Writing a New Environmental Era: Moving Forward to Nature 9780367143787, 9780367143800, 9780429031724

Citation preview

“Hiltner agrees that humanities scholars need to use skills we have honed over decades for critical thinking and social responsibility to contribute to “writing forward to nature”, in a way that will mitigate the disaster that’s waiting. Hiltner has provided a model for others to follow. This is an important book, lucidly written, showing clear thinking; it’s a must-read, and should be widely disseminated.” E. Ann Kaplan, Distinguished Professor, Stony Brook University At once visionary and pragmatic, this eye-opening book argues for an ‘applied humanities’: science-informed, tech-savvy, and fully equipped to write the greenest possible future into being. Using his own experiment – the ‘Nearly Carbon Neutral’ conference – as a test case, Ken Hiltner shows that climate action is the work of every humanities scholar.” Wai Chee Dimock, Professor of English, Yale University “In this engaging and tightly argued book, environmental humanities scholar Ken Hiltner shows that the solution to our present environmental crises is not a return to some pristine and harmonious natural world. Thoreau’s famous retreat on Walden Pond, Hiltner reminds us, was only a short journey away from the textile mills of Lowell. If the pastoral idyll was never more than a convenient fiction, today we face an urgent imperative, as Hiltner puts it, to ‘move forward’ to nature. The environmental humanities can play a key role in this movement, Hiltner suggests, inasmuch as they can help us write the future into being. Blending personal memoir, whip-smart literary criticism, and some extremely forward-thinking suggestions about how to green academia, Hiltner’s book models what committed scholarship for our perilous times looks like.” Ashley Dawson, Professor of English, The Graduate Center & College of Staten Island, The City University of New York “A provocative exploration of how we understand humanity’s relationship with nature and a call to write our way not to a romanticized Edenic past, but to a truly sustainable future.” Erik Assadourian, Senior Fellow, Worldwatch Institute “In an era of accelerating climate breakdown and mass extinction, Hiltner convincingly argues that the environmental movement must take a step back and question its most fundamental assumptions concerning humanity’s relationship with nature, culture, and technology.” Peter Kalmus, Climate Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

WRITING A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL ERA

Writing a New Environmental Era first considers and then rejects back-to-nature thinking and its proponents like Henry David Thoreau, arguing that human beings have never lived at peace with nature. Consequently, we need to stop thinking about going back to what never was and instead work at moving forward to forge a more harmonious relationship with nature in the future. Using the rise of the automobile and climate change denial literature to explore how our current environmental era was written into existence, Ken Hiltner argues that the humanities—and not, as might be expected, the sciences—need to lead us there. In one sense, climate change is caused by a rise in atmospheric CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases. Science can address this cause. However, approached in another way altogether, climate change is caused by a range of troubling human activities that require the release of these gases, such as our obsessions with cars, lavish houses, air travel and endless consumer goods. The natural sciences may be able to tell us how these activities are changing our climate, but not why we are engaging in them. That’s a job for the humanities and social sciences. As this book argues, we need to see anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) climate change for what it is and address it as such: a human problem brought about by human actions. A passionate and personal exploration of why the Environmental Humanities matter and why we should be looking forward, not back to nature, this book will be essential reading for all those interested in the future and sustainability of our planet. Ken Hiltner is Professor of the Environmental Humanities at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). The Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative, Hiltner has appointments in the English and Environmental Studies Departments.

Routledge Environmental Humanities Series editors: Scott Slovic (University of Idaho, USA), Joni Adamson (Arizona State University, USA) and Yuki Masami (Kanazawa University, Japan) Editorial Board Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales, Australia Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia Georgina Endfield, Liverpool, UK Jodi Frawley, University of Western Australia, Australia Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia Christina Gerhardt, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA Iain McCalman, University of Sydney, Australia Jennifer Newell, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, US Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia International Advisory Board William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China Rob Nixon, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA Kirsten Wehner, University of London, UK The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture. The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicenter of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences. We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change.

WRITING A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL ERA Moving Forward to Nature

Ken Hiltner

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Ken Hiltner The right of Ken Hiltner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hiltner, Ken, author. Title: Writing a new environmental era : moving forward to nature / Ken Hiltner. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge environmental humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019016474 | ISBN 9780367143787 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367143800 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429031724 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nature–Effect of human beings on. | Human ecology and the humanities. | Science and the humanities. Classification: LCC GF75 .H54 2020 | DDC 304.2/8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016474 ISBN: 978-0-367-14378-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-14380-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03172-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

For Jordan May this, in some modest way, help write a better future for you.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

PART I

Forward to nature

19

1 Turning from the past

21

2 Turning toward the future

39

3 Forward to nature, away from nature

50

4 Places, natural and otherwise

65

PART II

Writing a new environmental era

79

5 Writing a new environmental era

81

6 Confronting denial

99

7 Going nowhere fast

112

Epilogue: about this book Appendix: writing a new practice, details, details Notes Index

124 127 152 172

INTRODUCTION

Come, my friends. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Tennyson’s “Ulysses”

I never thought I’d write this book. For the whole of my twenties and thirties, I made my living as a furniture maker, the trade that I learned from my father. My path in life seemed clear. If you had told me I would be entering a Harvard Ph.D. program in my forties with the goal of reevaluating humanity’s relationship to our planet, I would have questioned your sanity. My little workshop stood on the last remnants of a family farm—land that my mother’s side of the family had worked for three generations. The farm had once produced eggs, dairy, and dozens of different kinds of produce. Though my family embraced technology like mechanical seeders early on, we also tenaciously held on to tradition: I was 6 when we retired our last two draft horses. Having worked in the fields as a child and teenager, I know firsthand that farming is unromantic, backbreaking work. Still, it’s hard not to look back on it every now and again with nostalgia, even though (as we’ll soon see) nostalgia can be a worrisome impulse. Eventually my family, like scores of others at the time, accepted a sobering reality: in an era increasingly defined by corporate agribusiness, small-scale farms like ours were no longer practical. With the exception of the little plots of land on which my house and workshop stood, it was all sold to a real-estate developer who bulldozed it into a retirement community in the 1980s. The loss of family farms became an obsession of mine for decades. In many ways, the book that you are reading came out of my efforts to understand just what happened and why. In this Introduction, I’ll explain how this obsession

2

Introduction

took me from my life as a woodworker to become a professor of the environmental humanities. It was a strange road. But first, I want to explain my somewhat cryptic title and what this book is about. This book has two parts. The first introduces an idea that may make little sense on first hearing: for the good of our planet and the life that lives on it, including human beings, we need to work at moving forward to nature, rather than longing to get back to it. As we shall see, the notion that human beings once lived at peace with nature is little more than a myth, a story repeated so often that we have come to believe it’s true. It’s not. This myth and its dangers for the modern world will be taken up in the first chapter of this book. We need to stop thinking about going back to what never was and instead work at moving forward to forge a more harmonious relationship with nature in the future. Doing so won’t be easy. It may well be the greatest challenge humanity has ever collectively confronted. Nonetheless, now that we are faced with a host of pressing concerns, including a rapidly changing climate, we need to rise to the challenge of moving forward to nature. Before taking up the issue of how to move forward, Chapter 2 considers back-to-nature thinking and its problems and proponents, such as early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau. What’s so wrong with Thoreau? Fifteen miles (just a day’s walk) north of Walden Pond, where Thoreau famously went back to nature to live for two years, lies Lowell, Massachusetts. By the time Walden was published in 1854, Lowell had become the largest industrial center in the country. Its expansive textile mills made it the closest thing America had to Manchester, England’s great industrial city, which Charles Dickens scathingly critiqued in Hard Times, also published in 1854. The problem is that Lowell is not mentioned in Walden—not even once. Yes, there are a few references to factory life, but it is clear that Thoreau did not share the same sorts of concerns that Dickens and others had over industrialization and emerging modernity. This is not to say that Thoreau was unaware or unaffected by what was happening at Lowell. To the contrary, Walden arguably owes its existence to this factory city, as Thoreau’s response to it (and the industrial juggernaut steaming through his era) was to turn away from them and flee to the imagined simplicity of a bygone way of life on the quiet shores of Walden Pond. Although I have great respect for Thoreau, that was a cop-out. The proper turn is toward technology, urbanization, and the future, not away from them. This isn’t to say that we should simply accept all this in some unthinking, wholesale way— certainly and absolutely not—but we need to face it head on, rather than turn our back to it, à la Thoreau. As we shall see, coupled with sweeping cultural changes (and only when coupled with them), technology and urbanization are needed to move us forward to our greenest possible future. In contrast, Thoreau’s path doesn’t lead back to nature at all, but rather to environmental devastation. If a large swath of the population took Thoreau’s lead and moved away from cities and out to rural locales it would, with absolutely no doubt, be an environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions. Why am I so sure? Because, as

Introduction

3

we’ll see in Chapter 3, it actually happened and was. It began in the U.S. in Thoreau’s era, motivated by likeminded individuals acting on the same back-tonature impulse that gave birth to his Walden experiment. In a sense, it became the largest (and to my mind most regrettable) cultural movement of the 20th century. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe fled cities for the dream of simpler, rural lives. They ended up far short of the goal in suburbia. At first, in Thoreau’s era, they left in trains. A century later, the process sped up dramatically, as automobiles became the preferred way to get out of the city and then around in the suburbs. It soon became an environmental disaster on a global scale. In contrast, today human beings by the billions are moving back to urban areas. By 2050, nearly three out of four people on the planet will live in cities. It may well be the greatest cultural movement of the 21st century. Though not without problems, this is, as we shall see in Chapter 4, by and large a good thing. This book also argues that we need to turn to technology in order to craft a greener future. However, even though I have great respect for the sciences (I’ll explain why throughout the first half of this book), science-based solutions are rarely sufficient in themselves. The problem is that they often fail to attend to the root cause of problems. In one sense, climate change is caused by a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs). Science can address this cause. However, approached in another way altogether, climate change is caused by a range of troubling human activities that require the release of these gases, such as our obsessions with cars, lavish houses, air travel, endless consumer goods, etc. The natural sciences may be able to tell us how these activities are changing our climate, but not why we are engaging in them. That’s a job for the humanities and social sciences. We need to see anthropogenic (i.e. humancaused) climate change for what it is and address it as such: a human problem brought about by human actions. While this may be a sobering realization, it should also be empowering. If we take a long hard look at why we are doing what we are doing, and are willing to act on what we learn, together we can (aided but not guided by the technology of the applied sciences) craft a future that moves us closer to nature. The second half of this book explores how the humanities can help by introducing what may seem like another nonsensical idea: that we can write the future into being. This may sound like the stuff of fiction. A character in a novel writes something down in her journal, only to discover the next morning that it has come to be. (The plotline of the 2012 indie movie Ruby Sparks was based on this idea.) Although it sounds like fantasy, something of the sort can—and in fact desperately needs to—happen. Humanity’s many beliefs and practices, including those that impact the earth, its climate, and all its myriad forms of life, have been written into being over the centuries. Given that more than a few of these beliefs and practices are downright destructive in

4

Introduction

environmental and other ways, we now need to take up the formidable challenge of writing new, more environmentally sound and socially just ones. Seriously, we all need to get writing, now. If we succeed, our children will one day wake up in a better world that we have written for them. So, how do we go about writing a new environmental era into being? Ever since I began introducing the notion of moving forward to nature in talks at various universities starting in 2012, I have repeatedly been asked this question. We can start by exploring how our era came into existence, which we will do in Chapter 5. Consider how the humble automobile was written into ascendancy, in spite of its considerable shortcomings. If you own a car in the U.S., it is likely responsible for a quarter or more of your individual greenhouse gas emissions. Consuming that many fossil fuels doesn’t come cheap: as much as a quarter of an average American’s income goes to owning, fueling, and maintaining a car. And, of course, they are deathtraps, killing and injuring as many as 50 million people worldwide every year. Why do we go along with this lose–lose–lose proposition? For nearly a century now, automobile manufacture has played a crucial role in the world economy. By 1960, it was not only the largest industrial segment in the U.S., it had become the largest industry on the planet by a long shot, dwarfing anything anywhere that had ever come before it. One in six Americans were, either directly or indirectly, employed by this industry. Consequently, because its health was of paramount importance to the nation, the public was convinced to finance this endeavor through a remarkable feat: the linking of our very sense of personal identity to the automobile. The message was simple: you are what you drive. This extraordinary state of affairs was written into being by a broad range of texts. Some, like car ads, did so directly; others did it in a roundabout way, such as by selling us on suburban living, which demanded the use of cars. Our love of the car is just one example of an environmentally disastrous practice that was written into being. If you put your mind to it, I’m sure that you can come up with dozens more. The real challenge is to imagine new and better ones to supplant these and then write them into being. If we commit ourselves to this project, we can rewrite the world into a better place. Before we can take up the formidable challenge of writing a new environmental era into being, we need to confront the fact that a great many Americans are either unsure that it is necessary or outright deny that it is. Chapter 6 takes up the issue of climate change denial literature and why it stands between us and the future—and how we can remove it from our path. Perhaps surprisingly, the solution again involves the humanities. In order to write a new world into being, we first need to hone our skills at reading, as we need to successfully read through the campaign of disinformation waged by fossil fuel interests. In the age of fake news, this is easier said than done. Sadly, as poll after poll has revealed, many Americans lack the necessary skills to read through to the truth about our changing climate.

Introduction

5

Once we get past denial, what can any of us do to help write us forward to nature? For years (decades really), this question has nagged at me. The concluding chapter of this books lays out an answer and I recount my personal efforts to do something. Not through the application of science, but again by way of the humanities. The sciences can apply what they have learned to solve real-world problems. We generally refer to such applied-science approaches as “technology.” What if we similarly used an applied-humanities approach to solve problems? What if, after studying a problematic cultural practice, we then attempted to directly intervene by writing a new practice (or at least a new variation on an old one) into being? Conducting a cultural analysis of an existing practice would help explain why it came into being and what social needs it fulfills. Having learned this, we would be in a position to use this knowledge to propose something new that also addresses these needs, but in a better, more environmentally sound and socially responsible way. Once I turned my attention to this idea, I began wondering why humanities scholars do not do this—or at least attempt it—more often, even as a routine matter of course. It is often said that the humanities, especially when compared to the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), have little to offer the world. To the contrary, the applied-humanities approach that I am suggesting promises to have a great deal to offer. In many cases, as much or even more than the applied-sciences. I see this applied-humanities approach as a form of technology. When talking about technology, we generally mean an application of knowledge (i.e. applied knowledge) that brings about a change in the world. Usually, this knowledge is scientific. But must it be? The applied knowledge, the technology, can just as easily come from the humanities. Let’s again take the automobile as our example. Using an applied-science approach, we could work on technologies to make cars more energy efficient and emit fewer greenhouse gases. Alternately, using an applied-humanities approach, we could study something like commuting by bus in order to find out why it is so undesirable—let’s face it, nearly everyone hates it. If we could crack this nut (by exploring how mass transportation was largely written out of American culture as cars were written in, which did not happen to such a degree in any other country) and then apply what we learned to help make buses more appealing, we could advance a form of transportation that is a whopping 14 times more energy efficient than cars with a single occupant. Approached from the perspective of the applied sciences, a 1400 percent increase in automobile efficiency is utterly unthinkable (even 14 percent would be quite an achievement). However, an applied-humanities approach could pull off such a feat by seeing this as a human problem brought on by human actions, which can be rewritten. This is why I suggested that an applied-humanities approach can offer as much or more than the applied-sciences. This is not to say that rewriting transportation practices would be easy. Indeed, it is arguably easier

