environmental change. Yet the process of deconstructing the nature/culture dualism also risks enshrining a gender dualism. The problem is that neither “women” nor “ethnic minorities” are unitary categories of analysis. Rather they are diverse groups differentially situated with respect to their environments, communities, and identities (Di Chiro 1996).
In response to this problem, Marxist streams of ecofeminism have focused on issues of social class and environmental degradation, while grassroots environmental justice movements have successfully mobilized urban poor communities in the United States. In different ways, each has pointed out that the anti-urban bias of preservation politics has often resulted in the creation of toxic ghettoes in cities while cordoning off scenic wonderlands. William Cronon (1995) argues that wilderness preservation may encourage the migration of dirty industries to poor communities whose members lack access to networks of power; Robert D. Bullard (2002) adds that the term “environmental racism” more accurately describes the environmental policies and industry practices that provide benefits to whites while shifting costs to people of color. Environmental justice movements, including the “environmentalism of the poor” in developing countries, place the survival of poor and marginalized people at the center of environmental activism. These movements seek freedom from state-centered and international development projects that excrete the toxins of affluent nations and local communities into poor communities.
Environmental justice activists charge deep ecologists with ignoring the problems of social and economic inequality on a global scale. Deep ecologists counter with the charge that the environmental justice position is reformist and anthropocentric, too firmly rooted in human communities. In contrast, deep ecology establishes itself as biocentric or ecocentric. The advantage of the latter position lies in its emphasis on the notion that “everything is connected”; its disadvantage is that it can be accused of ventriloquizing a natural world that cannot speak for itself. Herein lies the central paradox: Speaking for a natural world is a representational practice requiring the intervention of an authorized human agent. Biocentrism’s radical displacement of human agency means that a powerful speaking human subject vanishes into nature, setting up an ideological fantasy of a world of total equality among humans, and between humans and nonhuman “nature” (van Wyck 1997). As Jim Tarter (2002, 213) puts this critique of biocentrism, “some live more downstream than others,” and those people tend to be poorer and darker, and to have little or no access to environmental policymakers. In short, biocentrism risks masking the relationship between environmental exploitation and human exploitation. By contrast, the broader sense of the term “environment” can enable a questioning of relations of power, agency, and responsibility to human and nonhuman environments.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
So — Let’s get the ball rolling. What terms do YOU think belong on a new and expanded list of “keywords in the study of environment and culture”? I’ll begin by sharing two lists as starting points for this blog.
List #1: The five keywords we highlighted at the 2008 ASA panel, which we thought were essential to the field:
nature
place
eco-art
sustainability
environmental justice
List #2: The glossary of terms from Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005):
anthropocentrism
anthropomorphism
biocentrism
bioregion, bioregionalism
brownfields
culture
cyborg
deep ecology
ecocentrism
ecocriticism
ecofascism
ecofeminism
ecology
ecotone
environment
environmentalism
environmental justice
environmental racism
environmental unconscious
environmental writing, environmental literature
factish
Georgic
green studies
homocentrism
land ethic
landscape
nature
nature writing
pastoral, anti-pastoral, post-pastoral
place, placeness, non-place
reinhabitation
restoration ecology (ecological restoration)
social ecology, ecological socialism
space
sustainability, sustainable development
UMWELT
wild, wildness, wilderness
But these two lists are only a start. What other words would you include in a new, expanded Keyword list, and why? Which of these terms, if any, would you strike?
March 21st, 2009 at 10:57 am
Hi Everyone,
Welcome to the site. Bill and I are excited to get this promising project going.
I learned a lot about the possibilities for this kind of project when I read the blog on the Keywords site dated October 17, 2008 (just under the announcement for this project). I encourage everyone to read the blog which will give you a great introduction to Glenn Hendler, Bruce Burgett and Deborah Kimmey’s work to date both on the the book and this site. And we thank Deborah for facilitating this work!
To get things rolling, I suggest the following possibilities for additional keywords:
food justice
globalization
deterritorialization
reterritorialization
April 5th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
I very much appreciate the work that went into setting up this forum, and Vermonja Alston’s entry on “environment” is a wonderful starting point, touching on a number of issues that will surely overlap with postings on other keywords. Below, I include the short presentation on the future of the word “nature” which I delivered at the ASA panel.
