Last night, after finishing homework with my daughter, synonyms of villain and dispute, then ripping through 11 long-division problems featuring decimals, I settled in to plan a course for the Spring semester at the California College of the Arts. There's an area of growing interest called environmental humanities, and the course I had in mind was "An Inconvenient Art," how writers, artists, and filmmakers across genres respond to environmental threat -- beginning with Thoreau and Emerson and fast-forwarding to Abbey, Carson, and then the IPCC report, among others.
My own writing -- a literary take on science and history -- is often called "inter-disciplinary." I must admit all this feels rather stiff to me. I mean, the idea that we need to name the discussion of the Earth, our place, as "environmental humanities" doesn't sit all that well with me.
At any rate, regardless of my own angst about how we marginalize place with fact and name, there is an interesting blog, Planetary, that offers both news and commentary on eco-activism specifically geared towards people who teach "environmental humanities."
A recent post found them contemplating a review of Into the Wild, which many of us who teach really struggle with as a depiction of life "outside the box" -- that is, the protagonist is either a complete genius or utter madman when you study Krakauer's account.
When I taught the book at the University of Iowa, the students were stunned by how stupid this rich white kid was about the wild. Most of those Iowa kids were from poor or struggling rural areas and had worked outside on the land. Many enjoyed hunting. Weather was something to watch and respect. Food sometimes was in short supply, even as they lived amidst corporate fields of corn and soy, a monoculture that some find beautiful but which brought to my mind recent horror films where creamed-spinach creatures come calling after dark.
How does this reside in our minds, this dissonance between what we believe the wild Earth to be, what the "countryside" is supposed to be, and what it is? On that note, may I suggest some further reading from my favorite online thought journal, The Electronic Book Review? Check out a review of McMurry's Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature, published by the University of Georgia (2003.)
As the writer notes, "everyone who is anyone after Kant agrees that the real eludes us in its concreteness..."
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