6

Introduction

to change cars (such as by making them electric) than to change people’s actions. Nonetheless, it is time for specialists in human culture (like me) to devote ourselves to developing such humanities-based technologies to help with real-world problems. Intrigued by the idea, I resolved to pull up a seat at the game, the culture game, to see if I could in some small way, using what I learned by studying a cultural practice, work at rewriting it for a better future. Although I first thought about addressing our love affair with the automobile and alternatives to this disastrous form of transportation, I soon realized that it was just too big of a job. So, I took up the issue of air transportation, specifically all the flying that academics like me do as part of our jobs. Astonishingly, this accounts for a third of the carbon footprint for the campus where I teach (55 million pounds of CO2 or equivalent gases every year). My idea was a simple one: make a study of the traditional academic conference and the cultural role that it serves and then write a new version of it into being that would not only be more environmentally sound, but also more accessible and egalitarian. At the time of this writing, we have now conducted five such events, which all had carbon footprints less than 1 percent of traditional conferences. Chapters 7 and the Appendix explore this “nearly carbon-neutral” (NCN) conference model in detail. Will my modest efforts make much of a difference? Honestly, I don’t know. I do know, however, that each of us needs to at least try to intervene in climate change. Big interventions, small interventions, even failed ones matter (such as those that draw attention to a problem even though they do not succeed at solving it). A few years ago, I gave a talk entitled “Why the Environmental Humanities Matter” at Stony Brook University. This could easily have become the title for this book. As you have no doubt gathered, I am decidedly of the opinion that the humanities can, in immediate and pragmatic ways, help build a better world. This is especially the case with the emerging field of the climate humanities, which is my specialty. My fondest hope is that by the end of this book you’ll agree with me. A short Epilogue concludes this book. It explains why I took the unusual step of writing it for everyone—and not, as might be expected for a book of this sort, just for academics. So, what motivated me to write this book? As noted above, it began decades ago with the loss of my family’s farm. Within a single lifetime, mine, an entire region (the southern half of New Jersey, which was originally christened the “Garden State” in celebration of its extraordinary market gardens) largely turned from farm to suburb. And what was more, no one really seemed too upset about it, except, of course, for all the families who lost their farms. I couldn’t understand why more people, especially environmentalists, seemed so indifferent to the loss of such extraordinary farmland. To be fair, environmentalists and ecologists at the time didn’t seem too concerned with any of the places that humans inhabited—farms, cities, and suburbs included. Instead, what mattered most to the environmentalists of that era was

Introduction

7

preserving the wilderness areas that were (seemingly) untouched by human hands. This is nearly as true today as it was when I was a child. In 2010, researchers at Cornell University reviewed over 8000 scholarly papers published in the preceding five years in order to determine “the extent to which ecologists devote themselves to pristine wilderness at the expense of inhabited regions.” They reported that “between 63 and 83% of studies are being done in areas without people,” even though these places only constitute onefourth of the earth’s ice-free land mass. As one researcher noted in exasperation, “suburbs, villages and agricultural lands … are being [almost] completely left out of the picture.” In light of these findings, an article published in Nature—widely regarded as the preeminent journal in the sciences—concluded that “the world’s top ecologists are failing to study the landscapes that most need work, and they risk delaying conservation efforts and making their subject irrelevant.” “Risk delaying conservation efforts”? By 2010, the northeast corridor of the U.S. where my family’s farm once stood had already been developed into what feels like a single, sprawling suburb. It stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C., punctuated by a handful of major cities and the last scattered remnants of once thriving and productive farmland. From an environmental point of view, the difference between small family farms, which distributed their produce locally, and scores of tract housing units (many of them lavish, environmentally disastrous McMansions) now sprawled across the same communities are striking in a host of ways. Although conservation of farmland in the area is currently underway, it is a case of too little too late. When New Jersey is now called the Garden State, more often than not it is meant as a joke. So why weren’t more environmentalists also focusing their attention on farms, suburbs, and cities? Surely, this wasn’t about valuing a place because it is free of human encroachment or ignoring it because it is not. Or was it? Certainly, a wildly disproportionate amount of attention was (and in many ways still is) focused on wilderness rather than human-inhabited spaces. It seemed so obvious to me: the places we inhabit, and how we inhabit them, have to be just as important as the places we choose to keep pristine and untouched. For many years, while my hands were occupied working wood, my thoughts kept returning to this issue. To be honest, it became an obsession. At night and on weekends, I spent long hours reading and studying nearly anything I could get my hands on, trying to understand why people felt the way they did about both the natural world and man-made landscapes. Given the nature of my obsession, I was born at a good time: Silent Spring was published when I was a toddler, and I grew up alongside the modern environmental movement. When I was about 40, all of that reading led to a series of radical changes in my life. Ultimately, they led to the book you are now reading. I had been a woodworker for decades, as my father began apprenticing me into the trade even before my teens. After a while, crafting one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture by hand—nearly the opposite of the repetitive drudgery we associate

8

Introduction

with mass production and factories—gradually became routine and slowly lost its luster for me. True, each day presented new challenges, but, as I had often faced variations of them before (there are only so many ways to cut a dovetail joint in wood), they were no longer proving to be all that interesting. I also faced up to the fact that ever since I first read Walden early in my teens— Thoreau was one of my first and greatest heroes—I had become obsessed with nearly anything relating to the environment. Is “eco-geek” a species of nerd? If so, count me among them. Not only had I read, reread, and studied all the milestone thinkers (like Muir, Leopold, and Carson), I burrowed deep into the history of environmental thinking with obscure books like George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 Man and Nature. More than anything else, I wanted to better understand how humanity had gotten itself into our current environmental predicament. If we knew more about the road that we have taken, and how it brought us to our current situation, then we just might, with a little luck, be able to glimpse unexplored avenues not yet closed to us. As I watched modern environmentalism unfold during the closing quarter of the 20th century (from the sidelines, in a little room of my house made claustrophobic with overflowing bookshelves), I had the nagging feeling that something essential was being ignored. In some basic and crucial way, our understanding of nature, and our relationship with it, seemed to be confused and conflicted. In the minds of many people, nature and wilderness are synonymous, or nearly so. Because nature is by definition often imagined as being separate from the human world, uninhabited wilderness is frequently seen as its last great stronghold. For that reason, wilderness preservation has been an urgent preoccupation of environmentalists for over a century now. But, what about the cultivated fields where I, along with all sorts of produce, was raised? Because culture has been placed in opposition to nature for thousands of years of Western thinking, cultivated fields also risk being seen as separate and apart from nature. Indeed, in the most extreme form of this view, anything made by human beings risks being seen as unnatural by definition— and often inferior by contrast. Could the relative indifference that many environmentalists felt toward cultivated places (which not only included farms like my family’s, but cities, towns, industrial centers, and many other built environments) be related to the way that we imagine nature? If so, then the manner by which nature and culture are often understood in the West—as a binary structure in opposition, with the cultivated imagined as an active threat to the natural—could be playing out in modern environmental thinking, with consequences as worrisome as they are widespread. As unlikely as it seemed, the loss of a seemingly insignificant family farm hinted at something far bigger and more consequential than farmland. It suggested that an ancient view of nature was still alive and well in the modern world, influencing environmental researchers, policymakers, and, in a variety of ways, each of us.

Introduction

9

Although this occurred to me while I was making my living as a furniture maker, I knew that I had neither the training nor expertise to impact modern environmental thinking. Nonetheless, like many people, I desperately wanted to make a difference. But how to begin? Going back to school seemed like a step in the right direction. I started by taking a few evening graduate courses at the same local commuter college where I had received my undergraduate degree. But it soon became clear to me that if I wanted the best possible training and preparation for my modest educational goals—namely, a protracted study of the history of our Western attitudes toward nature and the environment—I would need the best education available, which meant a Ph.D. from a first-rate university. There’s an old joke about a man who stops his car to ask for directions. After much musing and a few false starts, he’s told, “You can’t get there from here.” The joke (it is admittedly not very funny) is that you can, of course, get to pretty much anywhere from anywhere else on earth. True, the directions may be confusing and the path circuitous, but getting there from here is almost always possible. It was, however, not at all clear that a woodworker in his forties, with an undistinguished undergraduate degree earned over more than a decade by taking night classes, could find his way into a topnotch graduate program. Quite the contrary: as I discovered when I arrived as a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, no one in my department could recall anyone anywhere near my age, let alone from circumstances as unusual, ever having found their way in before. Graduate programs of this sort are grueling, even for energetic twentysomethings. They usually take twice as long as law school, around six or seven years, to complete. Universities typically enroll fewer than ten students per year into Ph.D. programs like mine. Such a program would be intimidating for anyone, but for me it was extraordinarily so. About the time I finished my undergraduate degree (I was in my thirties: completing 128 college credits at the rate of one or two evening classes per semester is a painfully slow process), I realized that I was seriously dyslexic. An observant friend, noting the sorts of mistakes that I made in my writing, brought it to my attention. Having grown up in an era before this condition was well understood and screened for in elementary school, it had escaped everyone’s notice. Of course, I knew that something was wrong. Because distinguishing left from right was confusing, getting and giving directions was a nightmare (it was impossible to get anywhere from anywhere with my directions). The bigger problem, however, was that, even though reading was my passion and I lavished time on coursework, I was an abysmal high school and college student. I didn’t even finish in the top third of my high school class. As an undergraduate English major in college, my GPA was a 2.7 (that’s not a typo: a 2.7, not a 3.7). Because I was attending overfilled night classes, instructors rarely had the time to read lengthy take-home assignments. Instead, grades were almost exclusively based on essay

10

Introduction

exams hurriedly written in class. Mine, as you might imagine, were riddled with just the sort of errors that cause English professors to wince. It didn’t help that I had a habit of offering up new readings of texts rather than making clear that I had assimilated the professor’s approach. I fear this may have given the impression that I was something of an arrogant oddball. In retrospect, perhaps I was. Those were enormously frustrating years. It sounds like a cliché, but it is indeed difficult to keep believing, day after day, month after month, decade after decade, in your abilities and yourself when hardly anyone else does. Of the many challenges I’ve faced in life, this was perhaps the most difficult. At times, wondering how it could possibly be the case that everyone else was wrong about my abilities and potential, I deeply despaired. I do not regret my years as a woodworker; however, I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had my dyslexia been identified as a child. Now that I am aware of my strengths and limitations in writing, I have come up with a range of techniques, such as word-processing software that I modified for the purpose, which helps me recognize what would otherwise escape notice. It also helps that I now have a loving partner who has a gift for proofreading. Realizing that gaining entry to a Ph.D. program would be extraordinarily difficult for someone like me, I knew that I needed to do something altogether out of the ordinary to get my foot in the door. Considering my options (let’s face it, I didn’t have many), I came up with an outlandish plan: I would prove that I could write a dissertation, the ultimate goal of a Ph.D. program, by writing one before I even filled out the application for admission. Now, after having spent three years as the director of a university Ph. D. program, I would strongly advise against trying a similar stunt. Scholarly writing is a world all its own, with conventions that follow subtle trends that may not be at all clear from outside of academia. To succeed at such an outlandish undertaking, you would need to be very lucky. I was very, very lucky. One of the evening courses that I took was taught by a respected scholar, Diane McColley, who was interested in an emerging field of literary study: ecocriticism, a contraction for “ecological literary (or cultural) criticism.” In the previous decade, the 1990s, ecocritics had begun to look carefully at writers like Thoreau and Wordsworth in order to better understand modern environmental thinking. Diane was interested in pushing this approach back to the era of Shakespeare and Milton, hoping to reveal more of our deeply held beliefs about the natural world. Shortly before Diane left for a yearlong sabbatical, I asked her if she would oversee my M.A. thesis: an ecocritical approach to the poet John Milton. We agreed that each month I would send her an installment. The thesis was supposed to be 30 pages long. After 12 monthly installments, it ended up being 300. Diane suggested that I submit it for publication. I was really just hoping to prove to prospective Ph.D. programs that I could write a reasonably coherent dissertation-length work, but, at her

Introduction

11

insistence, I sent off the manuscript for consideration. To my shock, Cambridge University Press, which had published Milton’s first major work in 1630, offered to buy it. The book, my first, was Milton and Ecology. How did it happen that one of the world’s premier university presses came to publish a book written by an obscure woodworker without a graduate degree? The simple fact is that they didn’t realize who I was—or rather wasn’t. Starting with the acquisition editor, who was the first to read my manuscript, everyone simply assumed that I was a professor. Academic presses rarely receive submissions from anyone else. Although made anxious by the fact, I didn’t set the record straight. Whenever addressed as “Professor,” I instinctively responded by asking to be called by my first name. While I have to admit to being selfserving in not correcting them, I was also curious to see how long it would take before someone figured it out. As luck would have it, no one did. However, when faced with a final publication contract to sign with “Professor” before my name, I finally fessed up. Perhaps because things were so far along, no one said anything. They simply changed the signature line. Milton, who wrote one of the finest long poems in the English language, Paradise Lost, fascinated me because I saw him as the harbinger of a new attitude toward the environment in Western thought. Prior to his writing, most Europeans saw the Earth as fallen and debased, an inferior realm that paled in comparison to an imagined celestial one (Heaven). Because it was associated with the lesser, physical self, the earth was seen as the home and playground of evil. This is potentially an environmentally disastrous way to imagine the earth. Milton, however, would have none of this. He saw the earth and most earthly things (including rivers, mountains, and flowers, along with many of the tempting things in life, like good food and sex) as proper and right. He went even further by boldly declaring that these earthly things are a manifestation of the divine and should be celebrated as such. For Milton, and other religious thinkers who adopt this attitude, in looking at a pristine mountain we see the handiwork of a divine creator, who is immanent and at work in nature, rather than removed, transcendent, and disinterested. To this way of thinking, if the earth has become corrupted, it is the result of human action. Thus, abuse of the creation (which includes the earth and all its many places) can be seen as a form of sacrilege. This startling shift in thinking laid the groundwork for writers like John Muir, who two centuries later argued that wilderness is indeed nothing short of a holy temple, the home of the divine. When it was suggested that Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley be turned into a reservoir to supply water to San Francisco and elsewhere, Muir railed that “these temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature … for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.” In Milton’s writings I found the early emergence of an attitude toward nature that we tend to associate with later thinkers like Muir. Here was the ideological groundwork that underlies the deep reverence that we feel for wilderness.

12

Introduction

Instead of looking to some far-off place (as Muir did to the Yosemite Valley) for an uncorrupted, magnificent example of divine creation, Milton looked back to a distant time. Paradise Lost, which is an expansive retelling of the biblical story of Adam and Eve set in Eden, afforded Milton the opportunity to imagine a profoundly harmonious relationship that human beings once had with nature, now lost. Milton is thus a notable link in a long line of back-to-nature thinkers who held that nature and our relationship to it was once edenic and perfect, or nearly so. A generation after Milton, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau would take this ball and run with it. As we’ll see in the first chapter, belief in an edenic past (i.e. a harmonious relationship with nature we once had and lost) is still alive and very well today. While considering Milton, it began to dawn on me that back-to-nature thinking and the religious reverence that we feel toward wilderness—what I see as two of the poet’s greatest legacies—might have unsettling implications. This realization planted the seeds for this book. However, I’m jumping ahead in my story. With my Milton book in press, I was offered admission to a number of Ph.D. programs. In the end, it came down to Princeton and Harvard. Although I chose Harvard, a decade later I began to write this book during a year that I spent as a visiting professor at Princeton, where I held a joint chair in the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the English Department. Why study English literature? Why not directly tackle pressing environmental issues (like climate change) by studying something like geoscience or ecology? While I have enormous respect for the sciences—this book will repeatedly stress their essential role in our future—my primary interest was, and still is, in better understanding the beliefs and attitudes we have toward the environment. I wanted to know the history behind these ideas: where they came from and where they seem to be going. Why, then, study literature rather than history? As it turns out, I study both. These days, most literary scholars do. Allow me to explain by way of an example, which should help clarify the rationale for this book and its approach. In 1945, an amateur archeologist made a discovery a mile outside of a sleepy New England town. It was the foundation of a cabin, which had been about the size of a modern garden shed and where someone had lived about 100 years before. Had a thorough excavation of the modest site been made, not much would have been learned about who lived there and why. However, we happen to know a great deal about the person who dwelled there, as he left behind a written record chronicling his time in that cabin and its surrounding woods. His name was Henry David Thoreau and that record took the form of a book: Walden. The physical remnants of our lives that we leave behind, things like houses, furniture, cookware, and even our trash, can often tell archeologists and historians much about who we were and how we lived. But they can only tell so