Karla Armbruster
Webster University
October, 2008
American Studies Association Meeting
Nature
In 1989, Bill McKibben published one of the first major books about global climate change, The End of Nature. His argument was that because human activities have altered the climate and its weather patterns, there is almost no place on earth or in its atmosphere that remains unchanged by human beings. In a sense, he explains, global climate change means we have “domesticated the earth . . . [and] all that live on it” (84). As a result, he argues, it is harder and harder to comfort ourselves with “the idea that something larger than we are and not of our own making surrounds us” (85). In this view, nature, conceived of as a realm untouched by humans or human culture, is no more. More recently, in Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that dominant conception of nature as something beautiful, distant, and completely separate from the human observer is an impediment to developing a truly ecological view of the world and should be left behind. So, is nature dead? If not, should we kill it off? In the eigh-and-a-half minutes I have left today, I will explore some of the major ways nature has been defined in the Western tradition, recent attempts to rethink the nature/culture dualism, and the question of the ongoing usefulness of the term “nature.”
What do we mean by “nature”? As Raymond Williams famously pointed out, it may be “the most complex word in the [English] language” (219). In his Keywords entry on “nature,” he distinguishes among three primary uses of the term:
• the essential quality and character of something — human nature, for example,
• the inherent force which directs the world, and
• the material world itself.
Williams points out that humans may or may nor be included in the last two definitions. In the history of Western culture, he suggests, they have not been: he charts the evolution of the second meaning — nature as a force that is powerful, capricious, and often destructive to humankind — to the third, nature as a physical realm that functions as a potential source of regeneration and healing, or at least consolation, in the face of corrupt or artificial human society. In his analysis, this third sense of nature emerges in Enlightenment and Romantic thought.
It seems we have inherited both of these meanings, and the separation of nature from culture that they presume. This issue of the relationship between nature and culture is absolutely central to environmental thought. The idea that a rift has occurred between the two is often cited as a primary source of our environmental problems, although there are many different versions of the source of the rift: to name a few, the development of written language, the Judeo-Christian value system, the rise of agriculture, and the mechanistic worldview ushered in by the Enlightenment. Trying to find ways to heal this rift, or think beyond it, has been a preoccupation of many scholars in ecocriticism and environmental humanities.
But are nature and culture really separate? Have they ever been? As philosopher Kate Soper points out in What Is Nature?, we often employ a “lay” concept of nature, “the nature of immediate experience and aesthetic appreciation; the nature we have destroyed and polluted and are asked to conserve and preserve” (156). If we examine the types of common, everyday uses of the word nature that Soper refers to, the nature/culture distinction unravels. The example I like to use with students is a cow. As Lawrence Buell points out, “arguably nature still has value as a relative term,” and the assumption that most of my students hold — that a cow IS natural, is a case in point. Certainly, a cow is not a purely human creation. It is the result of natural forces and tends to live in the countryside, a place less obviously shaped and altered by human beings than the city (of course, this generalization is complicated by today’s hellishly crowded feedlots and factory-style abbatoirs). But once we compare the domesticated cow or pig to its wild relatives, it stops looking so natural. Once we start talking about selective breeding, artificial insemination, and genetic engineering, the distinction is much blurrier than it used to be. In fact, within environmental thought, domesticated animals like the cow are generally considered the products of human culture, and thus are either dismissed as unworthy of serious attention or condemned as agents of environmental degradation.
While early work in ecocriticism often assumed the validity of a nature/culture divide, merely arguing that dominant culture’s valuation of culture over nature is misguided, more recently, a number of thinkers have worked to question and complicate the nature/culture binary itself. In some cases, they have reacted to the notion of nature as a repository of unchanging rules and essences, a standard which can be used to identify deviations from the norm and, all too often, punish them; think about way the term “unnatural” has been wielded in regard to homosexuality, for example. In other cases, the impetus for rethinking the nature/culture relationship is a postmodern realization that our concepts about nature may not perfectly map onto the physical realities we use them to describe. I’ll just list a few prominent critiques of the nature/culture dualism:
• William Cronon’s identification of the nature/culture dualism as the heart of “the trouble with wilderness,” an attitude that allows us to protect and preserve small areas designated as wilderness at the cost of an “anything goes” attitude toward areas already seen as “contaminated” by a human presence.