Introduction

13

much. While it is possible, with varying degrees of success, to infer from these artifacts what the day-to-day lives of their owners were like, these objects are not the only windows into what they felt and believed. For over 5000 years, people have been writing about their lives, dreams, fears, beliefs, and just about anything else that you can imagine (the brilliant essayist Montaigne once wrote a treatise on thumbs). In a few cases, these writings have survived, opening up their worlds to us in ways that shards of pottery and the foundations of crumbled buildings never could. As a cultural and literary historian, I look to these works in order to better understand what these authors—along with the cultures in which they lived— believed. My specific goal is to understand more fully our modern posture toward the environment. When people think about literary study, words like “metaphor,” “plot,” and “symbolism” often come to mind. Armed with these and similar concepts, generations of high school and college students have searched for deeper, hidden meanings in poems, novels, and all sorts of literary genres. However, among scholars, this approach to literature has been largely outmoded for decades now. In the first half of the 20th century, a number of writers argued that what really mattered in literature was what a writer had to say that transcended his or her particular culture and historical moment. This approach to literary study was dubbed New Criticism in the 1940s (so it hasn’t been “new” for quite some time). Great writers, it was argued, captured the essence of humanity, which has remained unchanged throughout history. Hence, they often took up human preoccupations, such as pride, love, ambition, and so forth. Love, whether it was written about 2700 years ago in ancient Greece by Sappho, 400 years ago in Elizabethan England by Shakespeare, or a poet last year in Brooklyn, was seen as cutting across time and space for all of us human beings. Writers were celebrated for their insights into the shared, timeless human condition, as well as their ability to express these thoughts poignantly. Judged by this standard, writers like Milton and Shakespeare were (and still are) considered among the greatest of all time. There are, however, significant limitations to this approach. First, even the most fundamental human feelings, like love, are influenced by the cultures in which we live. New Critics, living in a time where heterosexuality was a widely policed norm, had difficulty understanding, much less appreciating writers like Sappho, who wrote about same-sex love. Even Shakespeare, who alternately wrote love poetry to a Dark Lady and to a beautiful young man, posed problems for them. If we do not understand an author’s particular culture and historical moment, we will likely assume that what he or she means by love is what we mean by love. And we may well be wrong in this assumption. One of Shakespeare’s sonnets may be a beautiful celebration of love, but it is also a chronicle of how love was seen and interpreted during Shakespeare’s time. For this reason, it is exceptionally valuable, as it can tell us an enormous

14

Introduction

amount about the culture that created it. While learning about past cultures is certainly interesting in its own right, in some cases, we can go further and learn about our own culture, and even ourselves, in the bargain. To me, this is literature’s most valuable payout. If a text is an influential part of our literary tradition, as are Shakespeare’s sonnets and Thoreau’s Walden, then it made some sort of impact on future thinking. In the century following its publication, scores of thinkers were influenced by Thoreau’s ideas. They may have read Walden directly, or they may have encountered other writers and artists familiar with the book and its ideas. That includes not just obvious candidates like John Muir and Aldo Leopold, but also George Eliot, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Stickley, John Burroughs, B. F. Skinner, George Bernard Shaw, and many more. And these were just in the first 100 years after Walden’s publication. Since the 1960s, with the rise of the back-to-the-land movement, interest in Walden has exploded. If we only read Walden as celebrating truths that cut across time, we may well overlook the book’s significant contributions to America’s cultural history. If we assume that the love of nature that Thoreau espoused in Walden is—like the way that the New Critics imagined the love of another person—somehow innate and shared by any human being anywhere at any point in history, we risk ignoring how Thoreau, along with writers before and after him, reshaped the relationship that we have with the environment. To better understand how they did this, it is worth pausing to consider the impact that past books can have in the present world. Books and writings of all sorts can tell us much about the people that gave birth to them and their culture. However, some, like Walden, don’t just reflect the beliefs and values of a culture (as do mountains of thoroughly ordinary books that annually appear on the shelves of booksellers). Instead, they play a role in renewing their cultures by revising existing attitudes and sometimes by even writing entirely new ones into being. To my way of thinking, these are “great books,” even if they aren’t recognized as such when they first appear. In some cases, as with the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the true greatness of the work was not revealed until well into the future. Even today, the world that Douglass worked to create (one intent on freeing itself of not only slavery but also racism) is still painfully attempting to emerge. Like Douglass’s book, Walden also helped generate something new in American culture. In a general way, we can call it an environmental ethic. What makes writers and artists like Thoreau and Douglass so extraordinary is that they venture out ahead of the rest of us to glimpse the future, imagining what it might be like. Through their work, they relate what they envision to a world still living in the present. In time, if they prove to be true harbingers of the future, the world eventually catches up. Mainstream America began to catch up to both writers sometime in the 1960s, more than a 100 years after the publication of both the Narrative’s and Walden’s world-changing ideas.

Introduction

15

Perhaps the most interesting and important thing about ideas is that they live not only in books, but in each of us. Surprisingly, we often simply assume that these ideas are natural and correct. For example, because we are heir to the environmental ethic imagined by Milton, Thoreau, and Muir, it has become ingrained in our beliefs. Consequently, many Americans are firmly of the conviction that wilderness should be respected and valued with religious reverence. However, a few hundred years ago this attitude largely did not exist, as most people in, say, Shakespeare’s England neither cared about nor particularly respected wilderness. Although it may be a disconcerting thought, people that we may never have read—we may not even recognize their names—long ago played a role in writing some of our deepest, seemingly most personal beliefs into existence. The philosopher Martin Heidegger observed that at birth we are all “thrown” (werfen) into a particular culture at a particular moment in history, which influences both who we become and many of the beliefs that we hold. The culture and era into which we are born is entirely random and obviously beyond our control. Had we been born a few generations ago, we, like most Americans, would likely not have been environmentalists. In part because of writers like Thoreau, this has changed considerably since his time (in particular the last 50 years), as ideas are constantly shifting and being challenged. Douglass challenged the idea of slavery, Thoreau prevailing attitudes toward nature. Once we understand that our beliefs and ideas are culturally influenced and often in a state of flux, it becomes clear that they have a history that can be explored. In the 1960s and 1970s, the historian Michel Foucault was obsessed with tracing the origins of our cultural ideas. Much influenced by Heidegger, Foucault reasoned that if our ideas are culturally constructed over time, then it should be possible to find our way back to their first appearances, along the way witnessing how they shifted and grew. He did this in a variety of different ways, such as by focusing on our perceptions of sexuality. Foucault drew attention to the fact that our attitudes toward complex topics like this were culturally constructed over time. His historicism promised extraordinary insights into both the cultures that created the ideas handed down to us, and, even more importantly, the present-day cultures and individuals that are heir to these ever-changing beliefs and ideas. It was, in part, this promise that brought me to Harvard. In the late 1970s, Foucault’s thinking had considerable impact on a young literary scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, who was a professor at Berkeley at the time. Greenblatt realized that adapting Foucault’s approach to literary study could open up old texts in entirely new ways. What he may not have realized was that he was inaugurating a revolution in literary analysis. Literature could provide unique insights into the ideas and values of past cultures—and perhaps even our own beliefs in the bargain. Greenblatt christened this approach “New Historicism.” Like New Criticism, it is now far from new, but it is still enormously influential, and one way or another plays a role in much of the literary criticism that is done today.

16

Introduction

Using texts to understand what a culture believes can often be a little tricky, as writers do not always well understand their own culture and times, or even what it is they are writing about. In addition, writers are often not the best representatives of a culture, as historically only a select, privileged few have had the benefit of an education and enough leisure for writing. People like my parents, who lived in an era when their eighth-grade educations were the norm for farmers and woodworkers, rarely left behind writings that have traditionally been of much interest to posterity. In the past few hundred years of European and American history, the most influential writers have generally been wealthy, white, heterosexual male members of the dominant culture. Nonetheless, insofar as they record beliefs and ideas, texts can be enormously revealing. These include not just works of high literature, but texts of all sorts, written by people of all sorts. An obscure Renaissance farming manual, which no one (not even its author) would likely have considered a work of art, can reveal more about contemporary attitudes toward the environment than any of Shakespeare’s plays. For people who value texts for their beauty and aesthetic value, this may be a disconcerting thought: it seemingly puts such a work on an equal footing with Shakespeare’s. Still, New Historicism doesn’t require us to devalue beautiful literature; on the contrary, most scholars of literature do what they do because they love literary texts. Rather, it underscores that literature’s beauty and worth are more than skin deep. It also means that texts that have traditionally been ignored—for example, if my grandfather had left behind his thoughts on farming and his relationship to the land that he worked—may prove to be of great interest to future generations. By the time I had embarked on an academic career, Greenblatt had moved from Berkeley to Harvard. While his interests were not largely environmental, as he fortuitously worked in the same period that interested me most, he was an obvious choice to become one of my dissertation advisors. The goal of my Ph.D. dissertation was to use New Historicist tools on early modern texts in order to trace the emergence of modern attitudes toward the environment. Although other scholars had been adapting the methods of New Historicism to environmental issues (notably Lawrence Buell, who, as luck would have it, was also a professor at Harvard), they were generally working in later periods. I have to confess to being more than a little intimidated when I arrived at Harvard. The seven Ph.D. candidates entering the program with me were altogether impressive. Two had done their undergraduate work at Harvard, one at Yale, another at Amherst. They were, without exception, all wunderkinds. On average, I was nearly 20 years their senior. Is there a word for former wunderkinds who reach the height of their powers in later life? If there is, it applies to many of the professors I had at Harvard. In certain fields, like mathematics, geniuses make their marks early in life. In a single year, his 27th, Einstein published four epoch-changing papers, including one that introduced special relativity to the world, another

Introduction

17

that would win him a Nobel Prize, and a third containing a pithy little formula regarding the equivalence of energy and matter: e ¼ mc2 : In the humanities, by contrast, many scholars are still in school when they are 30. While a few, like Stephen Greenblatt, produce groundbreaking works before they reach 40, he is an exception. Lawrence Buell, for example, was in his fifties when he published his watershed book on Thoreau. Like my peers, my Harvard professors were intimidating. However, in an unexpected way, they were also reassuring. Tennyson has a wonderful poem that imagines Homer’s hero Ulysses (Odysseus) as an aging king. Content to leave the rule of his kingdom to his son Telemachus and realizing that the legendary, epic deeds of his youth are now behind him, he nonetheless wonders if “some work of noble note, may yet be done.” Answering in the affirmative, he startles everyone by sailing off on a bold new odyssey, leaving one life behind in search of a new one. Had I embarked on the study of mathematics in my forties, my decision may have been laughable. However, at Harvard I encountered a range of individuals who had, at my age, not yet fully realized their potential. In some cases, their best work was still a decade or more ahead of them. Of course, I had quite a bit of catching up to do, having started on my Ph.D. in my forties rather than twenties. However, my ambitions seemed a lot less ridiculous, perhaps even possible. To my delight and even greater surprise, my luck continued. Because I entered with a clear plan for my dissertation, I was able to complete the Ph. D. in four years. Immediately after receiving the degree, I accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). In addition to being an extraordinary research center that has six Nobel laureates among its faculty, the UCSB campus is one of the most beautiful in the country, as it is situated on a striking ocean promontory. Because I had already published a book, my department voted to promote me to tenure 13 months after I started teaching. In the end, I suppose there are three main takeaways from my story, the first being less useful than the other two: Be lucky, be very lucky. Second, as life expectancy and middle-age vitality have been dramatically increasing over the past few decades, so too has the possibility for new beginnings and meaningful contributions later in life. Third, getting nearly anywhere in life, regardless of your starting place, is probably more possible than you might think. Sometimes you really can get there from here. The remainder of this book (which won’t linger on the details of my life—I promise) aims to challenge conventional environmental thinking. As noted above, Henry David Thoreau was once a hero of mine. Because I still find a number of things to admire in Thoreau, I have been highlighting the positive aspects of Thoreau’s enormous influence. It would be too simplistic to say that modern environmental thinking emerges fully formed with Thoreau, but many of its American roots trace back to him. This isn’t necessarily a good thing.

18

Introduction

While Thoreau is often seen as the harbinger of modern environmental thinking, Walden is also the culmination of thousands of years of writings celebrating the idea that we can get back to nature. For over 5000 years, a range of Western thinkers and texts have argued that human beings once lived in harmony with the earth. Some even hinted that it might just be possible to get back to that state of nature. Thoreau is striking because he, in a very literal sense, actually tried to make the return. He is likely remembered and influential because he eloquently confirmed for many readers the ancient suspicion that life was, and still is, better there. This is a comforting sentiment, which no doubt helps account for its continued appeal, even in the 21st century. However, this book argues that, as dangerous as it is comforting, this idea has wrought widespread damage environmentally while also keeping us from moving in the opposite but I believe urgently necessary direction: forward to nature. The first half of this book will explain in detail just what I mean by “forward to nature” and why I am convinced that we need to reorient ourselves from past to future, abandoning the false hope that we can somehow get back to nature. We need to envision a more harmonious relationship with nature as a future goal, not waste energy trying to recapture something that never existed. Indeed, this needs to be one of humanity’s greatest ambitions, especially as we are presently hurling toward a future relationship with the planet that threatens to be anything but harmonious.

PART I

Forward to nature

1 TURNING FROM THE PAST

Environmentally, when did it all begin to go wrong? This question, which I am asked frequently, strikes me as fair and well intentioned. It is, however, deceptively complex, as it often carries with it a series of related (though sometimes unspoken) questions: What, exactly, went wrong? Why did it go wrong? Who is to blame? These in turn are often just prerequisites for an even more pressing question. Once we better understand our situation and how our environmental problems began, how might we turn back the clock to repair, or at least mitigate, the damage done? Even this, however, is often not the end of the line, as it can raise the most worrisome and urgent question of all: Is there still time to make a successful intervention? Now that our environmental problems are global in scale, perhaps some sort of irreversible “tipping point” has been reached and passed. Instead of looking for answers to our opening question, I would like to respond to it with one of my own: Environmentally, why do we think that anything was ever right? Although it may sound a little flippant, I believe this question to be a better response than any answer I could muster. Why, indeed, do we believe that human beings once had some sort of harmonious relationship with the earth, now lost? As we shall see, there is little in the historical record to suggest that such a blissful time ever existed. Why, then, is this belief so common? Before tackling this question head on, it will be helpful to briefly take up the issue of how environmental beliefs emerge and change over time. Imagine a coal-burning power plant, complete with billowing smokestacks, being built not far from where you live. What do you imagine would be your impression of it? Would it strike you as good? Beautiful? Probably not. To the contrary, it would likely seem the opposite of both. Yet, in the U.S. in the late 1940s, signaling postwar prosperity, it may have seemed like a very good thing, perhaps

22

Forward to nature

even beautiful. Although the power plants themselves didn’t change, they surprisingly went from being seen as beautiful to ugly in a single generation. How did this happen? In various ways, we forcibly became aware of the consequences of certain of our actions. For example, the “Great Smoke” of 1952, during which more than 12,000 Londoners died as the result of smog inhalation during a single week, made clear the horrific dangers that come with unchecked burning of fossil fuels (and led to the creation of the U.K.’s Clean Air Act in 1956, a milestone in clean-air legislations). Not every influence need be this direct. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published a decade later, had little to say about fossil fuels and urban air pollution; nonetheless, because it alerted millions to the dangers associated with the wholesale release of toxic materials into the environment, it too changed our ideas toward coal-fired power plants. Because Carson’s work was so influential, you did not even need to read Silent Spring to know its basic environmental position, which was discussed in a range of media outlets, as well as around countless water coolers. Ideas and beliefs can spread even more subtly, without a single word spoken. A child notices her parent wince or sigh discontentedly as they pass the smokestacks of a power plant. Nothing need be said or explained to the child for her to clearly get the idea: this is a bad and ugly thing. The next time they pass, she too winces. As a cultural historian with a focus on the environment, I seek to understand how such ideas and attitudes emerge, spread, change, and sometimes die over time and across cultures. For thousands of years, human beings have been creating texts, artworks, and other artifacts that both provide a fascinating record of the state of the environment at the time of their creation, as well as document attitudes toward it. Milestone and influential works such as Silent Spring are of special interest and significance, as they not only reveal attitudes toward the environment, they can alter beliefs and even give birth to entirely new ideas. Returning to our opening question, it assumes that human beings once had some sort of harmonious relationship with our planet that somehow, somewhere along the line, was lost. Why do we believe this? As with our impressions of coal-fired power plants, a range of works have sometimes subtly, sometimes forcefully, shaped this belief. However, unlike the relatively recent flip-flop of attitudes toward power plants, thousands upon thousands of works over thousands of years have been steadfastly reinforcing this particular idea. The idea was already alive and well nearly 5000 years ago in Sumerian writing, the earliest literature of the West. It is echoed in both the Hebrew and Christian Testaments of the Bible, as well as later in the Quran. In the archaic period of ancient Greece, it was presented as historical fact, thanks to Homer’s contemporary Hesiod. Centuries later, as Greece was in decline, the poet Theocritus introduced a new form of literature (which, over 2200 years later, is still popular) built on a clever offshoot of the idea. It was, perhaps not surprisingly, also well known to Romans like Ovid and Virgil; especially the latter, who popularized and complicated the art form that Theocritus originated. The idea flourished throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe. We see protracted

Turning from the past

23

discussions of it in Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and seemingly countless other theologians, as well as in a great many philosophical treatises. In literature, the idea became central in works by Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, and thousands of additional poems, plays, and novels. While Michelangelo, Rubens, Cranach, Blake, Rousseau, and other artists imagined it visually, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Copeland did so musically. Lest you think it an obscure, ancient idea, rest assured it is still alive and well today in works ranging from the poems of Wendell Berry to films like Disney’s Pocahontas. For our, environmental, purposes, it is noteworthy that the idea opens both Silent Spring and the film version of An Inconvenient Truth. It was also a central belief in environmental movements like Deep Ecology. Given that it is such a pervasive idea, it has exerted tremendous force in shaping culture. It played a role in the European colonization of the Americas, the spread of the United States across the North American continent, and more recently the postwar suburban sprawl that took off in the 1940s and 1950s, the “back-to-the-land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the return to small town America in the 1990s. It even influences what we eat, through works like The Paleo Diet and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I am, of course, talking about the idea of Eden. As our whirlwind overview suggests, the notion that the earth was once a paradise is extraordinarily persistent in the West. In addition to the biblical account of Eden, in Greek literature it appears in Hesiod’s nostalgic tale of a lost golden race that lived at peace with themselves and the planet (rechristened and popularized as the “golden age” by Ovid and Virgil). Central to these tales was the belief that human beings once lived a perfect life in a perfect paradise, where a benevolent mother earth provided for their every need. The celebration of “pastoral” life, formally inaugurated as an art form by Theocritus, builds on and updates this idea, suggesting that such a wonderful life still exists, though only on the rural outskirts of civilization. So similar are Eden, the golden age, and imagined pastoral places that scholars use a single Latin term for all three: locus amoenus, the “pleasant place.” One of the West’s great Ur-myths, the story of the lost paradise has been repeated and revised for the whole of our written history (and even before). For most of this time, the Sumerian/Greco/Roman/Judeo/Christian/Moslem notion that the earth was once home to a welcoming, pleasant paradise that kindly and abundantly provided for human beings was taken to be historically accurate. Belief in Eden lives on today for perhaps billions of people, thanks to literal readings of the Bible and the Quran. A 2012 Gallup poll revealed that roughly half of Americans believe the biblical account of creation set in Eden to be historically accurate. For our purposes, what is important here is not whether the biblical Eden once existed. From an environmental point of view, what matters is the legacy of the lost paradise. It is almost impossible for us not to believe in the notion that human beings once lived at peace with the planet, so persistent is this idea across Western culture. Imagine scores of influential works appearing annually, each expressing an unwavering belief in an edenic past. Continuing for centuries, this project both forcefully

24

Forward to nature

and subtly (as with the child who now sighs discontentedly when passing a power plant) reinforced belief in an edenic past for each subsequent generation. Consequently, millions of Americans today, who may have no religious convictions whatsoever, may nonetheless believe that there was once a time when human beings lived harmoniously with the planet. In other words, believe in an edenic past. Works like Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, and even Silent Spring keep the myth alive, suggesting that somewhere, be it a few hundred years ago or just a generation or two ago in rural America, some sort of harmonious relationship between human beings and the earth existed. But wait; can’t we believe that human beings once had a much better relationship to the planet than we do now without believing in a perfect, edenic past? Perhaps, but it is worth pausing for a moment to briefly consider what the historical record tells us about the human condition. In the last few centuries, thanks to a range of scientists, historians, and other scholars, we have learned much about the past of our planet and species. The picture that has emerged does not show us living harmoniously with nature, ever. Human life expectancy, from prehistory through the ancient Greeks and even into 18th-century Europe, was around 30. Assuming that you lived through infancy, which was often unlikely, a range of horrific diseases and dangers awaited you, such as smallpox, typhus, and leprosy, as well as parasites like trichinosis, yaws, and tapeworms. Death from starvation, exposure, accidents, predators, and infection, which could begin with something as simple as tooth decay, was common. Moreover, there was also the very real possibility of a violent death at the hands of other human beings. Animals in our path also suffered relentless violence at our hands. The Late Pleistocene (i.e. Ice Age) extinction event saw the mass disappearance of thousands of species of animals just as modern human beings came on the scene. For example, over 40,000 years ago, when our species first moved into Australia, 15 of the 16 genera of large mammals soon vanished (in taxonomy, genera are root categories that can contain hundreds of species each). This pattern would repeat in Asia and Europe, then in North and South America. Climate change, disease, and other factors no doubt also played a role in these extinction events, but early human hunters were clearly a major factor. While there is a temptation, thanks to works like the film Dances with Wolves and scores of similarly themed works, to see North America in particular as a place where human beings lived in sustainable peace with animals like the American bison, pre-Columbian peoples helped eradicate 75 percent of the continent’s genera of large mammals. The enormous success of the bison was in fact due in part to Native Americans hunting its competitors for resources into extinction. Not only animals, but plants and the landscape were severely impacted by the emerging human presence. The practice of mass deforestation, which plays a major role in the West’s first great work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, followed human beings out of Northern Africa and into Europe on its way to the Americas and everywhere else. Long before this, as early as the Neolithic period (beginning about 10,000 BCE), fire was used for a variety of human

Turning from the past

25

projects, including hunting, repurposing of forestland, and early slash-and-burn agriculture. This not only impacted plants, but led to massive alterations to the environment. In North America, the ancient conversion of forest to grassland via fire helped create and enlarge the immense expanse of grassland at the center of the continent. This project of deforestation and landscape modification by Native Americans was so pervasive that in many parts of North America there are more forests today than prior to the arrival of Europeans 500 years ago. The historical record makes clear that for as long as we have been human, human beings have neither lived at peace with the planet nor with plants, animals, or even ourselves. Confronted with a range of diseases and threats, the short lives of human beings were not particularly pleasant, whether 500, 5000, or 50,000 years ago. (If you are interested in this topic, in his Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Steven Pinker explores it in detail, concluding that human lives have, in a range of ways, been getting better and better, especially in the past few hundred years. Though not without shortcomings, Pinker’s book invites us to reevaluate the history handed down to us.) Why then do so many people believe that we once lived at peace with the earth? One of the reasons is that we have only relatively recently put together an accurate picture of the past. For example, it is only in the last few decades that the extent to which Native Americans modified their environment has been well understood by scholars. Similarly, our modern understanding of geological time did not begin to develop until the 18th century. Prior to that, the image of the past that we held came mainly from stories, myths, and (often wrong) conjecture, as ancient thinkers obviously did not have much of a handle on history. Consequently, they were in no position to know what the lives of early human beings were really like. Prior to the relatively recent findings of modern scholars, by far the most common belief in the West, which traces back to the very beginning of Western civilization, was that human beings once had a harmonious relationship with the earth. The aforementioned mountain of works arguing for Eden’s existence for thousands of years obviously played a major role in this belief. In addition, the pastoral tradition introduced by the Greek Theocritus, which added an air of reality to Eden, greatly strengthened its credibility and influence. While Eden and the golden age resided in the distant past, Theocritus suggested that in certain rural locales, which he imagined as pastures populated by shepherds and their sheep (which is why such works usually receive the “pastoral” moniker), human beings still lived at peace with the earth, which benevolently provided for their every need. Writing from the vantage point of one of antiquity’s greatest cities, Alexandria, Theocritus was likely inspired by wistful recollections of his own youth in rural Sicily. Paradise, proclaimed Theocritus, still exists, but only far from the corruption of civilization, which is especially rampant in its cities and in the courts of its monarchs. Thus, unlike Eden and the golden age, the locus amoenus (“pleasant place”) of pastoral art is imagined spatially rather than temporally, existing not at another time (the distant past, like Eden) but rather in another

26

Forward to nature

place (certain far-off rural locales). If you could flee the city and free yourself of its corruption, then, according to Theocritus, you just might be able to get back to Eden, or at least to an ancient Greek version of it. Although Theocritus and Virgil, who together helped make pastoral art enormously popular, predate the Christian era, pastoral art and depictions of Eden soon merged. For centuries, scores of Christian writers and artists, influenced by Theocritus, Virgil, and others, would depict the pastoral locus amoenus as surprisingly like Eden. Conversely, they also gave Eden characteristics drawn from the extensive tradition of pastoral poetry and art. For example, the notion that the climate of Eden was perpetually spring-like, which shows up in a great many medieval and Renaissance Christian paintings and literary depictions, does not appear in the Genesis account, but rather was imported from the pastoral tradition. Pastoral thus imbued the myth of Eden with an air of earthly possibility. If human beings could, at least somewhere on earth, still live at peace with nature, then the idea of Eden seemed less farfetched. Conversely, if the biblical Eden once existed, then, just maybe, somewhere on earth human beings might still be living something close to a pastoral, edenic life. Perhaps not surprisingly, belief that an earthly paradise still existed somewhere was met with skepticism, even in antiquity. In his second Epode, Virgil’s contemporary Horace suggested that such a view is really little more than an idealization of country life from the vantage point of the often-dismal city. (Perhaps not coincidentally, knowing what we do about his biography, this sounds suspiciously like Theocritus’s own perspective from Alexandria.) In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare further critiqued pastoral by drawing attention to a conspicuous feature of the art form, namely, that the rural locus amoenus is often depicted, like Eden and the golden age, as lost to time—but in this case, only recently so, as the perfect pastoral place is frequently imagined as having remained alive until just a generation or so ago. Shakespeare’s apt psychological insight, made by way of King Polixenes in the play, is that this rather too coincidentally corresponds to the childhood of the person making the observation. This suspicion, which would be more completely theorized by Friedrich Schiller two centuries after Shakespeare, helps us further understand the birth of pastoral with Theocritus, who was, as noted above, likely influenced by pleasant memories of his own childhood in rural Sicily. Pastoral does not offer a dream of returning to Eden per se, but rather often to the time of our own childhood, which, as it turns out, we sometimes remember as being pretty edenic. Having grown up on a farm like Theocritus and being not much older than Shakespeare’s King Polixenes, even I have to admit to sometimes remembering the family farm of my childhood as an altogether pleasant pastoral place. However, after even modest scrutiny, this image soon dissolves in the light of day when I recall my real rather than imagined childhood. Incidentally, the campaign slogan used by both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, “Make America Great Again” (Regan put a “Let’s” in front of it), is in the pastoral tradition in this sense. Both candidates were making an appeal to

Turning from the past

27

their contemporaries (i.e. older voters), who generally had more positive recollections of the past than good feelings for the present. The campaign promise was to turn back the clock to these fondly remembered times. As we shall see, using the past as a model for the future is a dubious practice. The critiques of pastoral made by Horace, Schiller, and others compellingly argue that, from its very beginning with Theocritus, the art form offered a wildly romanticized view of rural life born out of 1) frustration with the world becoming too modern, too quickly for our liking, and 2) a dissatisfaction with city life (pastoral, almost always an urban form, is rarely written by residents of the country, though examples like the poet John Clare do exist). Although not as influential as the idea of Eden, which is, after all, the creation myth for three of the world’s most influential religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), pastoral nonetheless became one of the most popular art forms in the West. Taking Virgil as a model, scores of medieval and Renaissance writers and artists, and thousands in the centuries since, have tried their hand at pastoral. Generally, each encouraged us to imagine a rural, recently lost, edenic scene. Not surprisingly, many books have been written about pastoral art (I should confess to having penned one myself). Far from dying out, in the 20th century, a range of environmentalists would cleverly take advantage of pastoral’s influence and central characteristics. Consider the opening of Silent Spring: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings …” When and where was this? Carson, who is carefully employing the pastoral and edenic traditions here, implies that it was in rural America, just a generation ago. Similarly, the film version of An Inconvenient Truth opens with the scene of a pristine river with a voice-over by Al Gore: “You look at that river, gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds. You hear the tree frogs … It’s peaceful.” Carson and Gore are tapping into the amalgamated traditions of Eden, the golden age, and pastoral. Their reason for doing so is clever, as they want to draw attention to the loss of the perfect locus amoenus they depict. No sooner do they present us with a soothing edenic scene then they rip it away. Carson wastes no time in doing so, as her third paragraph tells us that “a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community.” As with the biblical account, it does not take long for evil to enter paradise. Carson takes advantage of our belief in an edenic past, which, thanks to the pastoral tradition, we often imagine as having existed up until a few decades ago in certain rural locales. She then presents us with the demise of the perfect place she has painted. As a consequence, by the time Carson concludes her opening chapter (which is just three pages), she has masterfully—without stating a single one of them—encouraged the questions with which we opened this chapter to come to mind: Environmentally, when did all this begin to go wrong? What, exactly, went wrong? Why did it go wrong? Who is to blame? By the end of Silent Spring, Carson will leave us not only with answers, but also with the hope

28

Forward to nature

that there is still a chance of containing the evil that we unleashed. Ten years after the publication of Silent Spring, DDT was banned in the U.S. I have repeatedly referenced Silent Spring because it is, as far as I am concerned, one of the milestone works of the 20th century. Like special relativity, one of the century’s first great game-changers, Carson’s thinking effected a paradigm shift that had consequences far outside of her original project of revealing the costs associated with indiscriminate pesticide use. Incidentally, she cleverly rechristens these “biocides” in order to draw attention to the fact that they kill all sorts of plants and animals, not just those that we characterize as “pests.” Not only did this cause us to rethink biocide use, but a range of additional environmental practices, such as the wholesale burning of fossil fuels. Yes, other works also played their role, but none had the impact of Silent Spring. For our immediate purposes, it is important to note that Carson also brilliantly worked out a way to make use of our inherited belief in an edenic past. In the intervening 50 and more years, this approach has been followed by literally thousands of environmentalists, such as Al Gore and Michael Pollan. Knowing that our opening question is not far from the lips of their readers, each compellingly answers it in reference to their specific environmental concern. When did it all begin to go wrong? Carson: With the widespread postwar use of biocides developed as chemical weapons during World War II. Gore: Check the bottom of the hockey stick graph: around 200 years ago as fossil fuel use began to skyrocket. Pollan: With the growth of industrial agriculture and the loss of family farms. Once our opening question is answered, each writer can then move to the accompanying what, why, and who questions before addressing the larger issue of how we might turn back the clock to undo what we have done, such as by banning DDT, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and favoring local heirloom and organic foods, respectively. The legacy of the conjoined traditions of Eden, the golden age, and pastoral can thus help bring about environmental consciousness and positive change. In deference to Carson, Gore, Pollan, and other committed environmentalists for whom I have great respect, I wanted to start this part of our exploration of edenic thinking on a positive note, as it is often useful to look back to a time when things were, at least regarding the particular issue referenced, in some ways better than today. Taking advantage of our belief in an edenic past, this approach has quite a bit of rhetorical punch. It certainly can, as Carson proved, help bring about positive and widespread change. However, environmentally, belief in an edenic past also has worrisome consequences. The problem is that Eden stands between us and the future. In so far as edenic thinking imagines a harmonious human relationship with the earth in the past, it can encourage us to attempt to turn back the clock to regain it. Obviously, such thinking is directed toward the past, not the future. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously expressed this idea over 250 years ago with the now familiar phrase retour à la nature, often rendered as “back to nature,” though it literally translates as “return to nature.” In practice, this

Turning from the past

29

became little more than an imperative urging us to “return to Eden.” Because the edenic tradition encourages us to envision a past more appealing than the present, and, thanks to the influence of pastoral, such a past is often imagined as still existing just a generation or two ago in rural locales, the past is offered as an attainable paradigm for the future. This project is, unfortunately, doomed to failure. Not only can we never return to Eden, but relegating the future to the past is fraught with dangers. Let’s start with a familiar and modest example: heirloom fruits and vegetables, which in recent years have not only become a fixture in local farmers’ markets, but now in chain supermarkets as well. Consumers have woken up to the fact that commercial varieties of cultivars are often bred for doubtful characteristics dictated by the food industry. Tomatoes with appealing shape, size, and color that have long shelf lives and sturdy skins (like the commercial version of the beefsteak), may be a marketer’s dream, but they are often lacking in other ways, such as in taste and nutrition. Heirlooms are an appealing alternative as they date from a time before the agricultural industry began, largely for profit, undertaking the large-scale genetic adulteration of fruit and vegetables. The exact definition of an heirloom vegetable is, at the time of this writing, still being debated. Some experts argue that any vegetable cultivar that is at least 50 years old is an heirloom. Concerned that this would allow certain early hybrids to receive the classification, some would like to push the clock back further, perhaps to 100 years ago. Alternately, fixed dates, usually around 1945, which roughly correspond with the large-scale introduction of industrial hybrids, have been suggested. Hybrids, which are the first generation of a cross between two different plant varieties, enter into this debate for a number of reasons, but chiefly because, as Michael Pollan and others have repeatedly made clear, the seeds of hybrids do not faithfully reproduce the parent. Plant the seeds produced by a hybrid, and the resulting plant will likely disappoint you. This is not unlike crossing two animal species, such as a horse and donkey producing a hybrid offspring: the mule. Unlike mules, hybrid plants can and do reproduce (by making seeds); however, as the resultant offspring is genetically unstable, it will not likely have the desirable blend of characteristics possessed by the hybrid parent. In contrast, traditional “open-pollinated” plants, which is how plants reproduce without human intervention, produce usable seeds with consistently predictable qualities. However, unlike open-pollinated varieties, growers cannot use the seeds of hybrid crops to produce new plants, but must purchase new seeds every year. Hence companies that produce hybrid seeds have, as Pollan suggests, “the biological equivalent of a patent. Farmers now had to buy seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce themselves, they now depended on a corporation.” It is difficult not to be moved by Pollan’s argument, which is made in the spirit of American environmentalists like Thoreau, who, 150 years before in Walden, similarly railed that the goal of the clothing industry was “not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.”