• The environmental justice movement and related arguments that nature can be found in urban and other built environments seemingly dominated by human culture. In ecocriticism, we see this impulse in the move to go “beyond nature writing” to environmental writing and discourse.
• Dana Phillips’ argument in The Truth of Ecology that we should see culture as “our means of negotiating our differences from nature and from each other, and not an outright impediment to our negotiations, about which we can do nothing at all” (224).
• Greg Garrard’s assertion in Ecocriticism that we need a “poetics of responsibility” which employs a shifting, pragmatic sense of the relationship between nature and culture to focus on human actions and their results (as opposed to a “poetics of authenticity” that idealizes the unmediated encounter with nature as a way to rescue us from “the corrupt modern world of representation and simulation” (168)).
• Donna Haraway’s concepts of the cyborg, natureculture, and companion species, which all begin with the ways the categories of nature and culture are inextricably interrelated.
Overall, these thinkers are all responding to the way that, as Molly Wallace puts it, “the modern notion of an external nature, opposite to culture, and there for discovery, ‘a source of insight and a promise of innocence,’ has become less and less useful in the current ecological situation” (137). But they also reject a radical constructivist view that sees “nature as a lost object, incorporated entirely into culture” (Wallace 146) and thus ignores nature’s power and agency. There is a sense in many recent works of ecocriticism that the development of a theory (or theories) that can somehow deconstruct the nature/culture binary without reducing one side to the other is one of the most important challenges facing the field.
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton seems to go one step further, arguing that all of these attempts to “posit a nondualistic pot of gold at the end of a rainbow” (205) are doomed to failure. He seems to begin at the same place that they do, asserting that the traditional concept of nature as separate and superior to humanity, the concept embraced by what he calls “conservative ecocriticism” (which seems similar to Garrard’s poetics of authenticity), is an impediment to developing a truly ecological view of the world. He proposes that we give up on the idea of nature and move towards a “dark ecology,” which he argues takes a different direction than the quest for antidualism. Dark ecology, which he defines as “a perverse, melancholy ethics that refuses to digest the object into an ideal form,” involves what Morton describes as jumping down into the mud instead of trying to pull the world out of the mud (195).
While I appreciate Morton’s suggestion that we need to develop a new relationship with the otherness to be found in nature — perhaps one that sees difference as a source of vitality and value rather than an excuse for domination and abuse — I don’t think nature, as a physical reality or as a concept, is going to give up the ghost anytime soon. What he seems to be saying is that the word has too much baggage for us to be able to rethink it in a productive way. I want to suggest that not only is it unrealistic to suggest that we can do away with this complex word that Williams so rightly points out renders “the real complexity of natural forces” (222), but also that forces at least partially outside of our control may be having a say in this debate. Global climate change (a natural/cultural phenomenon in and of itself) may, in the end, shake up dominant ideas of what “nature” is more than any literary or cultural critic could. As Garrard and Phillips point out, contemporary ecological science suggests that “nature” has never been the stable, predictable set of processes and materials that we have often thought (and wished) it to be. As severe and unpredictable weather patterns increase around the world, more and more people may come to understand this “truth of ecology” on an experiential level. Instead of signaling the “death of nature,” as McKibben feared, global climate change may signal the rebirth of a new, more ecological view of nature and of the human relationship(s) to it— a nature that is complex and unpredictable, and that is powerful in its own right but that cannot be easily separated from human activities and cultural processes. While I don’t want to suggest that we should sit back and let global climate change do our work for us, I do think it’s possible that the experience of global climate change, however painful and costly, may convince us to give up our damaging quest for mastery, whether over the material processes and entities we typically call “nature” or the conceptual problem of how best to represent or understand the relationship between nature and culture.
Elsewhere, I’ve written at length about the complexities and difficulties of attempting to speak for nature. But, on the issue of the future of the word “nature”, I will suggest that today nature might say, with Mark Twain, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Norton, 1995. 69-90.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Marx, Leo. “The Idea of Nature in America.” Keywords: Nature. New York: Other Press, 2005. 37-62
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1989.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
Soper, Kate. What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Wallace, Molly. “’A Bizarre Ecology’: The Nature of Denatured Nature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 7.2 (Summer 2000): 137-153.