30

Forward to nature

If hybrids are the problem, why does the age of a vegetable variety, be it 50 or 100 years, enter into the definition of an heirloom? Why, indeed, is the issue framed between hybrid and heirloom, rather than between hybrid and openpollinated plants? Environmentalists like Carson and Pollan are not the only ones who know how to employ the appealing myth of an edenic past. As Pollan makes clear in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a new literary form has emerged in recent decades, which he dubbed “supermarket pastoral.” In order to sell pricey products, supermarkets first sell the dream of an edenic, pastoral life when human beings lived in greater harmony with the earth. Walk into any Whole Foods Market, notes Pollan, and you will see hundreds of signs and labels that either describe or picture the product as part of a harmonious rural, pastoral scene. In so doing, retailers leverage the work of environmental activists like Carson and (ironically) Pollan, who have argued that we have made significant and harmful changes to the environment through, for example, the introduction of biocides and hybrid vegetables into our farmland. Heirlooms, by definition, promise us fruit from before this environmental fall from grace, so to speak, as they are imagined (and marketed) as living artifacts carefully handed down to us from a time before everything went wrong environmentally. Similarly, organic vegetables promise return to an era before biocides. Thanks to the conjoined pastoral and edenic traditions still alive and well and at work in our culture, this makes heirloom fruits and vegetables easy to understand and sell. The distinction between hybrid and open-pollinated vegetables is, by contrast, somewhat complicated and confusing. Consequently, in part because supermarket pastoral much prefers the edenic and very marketable label “heirloom,” it stands in opposition to industrial hybrids, rather than “open-pollinated,” in the public imagination. If we find the charm of heirloom fruits and vegetables appealing, and are willing to pay our grocers for providing it, what’s the harm? In the past 50 years, both large- and small-scale growers have, through traditional open-pollination, produced an astonishing number of new fruit and vegetable varieties. There is nothing new here, as this is how, long before hybridization came onto the scene, heirloom varieties themselves came into existence. For example, the Black Krim, a popular greenish burgundy heirloom tomato, owes its existence to an early ancestor on the Crimean Peninsula over 200 years ago that gave birth to over 50 varieties of Russian black tomatoes. The heirloom Black Krim at your local farmers’ market is just one variety from this fascinating and tasty family tree. In this case, a variety whose characteristics were locked in decades ago; hence its heirloom status. However, in the intervening years, dedicated gardeners and growers worldwide have, through traditional open-pollination, been improving Russian black tomatoes further, creating whole new varieties in the process. Why attempt to improve on a classic? For the same reasons that gave birth to those original 50 varieties: to make them tastier, juicier, tenderer, and so forth. Now that our global climate is changing, the project has new urgency and importance, as these tomatoes need to be prepared for the future by being

Turning from the past

31

made more drought, heat, and disease tolerant. While growers can somewhat improve the heirloom Black Krim by selectively saving only the best, hardiest seeds, any new variety created from it would no longer, by any of the definitions proposed, be an heirloom. Consequently, now that heirlooms are big business, we risk having a generation of growers largely set aside the millennia-old project of creating new and better varieties of vegetables. For all life, the future belongs to each new generation, not the last. That’s how evolution works. Each successful new generation takes a step (even if it’s a small one) away from the past and toward the future. The myth of an edenic past, however, is standing between the heirloom Black Krim and its future by not allowing its progeny (recent varieties that have evolved from it) to succeed it. This not only includes varieties created by breeders, but also new offshoots that would naturally occur through the process of evolution without human intervention. Because our climate is changing, the process of evolution is now feverishly attempting to adapt plants across the planet for the future. It cannot, however, do this with heirloom plants. As improbable as it may sound, Eden not only threatens the teaching of evolution in the classroom, but, in a wholesale and altogether disturbing way, now the process of evolution itself. In their own small way, heirloom vegetables stand between us and the future. They offer us the profoundly alluring but impossible dream of returning to a time before things went wrong environmentally. In the process, they carry with them a tempting answer to our opening questions, as they are marketed with an explanation of what went wrong, as well as why it did and who is to blame. To the delight of grocers everywhere, they promise to mitigate the problem through their purchase. The danger here is that slavish devotion to the past can hinder our acceptance of the future. Devotion to the past can also carry surprising environmental costs, in this case by severely limiting genetic diversity and bringing a halt to the process of evolution. Heirloom fruits and vegetables are a modest example of the impact of edenic thinking. In contrast, its influence can also be enormous, as the myth has shaped how certain environmentalists imagine our future relationship with the planet. As incredible as it may sound, a few decades ago some of these individuals set out to find Eden. Horrified at the present state of the environment, yet believing that somewhere in our past we lived at peace with the planet, in the closing decades of the 20th century these individuals searched for the remnants of lost edenic life. They did not do so because they were devout Christians, but rather committed environmentalists. Their search was motivated by belief in a secular version of the Eden myth advanced by environmentalists like Max Oelschlaeger, who baldly suggested in 1993 that “prehistoric people existed in an Edenlike condition.” Consequently, the earth was scoured for cultures that, untouched by modernity and hence imagined as still innocent, had seemingly not yet lost paradise. In the Americas, the indigenous people of the Amazonian rainforest were

32

Forward to nature

often touted as prime examples. Native North American cultures that had existed up until a few generations ago were also repeatedly referenced. This particular belief became popular early in the modern environmental movement, in part thanks to an enormously influential 1971 article by Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, entitled “Indians: First Americans, First Ecologists.” These cultures were offered as a hope for the future, as they had not, it was argued, made our mistakes. Even if we were not always clear on exactly what went wrong for us environmentally (given that so much has), here was a chance to turn back the clock to a time before it all began to fall apart. The obvious difficulty is that the edenic image that we hold of preColumbian American cultures often runs counter to what we know about their actual relationships with each other, animals, plants, and the planet. This is not to say that these cultures have nothing to teach us. Certainly, they do. Indeed, they have a great deal to teach us of value. But it is worth pausing to ask what it is we see in them. Is it an answer to our opening question: Do we see ourselves before it all began to go wrong environmentally? Do we honestly believe they can help us turn back the clock to regain what we believe they never lost: paradise? Incidentally, it should go without saying that seeing a vast, complex, and rich diversity of Native American cultures not for what they are, but rather as an upended projection of ourselves, does them a great injustice. While there is much to be learned from past cultures, they can only be of so much use in the 21st century when our global population will reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. Let’s stay with the example of plants and assume that we can find a past culture that really had their food system figured out in a way that was sustainable in the long term by adapting to their specific region, climate, available resources, etc. Regardless of what can be learned from such a culture, trying to turn the clock back to such a time would be senseless for a planet with a population of nearly 10 billion, 70 percent of whom will live in cities in 2050. True, we could learn from them and other similar cultures throughout history, but these lessons can only help so much. The challenge is to synthesize all that we know (and still need to learn) into a sustainable, largely urban and highly technological future, which will bear limited resemblance to anything in the past. Of course, modern agribusiness is an environmental disaster. It is hardly any wonder that people recoil from it and look to the past for a better way. But, as there is no past model that can come anywhere near addressing our global needs and problems, we need to radically reform this business—along with many others. It certainly won’t be easy, but that’s the challenge. The belief that we can return to a harmonious relationship with the earth is enormously appealing. Especially in environmentally troubling times, its allure is obvious. It offers the simplest of all answers to our questions and problems: the imagined simplicity of a time that predates both. Wistfully pining for an edenic relationship with the planet we believe we once had and lost may seem harmless

Turning from the past

33

enough, but it can turn worrisome when we seek to assign blame for our environmental woes—in other words, when we set out to name the evil that corrupted our once edenic planet. In 1980, Carolyn Merchant published a book that would influence scholars for decades. The Death of Nature strongly linked science and technology to our current environmental crisis. As late as 1500, Merchant argued, most human beings, including Europeans, lived harmoniously with nature. However, this bliss was soon shattered. Who or what changed things? Read like a whodunit, a prime suspect soon emerges: perhaps more than any other person in history, Francis Bacon, the so-called father of modern science, is responsible for the death of nature. Expressed more generally and bluntly, science and technology killed nature. Or more precisely, they have been slowly killing nature ever since the large-scale implementation of Baconian science. The only question remaining is whether or not it is still possible to turn the clock back and undo what science and technological modernity have wrought, thereby saving nature by going back to it. This general thesis was not new with Merchant. A decade before, Lynn White, Jr., in a work even more influential than The Death of Nature, argued that the mass implementation of “the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature … may mark the greatest event in human history since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well.” Science and technological modernity were thus implicated in the loss of our edenic life. Following White and Merchant, scores of environmental writers have, in a host of ways, subsequently made much the same argument. However, like edenic thinking, in many ways this belief stands counter to what we know to be the case; namely, that science and technology have done much to improve the human condition over the past few hundred years. Our lifespan has nearly tripled, infant mortality has been reduced by an even greater factor, many deadly diseases are now easily and safely inoculated against, and so forth. In developed countries (i.e. those with technologically developed infrastructure), fresh water, effective sanitation, medical care, adequate food, and most needs are met for most people (though, sadly, still not all, though this is often for socio-political rather than technological reasons). It would be easy to fill pages with examples of how modern science and technology have improved our lives. In fact, as noted earlier, Steven Pinker has recently filled a rather large book with scores of examples. It can, of course, be countered that all this comes with significant environmental costs. However, we need to be careful in implicating science and technology here. Consider the issue of urban air pollution, such as created by coal-fired power plants. As London’s aforementioned “Great Smoke” revealed, this can certainly be a horrific problem. Moreover, we now know that it is no longer an issue localized in cities and other places, as the rise of atmospheric CO2 and resulting climate change cause extraordinary consequences for the entire planet.

34

Forward to nature

This problem, however, largely predates the rise of technological modernity and the so-called industrial revolution. Three hundred years before the Great Smoke of 1952, respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal smoke was quickly becoming one of the leading causes of death in London. This fact was known even in the 1660s to individuals like John Graunt, the so-called father of both modern statistics and modern epidemiology. This predates both Baconian science becoming influential and what we generally think of as the emergence of technological modernity and the industrial revolution. James Watt’s patent for a steam engine, for example, did not appear until over a century later in 1781. So, what was the cause of all this pollution? The twofold problem, which is still with us today, involves population and consumption. Starting around 1500, roughly a century before Shakespeare was at the height of his career, London’s population began to soar for variety of reasons, but principally because of mass immigration into the city. Some estimates have the city’s population increasing tenfold from 1500 to 1700. By 1800, its population reached a million, a feat that had only happened once before in European history, with Rome at its height in Virgil’s era. Environmentally, the difficulty was that all of these Londoners wanted, not surprisingly, fuel to cook their food and to heat their homes. At the same time, the trend in domestic architecture was toward ever-bigger houses, which created an even greater energy need. Although wood was initially their primary fuel, by the middle of the 16th century most of the area surrounding London was deforested. Londoners consequently had little choice but to turn to burning a particularly plentiful, though highly noxious form of coal, which they were very successful at mining and bringing in from the coast on barges (hence, they called it “seacoal”). This marked the first appearance on earth of a large-scale economy and culture built on fossil fuels. By the time Shakespeare was writing his plays, the English had become so skilled at building and draining pit coal mines that they were excavating deep mines with long horizontal shafts that even extended under ocean estuaries. These early modern Londoners were also the first people on the planet to realize the dangers that come with the wholesale, unchecked burning of fossil fuels. They clearly knew that coal smoke was killing people and animals, as well as causing the extinction of certain local plants. Although they did not understand the underlying chemistry, they also knew that the coal smoke was coming back to earth in the form of acid rain, as it was killing fish in the Thames. In spite of knowing all this, they sadly saw no other option but to continue doing what they knew was killing them. While protoindustrial practices were beginning to emerge in Shakespeare’s England, our original love/hate relationship with fossil fuels had little to do with technology. Instead, coal was burned for basic human needs, like cooking and heating. It’s easy to cast blame on technological modernity for our dependence on fossil fuels; however, as the early modern emergence of this dependency makes clear, the buck needs to stop with us, as all these fossil fuels were (and

Turning from the past

35

still are) either burned indirectly for us or directly by us. Like Elizabethan Londoners, we still burn fossil fuels right in our homes to cook food and for heat. We also now directly burn them in our cars in amounts that exceed domestic heating and cooking combined. Of course, technology and science has certainly created its share of environmental problems, but let’s again consider Silent Spring. What made Carson’s argument so persuasive was that it was thoroughly informed by a painstaking, scientific analysis of the impact that biocides had on living organisms. This is hardly surprising, as Carson held a Master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University. After spending 16 chapters answering our opening questions, explaining what went wrong environmentally with the sort of precision that only a trained scientist can offer, Carson opens her concluding chapter by referencing a poem by Robert Frost: “We stand now where two roads diverge … The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one ‘less traveled by’— offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” What is Carson’s road “less traveled”? Given that she explains in detail the dangers of certain laboratory chemicals (biocides), we might expect her to recommend that we try in some way to turn the clock back to a time before scientists began meddling with such things. Such a move would hardly be surprising, as many, many environmentalists have made similar recommendations in the decades since the publication of Silent Spring—in the process, often unabashedly implicating science in the loss of an imagined edenic and pastoral past. Instead, Carson argues that science itself needs to help provide the answers. Concerned over the direct chemical control of insect populations, she turns instead to the “vast field of biology,” where “entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, [and] ecologists” are “all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.” Once the underlying biology of the organisms (aka “pests”) that we seek to control is understood, argues Carson, we open up the possibility of making a biotic intervention, such as by rendering sterile the insects that spread malaria. This would be far more benign than the wholesale application of DDT to the environment, where it endangers a host of organisms. Although Silent Spring opens with the description of a pastoral scene, Carson does not seek to return to the pleasant past she invites us to imagine. Rather, like the “superhighway” of the biocide industry she rails against, Carson’s road “less traveled” is also headed into the future. Acutely aware that science and technology can unleash a host of environmental problems (which, after all, is what Silent Spring sets out to demonstrate), Carson does not give in to the temptation of seeing science as essentially evil, the “killer of nature,” in spite of the fact that this is, in some sense, an apt moniker for biocides. Nor does she pine for a time before the problems that she documents came on the scene.

36

Forward to nature

Rather, building on the amazing achievements of countries with technologically developed infrastructures, she looks to a future born out of a range of “new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” Obviously aware of the immense appeal of an edenic past, Carson does not allow it to turn her away from the future. Inspired by the example of Rachel Carson, I am firmly of the conviction that the future is to be found in the future, not the past. Detached from the environmental context we have been considering, this point is so obvious it hardly seems worth making. After all, what would be the alternative? That we attempt to fashion the future into a vision of the past? The problem, as we often come to realize at some point in our lives, is that the past, whether remembered or related to us, was rarely as rosy as it now seems. Yes, the idea of returning to a time before we released billions of tons of greenhouse gases and toxic chemicals into the environment is certainly appealing. However, our problem is not with the future, which can hold enormous promise. To the contrary, blame needs to partly fall to the past, which is where these worrisome practices began, and in larger measure the present where, unchecked and perhaps even unexamined, we unabashedly continue them. Our knee-jerk response to the present state of the environment may be to turn away from a future born out of it, which presumably holds even more of the same, in favor of an imagined pastoral past. However, and to the contrary, what is urgently needed is for us (following Carson’s lead) to firmly set our sights on the future for creative solutions to these problems. Yes, the past will certainly play a role in the future, as ignoring its lessons would be foolish, but the future needs to emerge out of the present, even with all its problems. In order to build a future better than the present, we need to face our problems head on, then seek and implement solutions that take advantage of our present and emerging knowledge, which obviously involves science and technology. In practical terms, even if we so desired, it would be naive to think that we could stop the juggernaut of technological modernity from moving us into the future. This issue is, in some sense, even more important than the other legacy of Eden: the long running debate over evolution and creationism still fracturing the U.S. In both cases, science risks being seen as suspect and dangerous, perhaps outright evil. While the evolution controversy obviously has far-reaching implications, the belief that human beings actually once had a harmonious, edenic relationship with the earth also has extraordinary consequences. Eden not only challenges the teaching of science in the classroom, it can impact the food we eat (when we reach for heirloom fruits and vegetables), the clothes we wear (through our preference for “natural” materials), the places we live (perhaps like Thoreau, through a love of rural locales), and hundreds of additional practices. This book will take up some of these, especially our potentially dangerous love of rural places.

Turning from the past

37

More importantly and more generally, Eden turns us away from a future born out of the lessons we have learned from the past. It’s not just that it offers an alternative to evolutionary biology; it risks standing defiantly as an alternative to evolution and progress, arguing against the scientific, technological, economic, political, and cultural evolution and achievements that are boldly moving our species into the future. Is it possible to replace the deep yearning for a perfect past with the promise of a far better future, crafted by our hands? Although it may be difficult to even imagine such a future in times as environmentally worrisome as these, I personally believe that it is possible, though it will not be easy. It is not just that our present environmental problems are so big, or that our predicament leaves little room for anything but pessimism. The bigger issue is that the roots of the back-to-nature thinking that we have been considering reaches back astonishingly far in time. Why does, altogether improbably, this ancient thinking persist today? The belief that we once lived in harmony with the earth is immensely appealing, especially when a harmonious relationship with the planet now seems more than just difficult to obtain, but so overwhelming that it is hard to even imagine. (Science fiction and climate fiction—sci-fi and clifi—writers have certainly had difficulty in doing so. For decades now they have given us a seemingly endless stream of apocalyptic and dystopic literature rather than glimpses of a better future.) Is it any wonder that, as technological modernity was emerging on the scene 250 years ago, Rousseau, sensing what was on the horizon and believing, like nearly everyone of his era in the West, that we once lived harmoniously with the earth, urged us to return to such a time, to return to nature? Unfortunately, as no such time ever existed (if the historical record rather than myth is to be believed), we cannot return to it. Rousseau’s imperative, although a wildly popular mantra for more than two centuries, is impossible to follow. Indeed, it is nonsensical. We cannot get “back to nature” because nature (i.e. a perfect human relationship with nature) never existed. If we are to get to nature in this sense, it will not be by going back, but by boldly moving forward toward it. A relationship with nature better than the one we have now, which will no doubt be complex and difficult to forge, is to be found in the future. The paradigm that has ruled for millennia, which Rousseau made into a maxim and Thoreau advocated as a lifestyle, needs to shift, as “back to nature” falls away and “forward to nature” takes its place. I introduced science and technology into this discussion because I will argue in the second half of this book that our environmental problems will not be solved through them alone. Although some environmentalists, such as ecomodernists, imply that technology is up to the challenge, I am far from convinced. This is not to suggest, however (as I hope to have made abundantly clear in this chapter and hope to do so again in the next), that science and technology are wholly responsible for our present woes or that they have no role to play in

38

Forward to nature

moving us forward to nature. To the contrary, I am firmly of the conviction that we can only move forward to nature by way of major shifts in our everyday practices aided by science and technology. The second half of this book will take up this conviction in detail. But first, the next chapter will further explore why we need to move forward to nature and consider encouraging, nascent efforts to do so that are now coming on the scene.

2 TURNING TOWARD THE FUTURE

For quite some time now, we have been headed down an environmentally questionable path. Given that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis that has been a long time in the making, this statement will not likely raise many eyebrows, especially as a range of environmentalists have been making similar claims for decades now. However, as counterintuitive as it may sound, we were put on this path by many of the guiding lights of environmentalism: Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, to name just a few. To environmentalists raised on these thinkers, this suggestion may prove unsettling, especially as one of the cornerstones of modern environmentalism that the above writers accepted and advocated is little more than a myth. This myth, which we explored in the previous chapter, is a simple one. It holds that human beings once had a largely harmonious relationship with nature. In one of its most extreme forms, it holds out the promise of our somehow, if only in small ways, reclaiming this lost relationship, thereby getting “back to nature.” Even if this is accepted as impossible, the lost connection to nature is still often wistfully pined after. Although often associated with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this thinking, as we have seen, existed thousands of years before him and remains a conviction for perhaps billions of people today, many of whom have never heard of Rousseau. Modern examples of back-to-nature thinking include our romanticizing of wilderness and the conviction that “natural” products, like heirloom fruits and vegetables, are intrinsically superior to those that are “artificial”—i.e. those that bear the mark of human art and intervention. Because he actually went back to nature to live for a time, Thoreau is perhaps the most famous advocate of this thinking.

40

Forward to nature

In one of its most common forms, this approach holds that at some point in history our species somewhere lived at peace with the planet. As we saw in the last chapter, though this may seem correct, even intuitive, such back-to-nature thinking flies in the face of reason, science, and the historical record. Consequently, we need to accept the sobering truth that such a harmonious state never existed and that reclaiming it is accordingly out of the question. Turning away from this common but misguided belief that we can somehow get back to what never was, we need to turn—and, I would add, with great haste—in the opposite direction, forging a more harmonious relationship with nature in the future. In other words, we need to move forward to nature. Why does such a shift matter? After all, if we are conscious of the need to improve our relationship with the planet, why is nostalgia harmful? In short, in practical terms, being oriented toward the past rather than the future impacts how we invest our energies in the present. Consider environments. We tend to focus our attention on different types of environments depending on whether our preoccupation is with the past or future. If we are interested in getting back to nature, we often, like Thoreau, direct ourselves toward wilderness because we see it as nature that we have not yet corrupted: a sort of living artifact from what we imagine to have been a greener and edenic past. We often use the phrase “back to nature” as a way of imagining moves like Thoreau’s as being across time, rather than space, even though this is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. We do not usually characterize Thoreau as going “over to nature,” even though that is exactly what he did by walking from his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, over to nearby Walden Pond (which, just a mile outside of town, was hardly wilderness, even though he often speaks of it as such). Instead, his going there is imagined like going back in time to when the earth was covered with such places. Wilderness is still often imagined in this way, as being essentially prehistoric: people imagine that it has never been touched, or been touched only minimally, by human history. (We now know that this is often inaccurate, as many wilderness locales, including now-iconic places like the Yosemite Valley, have been extensively modified by human action for thousands of years.) Thus, while there is no going back to nature, this over-to-nature spatial movement has long been imagined as a temporal back-to-nature one. Even though we cannot go back in time to get certain parts of nature back, such as the vast tracts of land that have already been developed for human use, we can at least do our best—expanding enormous energy, if necessary—to preserve the last stands of what we believe to be extant nature (i.e. wilderness) that are imagined as having not yet been significantly touched by human development. Following Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and others, a great deal of environmental activism has taken this line of back-tonature reasoning, fighting tirelessly for the preservation of wilderness. There is certainly nothing wrong with working to preserve wilderness. This work should be enthusiastically applauded, of course. However, in looking forward to a better relationship with nature in the future, we could firmly resolve

Turning toward the future

41

to give a proportionate amount of our attention to the places that we already inhabit: cities, suburbs, farms, industrial operations, and other human-controlled locales, which now constitute an overwhelming majority of the land mass of our planet (by a factor of at least three to one over wilderness). It is in these places that human beings are engaged in a host of practices that are profoundly impacting for the worse our global environment. And, in turn, it is in these places that we urgently need to move forward to nature by forming a better relationship with our planet. Of course, allowing our species and its many extraordinary cultures and achievements to thrive across the planet, while also doing so more harmoniously with nature, is a formidable challenge—likely the defining one of upcoming decades, perhaps even centuries. How, indeed, do we feed, house, transport, clothe, connect, and otherwise service billions of people without wreaking horrific damage on our planet? Expressed another way, how do we as a species move forward to nature, in the sense of forward to a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the planet and its nonhuman life in the future? I would argue that this is the great open question of our time and our future. Although some environmentalists may cringe at the thought, I would further suggest that this issue is in a variety of ways now more important than the conservation of wilderness. It is not that wilderness and its protection no longer matter in the forward-to-nature approach being advocated here; rather, it is only part—and indeed a proportionately rather small part—of what should matter. Yes, it is important to keep wilderness green, but so is the urgent need to devote our efforts to greening everything else. Uprooting back-to-nature thinking presents a formidable challenge. Because unchecked belief in it risks misdirecting our energies, environmentalists should be leading the effort to put this thinking in perspective. Ironically and sadly, because it has long been a cornerstone of modern environmentalism, back-tonature thinking has one of its strongest footholds with this very group, who learned it at the feet of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and a range of others. Although I intend to draw attention to recent efforts to move forward to nature—what I see as the early emergence of a forward-to-nature movement— it is still unclear exactly what form that movement and the future will take. As the novelist Milan Kundera once aptly noted, “the future is always mightier than the present.” Indeed, it has a tendency to laugh at the present. What may seem promising now may ultimately fall far short of the potential we imagine it to have. Still, the present is the only road to the future. A few decades from now, today’s nascent experiments in moving forward to nature may alternately seem laughable, the modest beginnings of a welcomed and important era, or something else entirely. Regardless of the directions that it takes, this forward-to-nature movement is largely being driven by a new generation with very different concerns and goals than their back-to-nature predecessors of previous decades. Among other places, I first saw signs of this movement in the classroom.

42

Forward to nature

Having taught works like Walden in a number of universities for well over a decade now, I have noticed students slowly cooling to early environmentalists like Thoreau. What’s more, they have also begun showing decidedly less interest in certain mainstay environmental concerns, such as wilderness and its conservation. While this might seem like a disturbing shift away from environmental values (it did at first to me), I have come to see it as a welcome move toward new ones, and my students as harbingers of a new era in environmental thinking and activism. As I noted in the Introduction, Thoreau is worrisome because he turned away from the emerging industrialization in his backyard (the largest industrial center in the U.S. at the time was 15 miles from Walden Pond in Lowell, Massachusetts) to instead live a bygone way of life on the shores of Walden Pond. As noted earlier, I see this as a cop-out. In contrast, a new generation of environmentalists is now turning toward technology, urbanization, and modernity. Such an approach is representative of a new kind of environmental thinking, which is profoundly different from what Thoreau advocated. However, this new approach does resemble Thoreau’s in one important respect, as an emerging group of environmentalists is increasingly prompted to direct and personal action, rather than being content with merely speculating on our planet’s future from the sidelines. Like Thoreau, they are engaged in a gritty experiment with real-life environmental consequences. They are not, however, as with the backto-nature movement of their parents and grandparents, following Thoreau’s lead and retreating to the last scraps of American wilderness or expending a disproportionate amount of energy on its defense. To the contrary, many are going in the opposite direction by moving to different sorts of land, which many abandoned decades ago, such as cities. For well over a decade now, a new wave of activists has literally been greening cities. New York City’s High Line and Paris’s Promenade Plantée, both greenways fashioned from abandoned railways, have become icons of this movement, as have rooftop gardens, backyard chicken coops, and vertical farms. These activists are not leaving the city for nature; they are bringing nature to the city, as the blended rural–urban lifestyle growing there is impacting a broad range of everyday practices. This movement is not limited to cities, but increasingly includes suburbs as well, where lawns are being replaced by vegetable gardens and municipal ordinances are being rewritten to allow livestock, like goats and sheep, to graze among swimming pools and tennis courts. Although the growth of urban and suburban farming may seem trivial, even quirky and amusing, in some sense this movement overturns over 5000 years of thinking. Beginning with the very first works of Western literature, country and city (and, by extension, nature and culture) have been repeatedly imagined as not only mutually exclusive, but in opposition. In recent centuries, the country has generally been preferred, the city eschewed. This attitude is alive and well in Thoreau, who, distressed by the growth of urban and industrial modernity at Lowell and elsewhere, fled to what he imagined to be its opposite: the closest thing to nature he could find. Now,

Turning toward the future

43

however, a new wave of environmental activists is increasingly shifting its attention from nature untouched by culture, such as the wilderness of national parks and tropical rainforests (which preoccupied many activists throughout the 20th century, sometimes to the exclusion of nearly everything else), to a vision of culture infused with nature—the merging of those ancient opposites: country and city. Cities, among the most developed of all the places that human beings inhabit, are becoming test beds for the idea that culture can be far more natural than we ever imagined. Thanks to works by Edward Glaeser, David Owen, and others, the idea of a “green metropolis” (Owen’s phrase) no longer sounds like a contradiction. The formidable challenge is to green cities even further, which, as Glaeser and Owen argue, are already in many respects far more environmentally benign than suburbs and even most rural areas. Although at first glance counterintuitive, they compellingly argue that life in Manhattan is far greener than in Wyoming in a variety of ways (we will be taking up this issue in detail in Chapter 4). The move toward cities and away from wilderness is by no means the only characteristic of forward-to-nature thinking. It does, however, reveal key features of the approach and helps underscore how it is different from its back-tonature predecessors. The notion that cities can be green and natural may seem counterintuitive, debatable, or just plain wrong. It certainly may have seemed so to earlier activists, like Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, who two decades ago baldly declared that civilization inescapably creates a rift between human beings and nature. His solution, which was among the most radical offered by his generation of activists, was to call for the protection of wilderness by nearly any means necessary—even if it required acts of eco-sabotage—from human development. By contrast, this new group of activists is focused on areas already developed and inhabited by human beings, which cover far more of the earth’s surface than the remaining remnants of wilderness. If we hope to save the planet, which is now largely covered by cities, suburbs, farms, factories, and all sorts of other human works and projects, we need to turn our attention and energies to these places. This shift in focus reveals just how much environmental activism is changing. Eco-sabotage (and more benign tactics deployed by moderate back-to-nature environmentalists) aimed at thwarting and checking human encroachment into wilderness is being supplanted by the eco-nurturing of areas that are already developed. This process of re-greening what we have spent centuries un-greening could, conceivably, take a back-to-nature turn, as efforts could be made to return these areas to their pre-inhabited state. However, these projects are frequently (and fascinatingly, I think) moving in the opposite direction: not back to nature, but forward to it.

44

Forward to nature

For example, the vision that Joshua David and Robert Hammond had for New York’s High Line in the late 1990s did not involve tearing down the mile and a half of elevated rail line so that it could go “back to nature” (i.e. so that the land on which it rested could be returned to a state comparable to before people, or at least Europeans, inhabited Manhattan Island). While this may have been the fantasy of a previous generation of back-to-nature environmentalists, David and Hammond accepted the existence of the railway—and more generally, and arguably far more importantly, accepted the fact that people inhabited the place and made their presence known through works like the rail line—and then set about making plans to green it. In contrast to its former rusting and decaying state, the High Line is now a far more “natural” place, as it has become a verdant, richly planted urban park snaking through downtown Manhattan. However, because it is a different sort of natural place than it was a few hundred years ago, some people might both object to calling it “natural” at all and perhaps even object to seeing its rehabilitation as a worthy and important environmental goal. Regarding it not being “natural,” this perception, which is related to back-tonature thinking, is often rooted in the aforementioned understanding of nature as separate and apart from human involvement. Unfortunately, this understanding and the road it sets us on does not lead to a practical environmental goal, but rather a dead end, as the only way to leave nature as nature in this sense is to remove people from the picture altogether. This radical suggestion has, in fact, been proposed by certain environmentalists, such as the aforementioned eco-sabotage advocate Dave Foreman: “If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But … phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” In 2007 Alan Weisman published The World Without Us, which provided a protracted vision of how the planet would go back to nature if human beings indeed became extinct. In 500 years or so, by Weisman’s reckoning, residential neighborhoods would become forests and nature would be well on its way to returning. In many respects, Weisman penned the ultimate back-to-nature fantasy. This radical back-to-nature approach, which imagines going back to a time before there were human beings, and then envisions that past as the future, will strike most people as obviously impractical, as it takes us out of the picture. Still, I am surprised by the number of people that I meet who nonetheless believe that such a radical, global return to a humanless nature would be the only true way to right the many environmental wrongs that our species has wrought. Realizing that “voluntary human extinction” is not much of an option, many people instead postulate some sort of “baseline” (a concept borrowed from biology), where human beings are indeed present, though only marginally so and with a minimal environmental footprint. In the case of Manhattan, to get back to nature in this sense, an obvious target baseline would be sometime prior to 1524, when the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano first laid European eyes on the island.