Williams. Raymond. “Nature.” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. 219-224.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Karla,
Thanks for posting this first entry/first response to Vermonja’s entry. It is interesting, these many years later, after the first ecocritical publications, to be reading this nuanced reconsideration of “nature.” Thanks for getting the conversation going! Joni
April 7th, 2009 at 10:54 am
As someone nearing the end of an ecocritical dissertation, “The Greening of American Naturalism,” I cannot express how much this discussion fascinates me. When I began my dissertation, two or three years ago, I quickly became intrigued by the work of Lawrence Buell, William Cronon, Ursula Heinse, Richard J. Schneider, Scott Slovic, and others. In various ways, these ecocritics illustrate the rich ecological interconnectedness of nature and culture and, in so doing, have helped guide me toward a renewed understanding of environment far beyond the abstract notion of a privilged or elitist Wilderness.
Karla Armbruster’s response has continued to help me consider the challenges of writing about and/or speaking for nature from an exclusively anthropomorphic vantage point. Armbruster’s discussion of McKibben, along with my recollection of his keynote address at the 2007 ASLE Conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina, has inspired me to ask the following question: if climate change and global warming have produced twenty-first century environments, both local and global, which remain forever changed by industrial and human activities, then has everything become toxic so that nature, however we understand it, ceases to exist?
Just as Armbruster brilliantly claims that McKibben’s ideas should signal not a “death of nature,” but rather a redefinition of place, space, and the land, so also do I see recent trends in ecocriticism taking scholars, students, and activists in promising directions. Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman continue destablilizing rigid binaries between nonhuman and human bodies and, in so doing, remind us that material world, in addition to language, still matters in our thinking about environment.
My own work brings an ecocritical perspective to the environments of writers like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright (whose texts have too often been read through the lens of a sort of urban determinism). Essentially, I pose the following question: If American Naturalism (the politically charged literature covering the period from the 1890’s through the 1940’s) focuses on appetite and environment, then why have so few critical conversations about food, water, waste, and land emerged in connection with these texts? I see interrelated economic, sexual, racial, and environmental injustices determining food access in Norris’s novels, governing water availability in Dreiser’s texts, and producing toxic waste in Wright’s writing. Inspired and humbled by the opportunity to participate in this scholarly exchange, I feel confident that this keywords conversation will guide me toward an enriched and enlivened conception of environment.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:16 am
As someone nearing the end of an ecocritical dissertation, “The Greening of American Naturalism,” I cannot express how much this discussion fascinates me. When I began my dissertation, two or three years ago, I quickly became intrigued by the work of Lawrence Buell, William Cronon, Ursula Heise, Richard J. Schneider, Scott Slovic, and others. In various ways, these ecocritics illustrate the rich ecological interconnectedness of nature and culture and, in so doing, have helped guide me toward a renewed understanding of environment far beyond the abstract notion of a privilged or elitist Wilderness.
Karla Armbruster’s response has continued to help me consider the challenges of writing about and/or speaking for nature from an exclusively anthropomorphic vantage point. Armbruster’s discussion of McKibben, along with my recollection of his keynote address at the 2007 ASLE Conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina, has inspired me to ask the following question: if climate change and global warming have produced twenty-first century environments, both local and global, which remain forever changed by industrial and human activities, then has everything become toxic so that nature, however we understand it, ceases to exist?
Just as Armbruster brilliantly claims that McKibben’s ideas should signal not a “death of nature,” but rather a redefinition of place, space, and the land, so also do I see recent trends in ecocriticism taking scholars, students, and activists in promising directions. Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman continue destablilizing rigid binaries between nonhuman and human bodies and, in so doing, remind us that material world, in addition to language, still matters in our thinking about environment.
My own work brings an ecocritical perspective to the environments of writers like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright (whose texts have too often been read through the lens of a sort of urban determinism). Essentially, I pose the following question: If American Naturalism (the politically charged literature covering the period from the 1890’s through the 1940’s) focuses on appetite and environment, then why have so few critical conversations about food, water, waste, and land emerged in connection with these texts? I see interrelated economic, sexual, racial, and environmental injustices determining food access in Norris’s novels, governing water availability in Dreiser’s texts, and producing toxic waste in Wright’s writing. Inspired and humbled by the opportunity to participate in this scholarly exchange, I feel confident that this keywords conversation will guide me toward an enriched and enlivened conception of environment.
April 7th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
I’m a graduate student in English at UC Davis working on a dissertation engaged in ecocritical questions.