Turning toward the future

45

In contrast, the vision that David and Hammond had for the High Line didn’t look back. Not to 1524, not even to before ice-age people first crossed into North America and made their way down to the Hudson River Valley. Instead, the pair looked decidedly forward to making it a greener place. As to what form it would take, the past offered only modest help, as elevated railways were obviously not part of Manhattan’s pre-Columbian landscape. Without the past to guide them, a bold challenge presented itself. How do we imagine an environmentally better future without looking back to a time now past and lost as our guide? This question, far bigger than the greening of the High Line, is, as far as I am concerned (and as I will argue throughout this book), one of the most important presently facing humanity. Of course, glances over the shoulder and to the past are certainly helpful. Considering what sort of plants once thrived in the High Line’s bioregion so that they might be reincorporated into the new landscape using the tools of restoration ecology is certainly useful. However, the formidable challenge of crafting a new relationship to nature awaits anyone hoping to succeed at moving forward to nature. Incidentally, I am not sure if the High Line’s David and Hammond initially considered themselves environmentalists. Certainly, their concerns are very different from those of activists of a generation ago. Still, even though their work manifests little interest in back-to-nature thinking, they envision and work toward bringing about an environmentally better world. To me, that certainly qualifies them as environmentalists. As the forward-to-nature movement continues to build momentum, the iconic image of environmental activists attempting to halt development and keep wilderness green by chaining themselves to trees could be replaced by one of a different type of activist working tirelessly to re-green the rest of the planet. Re-greening projects like Manhattan’s High Line are useful examples of recent efforts to move forward, rather than back, to nature. However, forwardto-nature thinking is hardly new. It played a major part in the birth of the modern American environmental movement in the 1960s and, as incredible as it may sound, the emergence of modernity 400 years ago. Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring arguably played a more influential role in igniting the modern environmental movement than any other work. For our present purposes, what is most interesting to note about this milestone book is that it ends, as we saw in the previous chapter, by optimistically looking forward to nature made better through the careful application of science, rather than rejecting scientific intervention. Consequently, as plant pathologist Pamela Ronald has recently argued, Carson may well have enthusiastically embraced genetically engineered crops. Is Ronald’s conclusion surprising? Does it seem odd? Simply wrong? After all, wasn’t Carson urging us to go back to a time before human beings began meddling with the workings of nature by, for example, categorically rejecting pesticides derived from petrochemicals and instead going organic? In fact, Carson makes no such suggestion. Although Silent Spring was written to draw attention

46

Forward to nature

to the unchecked, wholesale use of pesticides (principally DDT), it builds to a powerful and altogether moving conclusion that affirms Carson’s faith in science, technology, and our ability to move forward to nature. Specifically, the book ends with the hope that our understanding of biology would one day increase to the point where biotic technology would give us greater control over plants and pests alike, which is why Ronald argues that Carson would have likely endorsed genetically engineered plants. It is testament to the astonishing persistence and success of back-to-nature thinking that Carson’s concluding, core message has largely been written over—indeed reversed. Now, simplistically heeding her warning regarding the dangers associated with pesticides, consumers hunt through grocer’s aisles looking for “natural” products, such as organically raised heirloom fruits and vegetables, that, like some sort of living fossils, seem to somehow hold the promise of returning us to a time before everything went horribly wrong environmentally. In contrast, if Carson were alive today she would arguably be investigating the genetically modified offerings. Carson was hardly the first person to advance forward-to-nature thinking. While the idea has been sporadically appearing for thousands of years, voiced by scores of individuals, 400 years ago it burst on the scene in a strikingly new and powerful form. It not only inaugurated a new way of looking at the relationship that human beings have toward the environment, but also launched one of the most influential movements in world history. In many ways, it gave birth to modernity. Looking back on human history, Francis Bacon found little to suggest that life was better in the past than his own time. Writing around 1600, the height of the Renaissance in England, Bacon was Shakespeare’s contemporary. Even at its supposed apex with the ancient Greeks and Romans, who were wildly revered in Bacon’s time, the knowledge possessed by past cultures seemed (as I have argued elsewhere) downright childish to him. Because Renaissance artisans, Gutenberg being a prime example, had far outstripped anything previously achieved, Bacon saw his era as far superior to the past and looked forward to a future when technologically savvy human beings could 1) understand, 2) duplicate, and 3) surpass anything achieved by nature. Not only did Bacon hope that humanity would one day have the ability to best nature within its power, he believed that our primary mission should be to attempt this astonishingly ambitious goal. And he was confident that we could. Emerging from a world where religion, alchemy, folklore, superstition, astrology, and myth had more influence than science, and where technology was altogether crude by modern standards, this was an outlandishly optimistic suggestion. It is surprising that anyone took Bacon seriously. And yet, just a few decades after his death, the British Royal Society, which is still one of the premier scientific organizations in the world, was in part formed out of Bacon’s conviction that nature could be improved upon. Bacon, who has since been christened the “father of modern science,” was and still is a hero to this group.

Turning toward the future

47

If Bacon were alive today, it is likely that he would look askew at works such as Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Given his affection for terse aphorisms, he may well have abruptly answered Diamond’s title question with a simple “Not much.” In order to effect a rupture with the past, Bacon repeatedly undermined the reverence and nostalgia that we feel for it. To individuals committed to back-to-nature thinking and the belief that “old ways” are very often better, such forward-tonature thinking can be jarring. Bacon was well aware of this. That was, however, the point. He wanted to shake us free of what he saw as a strange and dangerous fetish that we have for the past, which he believed was inferior in most ways to the present, let alone the future that he wistfully imagined as containing and defined by a new nature, one shaped by human hands. It is worth stopping to consider the world as imagined in one of two ways: 1) Created as perfection (as in the biblical account of Eden), which means that something must have gone wrong somewhere along the way, as the world today is, in so very many ways, no longer perfect, or 2) constantly evolving, in which case the world is actually moving forward. Though not just on an environmental register, 400 years ago Europeans were faced with a choice regarding these two worldviews. This dilemma is still echoed today in the two ways that we refer to this era, either as the “Renaissance” or the “early modern” period. Although these two terms are often used interchangeably, they not only represent two very different views of the period, but two entirely different worldviews that are still with us today. “Renaissance,” which means to be born again, defines the period as a revival of the arts and sciences of antiquity, specifically of the Greeks and Romans, which were generally highly regarded in the period. “Early modern” is a characterization that can only be made from the vantage point of a later period, modernity. In calling this period early modern, we define it not in terms of the past, but rather the future: the early beginning of what would become our modern world. For example, Gutenberg’s printing press, which came on the scene in 1450, was entirely new in the West, as nothing like it existed in antiquity. Hence it is not a Renaissance object. However, as we now know that it was the humble beginning of the print culture that has animated our world ever since, it is an excellent icon of the early modern period. Although the first writers in this period, such as the Italian poet Petrarch, had their eyes firmly on the past, by Shakespeare’s time thinkers like Francis Bacon were looking back on the past with contempt: “One must also speak plainly about usefulness, and say that the wisdom which we have drawn in particular from the Greeks seems to be a kind of childish stage of science, and to have the child’s characteristic of being all too ready to talk, but too weak and immature to produce anything.” Rejecting the past, Bacon turned his sights to the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bacon has had his share of detractors over the years. Especially in the second half of the 20th century (although their roots reach back to 19th-century texts like Frankenstein and even before), a range of works drew

48

Forward to nature

attention to the fact that the revolution that Bacon helped inaugurate, which helped foster the growth of technological modernity, has had horrific consequences, many of them environmental. These arguments often go hand in hand with back-tonature thinking, as the past is frequently offered as an alternative to the scientific and technological present and imagined future that are being railed against. Ironically, Silent Spring was, at least environmentally, one of the most influential of these works, even though it repeatedly eschewed a back-to-nature approach. Opening with the image of a healthy and pleasant pastoral scene, complete with a melodious background of bird song, Carson invites us to witness its death. What’s left is a barren, silent landscape devoid of life. (Carson’s title was, incidentally, inspired by a poem by John Keats poignantly describing a similarly desolate scene where “the sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.”) The villain of Carson’s story, the killer of nature, is soon revealed to be the unchecked use of petrochemical-based pesticides. To an American public raised on the belief that science and technology were delivering on their promise of a better life, Carson’s 1962 message was a bombshell, forever shattering a naive faith in science for many. In part because it was so popular (it was serialized in The New Yorker and quickly made the New York Times best-seller list) and in part because of an emerging counterculture increasingly cynical of the status quo, Silent Spring helped encourage a general skepticism of science and technology on environmental grounds. When I noted that it was “ironic” that Silent Spring drew into question the scientific revolution that Bacon helped inaugurate on environmental grounds, I did so partly because Carson was, as noted above, a staunch supporter of the sciences (although not a research scientist herself, with a Master’s degree in zoology, her scientific training and knowledge are in abundant evidence throughout Silent Spring) and partly because the book immediately mobilized the sciences to help with the situation. Carson no doubt found the intervention of research scientists reassuring, as she repeatedly argued that science offered our best hope for the future. Rejecting it would be a case of throwing the baby out with the polluted bathwater to which she was drawing attention. The ink was not yet dry on Silent Spring (in fact, in some sense it was not yet wet, as the actual book was still a month away from publication, though excerpts had already appeared in The New Yorker) when President Kennedy was asked in a press conference on August 29, 1962, if the Public Health Service or the Department of Agriculture were looking into the dangers associated with DDT and other pesticides. He replied that “They already are. I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.” Less than a year later, the President’s Science Advisory Committee released a report on “The Use of Pesticides” that supported Carson’s argument and helped quell attacks on the grounds that her findings and science were flawed. Although this was hardly the first time that scientists had been enlisted to help in the cause of environmentalism, it underscored the major role they were increasingly playing in attempting to better our environmental situation. As Kennedy

Turning toward the future

49

noted, they were already mobilized. The Clean Air Act of 1963, the Clean Water Act of 1965, the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, and similar initiatives were all underpinned by studies provided by research scientists. The Clean Air Act went further by not just undertaking a study of the problem, but also authorizing research into ways of minimizing air pollution. These efforts came together in 1970 with the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Silent Spring was only made possible because it was buttressed by scores of findings that had been appearing throughout the 1950s and early 1960s in specialized science journals. Carson, trained as a scientist and, with decades of experience as an award-winning author, was ideally positioned to interpret and take this message to the public. Still, it was scientists who were there first, discovering what Carson explained to everyone else. Of course, modern science, especially applied science as technology, has certainly created its share of environmental problems, but again consider the example of Silent Spring. What made Carson’s argument so persuasive was that it was thoroughly informed by a painstaking, scientific analysis of the impact that pesticides had on living organisms. To Carson, science provided the best way of understanding the problem. Although obviously important, science does not offer the only road leading forward to nature. The following chapter (as well as the second half of this book) will explore another avenue, which involves shifts in our beliefs and practices. Interestingly, Thoreau, both in his writings and through his example, encouraged us to go forward to nature by going down this road. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, he also ironically helped initiate the largest back-to-nature movement in history. Involving hundreds of millions of people, this movement quite unexpectedly had horrific environmental consequences when all these individuals literally moved out (which they saw as back) to nature.

3 FORWARD TO NATURE, AWAY FROM NATURE

What about Thoreau? Are we to conclude that he has nothing of value for us today? There are two ways that Thoreau is playing a role in setting the stage for forward-to-nature environmentalism, one eminently practical, the other less so, though arguably easily as important. Let’s start with the former. After discussing both, we can take up Thoreau’s more worrisome legacy—his particular way of urging us to return to nature. Thoreau famously reduced one of Walden’s core messages to a two-word imperative: “simplify, simplify.” Distressed by his neighbors, who even in the 1850s were building increasingly lavish houses, Thoreau pondered what would be the simplest dwelling possible for a single person. His answer? A wooden version of a singleperson tent, with a floor just big enough for a bedroll. To keep things simple from the start, he proposed recycling a used railway storage box, which could be purchased at the time for a dollar, for the purpose. Ultimately, he settled on a larger structure, which at 150 square feet may seem lavish by comparison but is nevertheless about the size of an average garden shed (which his cabin at Walden Pond resembled). When Thoreau turned his attention to clothing, he railed against the fashion industry, which even then was centered in Paris, for encouraging us to buy into fleeting trends: “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” Because “every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new,” clothing was (as it is even more today) being discarded as unfashionable when it was still quite usable. To simplify things, Thoreau suggested not giving in to the whims of fashion. Instead, own just a few pieces of sturdy clothing and, for good measure, “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” With respect to food, Thoreau made repeated appeals for the simplicity of vegetarianism: “I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.” As early as

Forward to nature, away from nature

51

Walden, he also rejected imported foodstuffs, like coffee and tea. His last work, unpublished in his lifetime, was a celebration of local and seasonal wild fruit, which he extolled as superior to their imported counterparts, such as oranges and bananas that were being shipped into U.S. ports (like nearby Boston) by way of sailing ships. In general, though he was certainly given to his share of philosophical musing, throughout his life Thoreau repeatedly drew his (and our) attention to the most basic of day-to-day needs, which, he provocatively argued, can be satisfied far more simply than we usually imagine. I often ask students to imagine what Thoreau’s Walden experiment would have been like had it not been conducted in its semi-wilderness setting, but an urban one instead. His profound aesthetic appreciation of the scene (discussed below) would, of course, be radically altered, but, in wholly practical terms, what would such a lifestyle be like? When I first started asking this question some years ago, students generally found it less interesting then Thoreau’s actual experience. Today, conversely, a generation of students skeptical of Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond is nonetheless often intrigued by the challenge of imagining a life of urban simplicity. This is hardly surprising: in a variety of different places, in a range of different ways, experiments of this sort are now actually being made. What’s more, these are not isolated and quirky, but in many instances are mainstream efforts that are offered as models for us all. In 2012, spearheaded by then Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City launched its adAPT NYC pilot housing program to encourage microapartments by fostering a competition for real-estate developers. In 2013, the winning design was announced, which consisted of a modular building with 55 units with floor plans between 250 and 370 square feet each. Although this might seem a little large when compared to Thoreau’s cabin, keep in mind that these units have bathrooms and full kitchens, which Thoreau lacked. Even so, as the larger apartments can be home to a couple, at 185 square feet per person these units are surprisingly close to Thoreau’s ideal size for domestic simplicity. New York is not alone as a test bed for this movement, as Boston, San Francisco, and other cities are adapting zoning for apartments as small as 220 square feet each. Housing was, of course, only part of Thoreau’s drive for simplicity. In 2012, Elizabeth Cline’s Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion succeeded at shocking Americans with the statistic that we annually buy about 20 billion garments, which works out to a staggering average of 64 items per year for each man, woman, and child in the U.S. (not including incidentals like underwear and socks). As Cline makes clear, this has profound environmental implications: “World fiber production is now 82 million tons, which requires 145 million tons of coal and somewhere between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion gallons of water to produce.” Cline proposes and personally enacts an alternative that would have made Thoreau proud: buy fewer, less trendy items, though of higher quality and responsibly sourced and made, and