What intrigues me about this project is the synthesis of the keyword approach with exploration of new media collaboration opportunities.
I’d like to see the following keywords considered for addition:
ecomedia
ecocinema
April 9th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Great suggestions, Andrew. As new keywords are offered Joni and I will keep a running list, and every week or so we’ll recirculate the latest suggestions. We’re also interested to know if you think any earlier keywords have outlived their usefulness.
April 11th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Hi,
I’m nearing the end of my first year graduate of study in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, with a focus on urban and environmental studies. I’ve very intrigued by this discussion and look forward to it’s end results (and attending the ASA conference next fall). I’m thinking a lot about urban environmentalism for a paper this semester. Here are a few suggestion to ponder for now:
Agriculture and/or urban agriculture
farm
food security
food desert
food sovereignty
food-system
organic
garden
park
urban landscape
April 13th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Welcome to all and it’s great to see the kinds of projects that grad students are working on and think about the ways in which this project might support new kinds of research. Joni
April 14th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
For the “keywords in the study of environment and culture,” I’d like to propose the following terms
ecological indigeneity
ecological Indian
I’m working on the cross-cultural representations of indigenous ecological wisdom in the face of environment crisis in the U.S. and China. Amidst the age of global environmental crisis, I believe that it is no coincidence that popular images of indigeneity have been consistently linked to ecological wisdom in two of the largest world consumers of natural resources. Within the U.S., much scholarly work has been done on the uses and dangers of idealizing the concept of the Ecological Indian, such as the most recent scholarly publication of Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian in 2007. Simultaneously, the proliferation of popular cultural icons including Disney’s ecologically savvy Pocahontas bespeaks the ongoing public intrigue about this concept. At the core of this Ecological Indian image is the ethics of environmental sustainability. Such ethics has been construed as traditional practices that are essential to indigenous community building and belonging.
Recently, China also saw the phenomenal success of stories about minority groups’ past ecological wisdom and passing conservation ethics, which has become an important issue in the global indigenous discourse. In that case, I believe that the work that has already been done in American Cultural Studies on ecological indigeneity and on ecological Indian would be useful in the near future to approach ecological indegeneity which is complexly related to the issues of sustainability within indigenous communities and issues of land.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:02 am
My friend on Facebook shared this link with me and I’m not dissapointed at all that I came to your blog.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Well I don’t know if we should be adding “heartburn home remedy” (!) to our list of keywords, but here are the terms that have been suggested in the past two weeks. This is a terrific start — let’s keep more terms coming.
food justice
globalization
deterritorialization
reterritorialization
ecomedia
ecocinema
Agriculture and/or urban agriculture
farm
food security
food desert
food sovereignty
food-system
organic
garden
park
urban landscape
ecological indigeneity
ecological Indian
April 20th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Enjoying the discussion thus far. Here’s my take on “environmental justice,” as presented at the October 2008 ASA meeting. My suggestion here, given that the word “nature” is hardly going to go away, is that as scholars, we strive after ways of keeping both it and “culture” in mind, as complementary descriptors of any human reality.
“Environmental Justice as a Way of Seeing”
Christopher Sellers
Stony Brook University
October 16, 2008
Panel on Keywords
“Environment Justice” first emerged as a rallying cry during the 1980’s in the U.S. The initial coinage came among groups mobilizing to resist the siting of hazardous waste sites. They thereby sought to recast the rhetoric of environmentalism in the moral terms of the civil rights movement. It was thus premised on an earlier, historic reworking of the word “environment,” to encompass much of what earlier generations had known in terms of “nature” and/or “public health.” Since the eighties, as the meanings of “environmental justice” have multiplied, it has offered an increasingly sweeping critique of all that “environment” has come to mean. Environmental justice, most broadly, has become not just a subset of environmental issues but a way of seeing. Environmental justice advocates and scholarship insist that attention to nature or environment cannot afford to remain blind to issues of power, and to differentials of color, class or gender. Instead, environmental awareness and intervention should go hand in hand with a close scrutiny of just whose nature or environment is at stake.
Among the host of new scholarly approaches spawned by this movement in the environmental humanities and social sciences are those in my own field of environmental history. Now as someone originally trained in American Studies, who has followed the flowering of ecocriticism appreciatively, but from a distance, I know that most of my fellow panel members and probably the audience have followed different trajectories into this meeting hall. Please bear with me as I elaborate my argument on the basis of this field, the one which I know best.
As with so many other movement-related academic innovations, the history scholarship most closely identified with “environmental justice” pertains to those topics, places and groups of people that propelled the movement itself. We have learned much about paradigmatic struggles out of which the movement arose to gain organization, momentum, and influence during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, from Love Canal to Warren County, North Carolina. Other scholarship has sought out companionate struggles around this same time, in Houston or the Louisiana Delta or New York, or in other times, notably the Progressive Era. Also more or less directly inspired by the movement are a host of historical studies of environmental problems it has made familiar. Hazardous waste, but also garbage, other forms of industrial pollution, as well as workplace hazards, all have become more accepted, as viable topics within the field.
Similarly, in the wake of this movement, environmental historians have become more interested in the environments and experiences of those racial minorities and working class communities out of which calls for “environmental justice” first emerged. We now have significant scholarship on African American environmental history, also what I hope are growing ranks of scholars studying on the role of labor and work in environmental history. The field has also suspended, if not entirely abandoned, those earlier doubts that study of less evidently natural environments can be environmental. Before Katrina, but ever more emphatically afterward, the conceptual underpinnings of environmental justice drew and guided a burgeoning environmental history of the city. We have also learned much more about the racial and labor conflicts associated with the most rural of places, from farms to wilderness parks.
Many if not most environmental historians now identify or sympathize with the “environmental justice” advocates. That movement’s impact on the field has ramified especially in new fusionist scholarship of the past decade, at the intersection of social and environmental history. Of course, these trends coalesced out of more than influence from the environmental justice movement; the politics of scholarship and jobs within the history profession also proved friendly. In particular, an on-going fusion of the methods of social and environmental history has bolstered the foothold of environmental history in the American history academy, by piquing the interest of erstwhile purely “social” historians in environmental topics and questions. Trends in environmental history more or less associated with environmental justice have led to an ever more fundamental reformulation of the field’s grounds and purposes. More so than I understand is the case in the agendas of many environmental groups and agencies, questions of justice are, for many environmental historians, not just after-thoughts or add-ons. Instead, they have become fundamental to the field, every bit as important as an historicizing attention to nature itself.
Not that notes of justice went missing from earlier visions of environmental historians. Even during the foundation-laying of the 1980’s, when path-breaking works solidified environmental history’s status as a viable and important approach to history, questions of justice lurked in what we found capitalist farming did to the Midwest, or how colonial settlers’ land usages displaced those of native Americans. Often, the moralism driving such histories centered around the destruction not just of nature but of human groups who lived off it. But into the nineties, our programmatic statements nevertheless tended to pivot around “nature” as the field’s organizing, central loadstar. We aimed to study “the role and place of nature” in human history, or to “write nature” into it. Such mission statements worked well on at least two fronts, to argue the necessity of the new field to non-environmental historians, and to make plain an allegiance, however loose, to environmentalist politics. They nevertheless left under-articulated just what assumptions we snuck in about the human side of that nature we chose to study. Were we to concentrate on those times and peoples whose surroundings we found most recognizable as “nature”—forests or farms rather than cities or factories? Or were we to be more geographically even-handed, as this relatively novel coinage “environment” seemed to imply? Did we take the “role and place” of nature shared throughout a given society, as many of our early founding works would have it? or was that role and place far more uneven, reflective of social conflicts and division?
It is ironic that environmental history as a field convened around this societal wholism just as the environmental justice movement was itself coalescing, and as American society was launching into an historic phase of yawning income and other inequalities. Environmental historians have, in recent years, issued programmatic statements that offer correctives. They call upon their colleagues to attend not just to nature’s “role and place” in human history, but to the power, inequalities, and conflicts that have proven part and parcel of that “role and place.” Where I think my field still has a good deal further to go, and where your study of the intersections of environment and culture can help us, is in reflecting more on the importance of those concepts and categories on which we, as well as our historical subjects, draw. First and foremost, we need to get warier about the seductions of that word “nature.” That it points to some reality independent of humans and their culture, I don’t meant to deny. What I’d like us to keep more steadily in mind is that it remains, also, a cultural category. As such, its boundary-drawing, between where nature is and where it is not, comes loaded with dubious legacies.
As one way into these, let me raise a question about the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” nature. As originally elaborated by nineteenth century German philosophers, and revived much more recently by William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis (1991), it names a difference between the natural and the built, or human-made. Such a dichotomy may still be useful for distinguishing between windows to the past opened by natural versus social sciences. But it runs against the grain of what today’s fusions of social and environmental history keep finding. From colonial encounters to those around forests and farms, a general theme in the environmental history of more natural places seems to be that one group’s “primary nature” turns out to be another’s “second nature.” Identification and usage of a “nature” as “primary” often comes easiest to the powerful—colonizers or state officials or industrialists. They thereby wind up stirring conflicts with those, frequently less powerful, who see it as “second” and domesticated—indigenous peoples, or locals, or workers. By the same token, if primary nature is difficult to discern in urban or industrial settings, those positioned to see and manipulate these places as “second nature” are inclined to miss the natural, biological elements within. Not least among these are the human bodies of their inhabitants, whose lives and livelihoods may be threatened.
Perhaps at this point, to get a clearer bead on the ecological and human violence that projections of “nature” have brought, we need another notion of just what it is whose “role and place” we are writing into human history. Maybe it is more like what some in science studies have recently taken to calling “nature-culture.” A substrate which does yield to a description as “nature,” it can alternately be seen as inhabited or domesticated or built, depending upon the lens through which you look. These days, in an era of global impacts like warming, what human perception of “natural” places is not a matter of expectation and effect, of not noticing the actual imprints of human activity there?
If there is one lesson in this direction I would like to see in environmental history and other related humanities, it is that we, whether scholars or activists or citizens, need to work on ways of keeping both the socio-cultural and the natural in mind. It is not easy. For all sorts of reasons, those glasses that enable us to see nature often tend to tug our eyes away from the glasses themselves, not to mention the social injustices with which they may be connected. Similarly, lenses singling out the plight of our society’s oppressed tend to miss how the human relationship with nature may also be at stake. But let us examine the historical and contemporary record. When environmental activists, officials–and academic humanists—focus only on “nature”, without as searching an eye to cultural implications or inequalities, what “environmental” repercussions do they tend to neglect? Similarly, when studies or advocacy of the underprivileged ignore “nature” or “environmental” problems, what “justice” issues do they pass over? As a way of seeing, environmental justice insists on the necessity, the moral imperative, of recognizing and exploring both.
June 10th, 2009 at 7:35 am
The preliminary conversations that have taken place here since March have been invigorating, as have the many off-site “face-to-face” conversations we know working group members have been having at places like the recent ASLE conference in Victoria, British Columbia.
So, what’s next?
We would like now to encourage everyone involved in this project to think about specific keywords in the study of environment and culture for which they would like to take responsibility. If you’d like to volunteer to begin working on a particular keyword, just say so right here. If we have multiple claimants for individual keywords, that’s fine; we may ultimately decide that certain words deserve more than one treatment, or we may encourage collaboration in the researching and writing of entries for our anticipated volume.
Either way, tell us what keywords you’d like to take responsibility for, and together we’ll begin to shape the next stage of this project.
Questions? Comments? Add those here too. Thanks!
June 15th, 2009 at 7:54 am
I’ll be glad to write about “ecofeminism” as a keyword, and I want to hear more details about how you envision these entries! Already we’ve seen some great postings here, offering reflections on “environment” from Vermonja Alston, “nature” from Karla Armbruster, and “environmental justice” from Chris Sellers. Joni and Bill, do you have a sense about the ideal length for these entries? Do have an evolving deadline for their creation? And if you want citations for these entries, do you want just the benchmark contributions?
What a helpful project this is, and what a democratic, dialogic process you have chosen to build these concepts while building community!
June 16th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Good to see the project moving forward. I would be interested in writing about “globalization” as a keyword.
July 27th, 2009 at 9:42 am
I’m a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia and am working on a dissertation on eco-melancholy and the politics of environmental mourning in American literature. After attending the “keywords” panel at ASA 2008, I’m very excited to discover this project. It looks like the section for entries beginning in “E” is already going to be rather long, but here’s a few more contributions:
“eco” (an entry just on this prefix, its etymology, uses, and abuses)
eco-terrorism
endangerment
extinction
Could I start working on “eco”?