52

Forward to nature

learn how to mend them as they wear. Even better, shop secondhand, and, if you have the time and are willing to learn how, make and upcycle your own clothing. Michael Pollan’s message, delivered in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and elsewhere, dovetails with Thoreau’s thinking insofar as both writers celebrate the importance and simplicity of local, seasonal food. However, in his first book, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Pollan argued that Thoreau’s affinity for wilderness subverted his efforts at gardening at Walden Pond. Since Thoreau believed that weeds had as much right to his garden plot as did the beans that he planted, and that woodchucks and birds were equally deserving of the harvest, his garden ultimately failed. Hence, although Pollan began, by his own admission, as “a child of Thoreau,” he largely shifted his attention and concern from relatively pristine environments, like Thoreau’s Walden Pond, to places responsibly shaped by human beings, like urban farms and his own lovingly tended vegetable garden. Fifteen years later in 2006, realizing that not everyone can be a gardener, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan focused on encouraging us—regardless of where we live—to understand and buy local and responsibly grown seasonal food. Finally, 2009 saw the release of the book by (as well as a documentary on) the “No Impact Man”: Colin Beavan, who, with his wife and baby daughter, attempted to live for one year: without making any net impact on the environment. Ultimately, this meant we did our best to create no trash (so no take-out food), cause no carbon dioxide emissions (so no driving or flying), pour no toxins in the water (so no laundry detergent), buy no produce from distant lands (so no New Zealand fruit). Not to mention: no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no buying anything new. Although Thoreau spent two years living on the shores of Walden Pond, Beavan’s one-year experiment in an apartment building in the middle of New York City is in the spirit of the Walden project. More recently, a number of articles, books, and films (such as Minimalism, A Documentary) have advocated for a “minimalist” lifestyle. It is not coincidental, I think, that these recent efforts for simpler, more environmentally benign lives and lifestyles are either centered in cities or were proposed by city-based authors. This is at once a radical departure from Thoreau’s preoccupation with wilderness and an endorsement of his central prescription to simplify our lives, though now taken in an urban setting. Thoreau must either be smiling or rolling in his grave. We should, however, be careful to not give Thoreau too much credit for the idea that we need to reconsider our overly complex lives, as he was hardly the first person to make the suggestion. As we have seen with pastoral art, the imagined simplicity of rural life has been offered as an ideal in Western literature for thousands of years. This

Forward to nature, away from nature

53

tradition is not remotely limited to the West. Kamo no Chōmei, a 13th-century Japanese poet, wrote The Ten Foot Square Hut about his reclusive life in a rural house of his own making, which, at 10 x 10 feet, was even smaller than Thoreau’s cabin. Chōmei is, in fact, just one of many writers across the globe that over the centuries have praised the simple life of the rural hermit. Moreover, although Thoreau was certainly an original thinker, a range of writers directly influenced his preoccupation with simplicity. In the beginning of the 17th century, Ben Jonson, who Thoreau references in Walden, wrote the poem “To Penshurst” extolling the simple life. Jonson took the opportunity of the poem to compare a relatively modest country house to increasingly fashionable, but, as he argued, environmentally disastrous, spacious and sprawling trophy houses (the McMansions of their day), which were already becoming a feature of the landscape in Shakespeare’s England. Three decades later, Sir John Denham, in one of the most popular poems of the 17th century, laid out the underlying rational for Walden’s critique of consumerism and complexity by suggesting that “men like Ants / Toil to prevent imaginary wants; / Yet all in vain, increasing with their store, / Their vast desires, but make their wants the more.” Imagining that we need a range of possessions in order to have a good life (something marketers expend enormous energy encouraging us to do), we labor to acquire them, only to realize that we are still not satisfied, so we begin again the process of laboring to acquire still more. The more we want, the more we work, the more we get, the more we want … and so forth. The solution to this vicious cycle is to simplify. What separates Thoreau from Jonson and Denham is that he took this maxim to heart and acted on it. Although modest when compared to the McMansions of the day, the house at the Penshurst estate is still much larger than most modern American homes. Similarly, Denham’s day job (which supported his poetic career) was Surveyor of the King’s Works, which entailed his overseeing the construction of opulent royal castles and residences. In response to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitude of Jonson, Denham, and others, Thoreau provocatively synthesized theory and practice by drawing attention to the deep significance, environmental and otherwise, of everyday practices. From the outside, Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond may seem stoic and one of privation. Thoreau, however, countered that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” because they are caught in the never-ending cycle of trying to satisfy all those “imaginary wants” that Denham railed against. Freed of this endless and ultimately unsatisfying burden, Thoreau argued that he was living a better, more authentic life. And that he was happier. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” While living a simplified life can have significant and positive implications for the planet, Thoreau suggests that it can also change each of our lives for the better. Elizabeth Cline begins Overdressed by recounting the moment of realization that gave birth to the book, when she impulsively purchased seven pairs of

54

Forward to nature

shoes that were on sale for seven dollars for each. On realizing that there was something worrisome about both her desire to do so and the global economy that made such cheap products available, Cline, like Thoreau, set out to better understand herself and the system. Although Thoreau is nowhere mentioned in Overdressed, Cline ultimately embarks on a personal mission to simplify her life, which, in a bargain too good to pass up, made her life (at least with respect to her relationship to clothing) better. It is clear that, in order to stave off climate change, those of us in the developed world need to reduce our environmental footprints by consuming less (which, in turn, will result in fewer by-products of consumption, like atmospheric CO2 and methane). While this might, at first hearing, suggest that we need to accept a lower standard of living, Thoreau’s epiphany, now shared by Cline and others, is that this, quite the contrary, could result in better lives for us all. As far as I am concerned, Thoreau’s imperative to simplify, and the realization that it can have positive benefits for both the planet and each of us personally, is one of his two great legacies for the 21st century. Although somewhat less tangible, the other is no less important. An astute student once observed to me that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring would not have been possible without Thoreau and the Romantic poets, who are in many ways his British counterparts. What did she mean by this? For Silent Spring to succeed at urging us to undertake steps to preserve the environment, we first need to care about it. As the U.S. and England were among the first technologically modern countries on the planet, a range of writers and artists, Thoreau among them, responded by celebrating what was receding across the globe: areas still relatively untouched by modernity and industrialization. They passionately and repeatedly argued that wild places, like forests and mountains, were sublime and precious, worth preserving at nearly any cost. In order to understand the significance of what these writers and artists did, it is important to realize that forest and mountains were not always so favorably imagined. For example, in medieval England forests were generally thought of as dark and foreboding, the home of criminals, where people like Robin Hood were to be found. Of course, Robin Hood was, at least in modern versions of the story, a well-intentioned criminal, but his story emerges from an era when forests were indeed dangerous places inhabited by people outside the reach of law. Moreover, as medieval England had not yet eradicated its wolf population (something it did not do until Shakespeare’s era), there was a very real chance of being attacked in forests by what became the stuff of fairy tales: big, bad wolves. While it is unfair to characterize them as inherently bad, there were indeed packs of wolves in medieval England that occasionally attacked people. Consequently, if we had lived in medieval Europe, our view of forests would likely be very different than they are today. Instead of beautiful and inviting, we would likely have seen them as foreboding and dangerous, justifiably a source of great anxiety.

Forward to nature, away from nature

55

This is not to say that all of nature was frightening. To the contrary, picturesque scenes of pastures with shepherds leisurely tending their sheep, or farmers working fertile, bucolic fields, had long been a favorite of poets and artists. However, these were places where human beings had significantly modified the environment, in the process making it safe and inviting. This was not the case for large tracts of forested land. Mountains were similarly worrisome in medieval (and even Renaissance) Europe. When British writer John Evelyn encountered the Alps while traveling in the second half of the 17th century, he described them in all earnestness as “strange, horrid, and fearful crags.” Evelyn’s view was pretty typical for his time. However, two centuries later, John Muir would see mountains entirely differently. Observing Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States and the closest thing that we have to the Alps, Muir famously noted that “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” This new, favorable view of mountains was consolidating throughout the 19th century, thanks, in part, to Thoreau and the Romantic poets from a generation before Muir, who romanticized even dangerous crags and peaks, such as William Wordsworth in The Prelude, Percy Bysshe Shelley in his magnificent poem celebrating the highest mountain in the Alps, “Mont Blanc,” and Thoreau in a variety of texts. Muir offered a provocative explanation for the change in perspective. With the growth of modernity and the loss of wild places across the continent, “overcivilized people” (as he calls them) were no longer seeing forests and mountains as foreboding and dangerous, but instead, as inviting and renewing, the last enclave of nature—a sort of antidote for modernity. Muir was not the first to make this assessment. A generation before Muir, Thoreau diagnosed the affliction and personally acted on it by way of his Walden experiment. Flash forward to 1962, when Silent Spring first appeared, and we find the influence of the Romantic poets alive, well, and incredibility pervasive. You need not have read Thoreau or Wordsworth to have felt their influence in 1962 (or even today), as their writing and the love of nature it fostered has been widely influential. A clear indication of this fact is that Muir’s words ring true with us: “that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” Consequently, as my student argued, Silent Spring would, in some sense, not have been possible (or at least not as successful) without Thoreau and the Romantic poets teaching us—even now, over 150 years later—the importance of not only valuing, but also preserving and caring for mountains and forests. Speaking to an audience that she knew valued nature, Carson was able to passionately argue for its preservation. Since DDT was principally of danger to

56

Forward to nature

birds and animals, and only secondarily to human beings, Carson’s call to reconsider its indiscriminate use hinged on our caring about wilderness and the nonhuman beings that lived there, rather than just our own interests. Had we never come to value wilderness to the degree encouraged by Thoreau and others, Carson’s message, and perhaps that of the modern environmental movement more generally, may have fallen on indifferent ears. Nonetheless, it is provocative, and maybe even a little shocking, to realize that what we see when we look at a forest or mountain is, to some extent, culturally constructed. In this case, it was put together over a century ago by a range of writers and artists. Does this mean that these feelings are somehow inferior or less than legitimate? Not at all. To the contrary, they are, at least as far as I am concerned, sincere, legitimate, and altogether appropriate responses to what is now happening environmentally across the globe. Indeed, such feelings often emerge in response to the fact that forests and mountains are increasingly endangered. I explored this idea (the European emergence of environmental consciousness) in some detail in a book on pastoral literature. Allow me to briefly explain by way of an example. Imagine a dear friend, someone with whom you are very close. Somewhat paradoxically, the very fact that you are so close can obscure the friendship and its importance. Because you know them so well, and perhaps see them so often, it is easy to take them for granted and lose sight of the friendship. However, if you were at risk of losing them, perhaps to illness or for some other reason, the friendship would likely suddenly come into sharp focus, as you realized just how much they mean to you. Something similar occurred in England in response to the wholesale loss of landscape that had formerly been relatively pristine, which happened even before the growth of technological modernity in places like London’s surroundings. Because, as previously noted, London’s population grew as much as tenfold from year 1500 to 1700 by some estimates, the landscape surrounding Shakespeare’s London was dramatically being transformed, the result of early modern suburban sprawl (which Ben Jonson railed against in “To Penshurst”) and the cutting of forests for fuel. When this happened, suddenly that landscape came into focus for a number of individuals, becoming valuable at the very moment of its endangerment, just like the friend that you see as if for the first time when you learn that they may become lost to you. In many respects, this was, as I have argued, the harbinger of the present condition of modernity with respect to the environment, as a distinctly modern environmental consciousness emerged in these individuals. When people began to deeply feel this sense of loss, which became more and more common over the next two centuries, they set off for the countryside in search of landscape not yet touched by soaring population growth and industrialization. In England, Wordsworth went to the Lake District. In the United States, Thoreau to Walden Pond and Muir to the Yosemite Valley and elsewhere.

Forward to nature, away from nature

57

In many ways, it is not too strong to say that these individuals saw nature for the first time, at least nature as we have come to understand it today. Because some of them were artists and writers, and a few true masters at conveying what they saw, they helped us see, through their eyes, nature. From this new vantage point, they were able to at once see the immense value of forests and mountains (something that previous generations had not seen, at least in the same way), yet they also saw, with crystal clarity, that these places were in grave danger. Consequently, Wordsworth fought to keep a rail line from reaching the Lake District. Those who followed him, like writer Beatrix Potter, fought to preserve the whole district from development. We are in much the same situation today, as our vantage point allows us to see the enormous value of nature. Generalizing this sense of environmental consciousness, we are also now in a position to see the value of our entire planet. As far as I am concerned, this is the most enlightened of environmental thinking, as it is true global environmental consciousness. However, like Silent Spring and the modern environmental movement, such global environmental thinking may well have not arisen, at least when it did, in the way it did, without Thoreau and thinkers like him. Consequently, although we may be critical of Thoreau’s turn away from places like Lowell, Massachusetts, and the technological modernity they represented, we should not forget his legacy: promoting environmental consciousness, which, thankfully, still endures today. The danger in the thinking that Thoreau and Wordsworth fostered is that they acted upon it. Appreciating nature is one thing, colonizing it another. This may seem like a harsh statement to make in connection with Thoreau and Wordsworth, as their respective lives at Walden Pond and the village of Grasmere in England’s Lake District had relatively small environmental footprints. However, imagine thousands of converts (each with borrowed axe in hand, which is how Thoreau arrived there), all converging on the 335 wooded acres that is now the Walden Pond State Reservation. Once they cleared thousands of lots for their cabins, Walden Wood would no longer be a wood. In some sense, this was the situation that Wordsworth faced with the aforementioned rail line. With the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which he wrote with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge shortly before he moved to the picturesque Lake District, Wordsworth began a somewhat spotty poetic career that nonetheless culminated in his becoming England’s Poet Laureate in 1843. Short of cash early in his career (this was likely his primary motivation), in 1810 he published a guidebook for travelers to the district, fittingly titled Guide to the Lakes. Thanks in part to the Guide and his poetry that romanticized the area—and, of course, thanks also in no small measure to the intense beauty of the region—the tourist industry in the Lake District was booming by the 1840s, prompting a passenger rail line to the district to be proposed. Although Wordsworth protested its development, including writing an impassioned poem for a local newspaper in which he asked “is then no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?” the Windermere line opened in 1847.

58

Forward to nature

As Wordsworth came to realize, fostering an appreciation of nature can have worrisome consequences when enacted en masse. This became especially clear in the U.S., where a huge swath of the country was radically reshaped by this appreciation in the past 150 years. Thoreau and Wordsworth did not emerge from a vacuum. Beginning as early as the second half of the 17th century, writers like John Milton and Andrew Marvell began celebrating nature in ways that anticipated the Romantic poets. This continued into the 18th century with works like James Thompson’s milestone poem The Seasons. The fascination with wilderness soon made its way to America. In literature, Thoreau’s friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, provided something of a manifesto for the transcendentalist movement that celebrated wilderness with his aptly and pithily titled essay “Nature.” A decade earlier, the Hudson River School, arguably America’s first homegrown school of painting, began with Thomas Cole’s striking landscapes of New York’s Catskill Mountains. By the time Thoreau was setting up house on the shores of Walden Pond in the mid-1840s, America had a thriving crop of artists and writers celebrating nature and urging its enjoyment. Two of them are especially important to our story. In 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing published A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, a well-received and influential book that became America’s first systematic and scientific treatment of landscape design. Downing soon became editor of The Horticulturist magazine in 1845, which celebrated rural life in ways that coincided with what Thoreau was imagining at about the same time at Walden Pond. In an 1848 article for the magazine, he noted, in words that could have been written by Thoreau, that “nature and domestic life are better than society and the manners of towns. Hence all sensible men gladly escape, earlier or later, and partially or wholly, from the turmoil of the cities.” During a trip to England, Downing encountered an exhibition of landscape watercolors by Calvert Vaux, whom Downing encouraged to come to the U.S. to work with him on designing—rather than just painting—landscapes. The pair went on to design, among others, the grounds for both the White House and the Smithsonian Institution. They also became two of the most important early architects of the American suburbs, which they tirelessly praised and promoted, and which Vaux later directly helped develop on the outskirts of New York, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere. In Walden, Thoreau famously recounted how the whistle of a steam locomotive repeatedly intruded on his rural retreat. As we have seen, in the previous decade locomotives also proved vexing to Wordsworth. Downing, however, embraced what Thoreau and Wordsworth feared. Because early mass ground transit had been largely limited to slow and uncomfortable horse-drawn omnibuses (which could carry as many as 18 passengers), commuting in and out of cities like New York and Boston on a daily basis was not practical. However, realizing that passenger rail lines could “do some duty for the Beautiful, as well as the Useful,” by transporting not just cargo, but also people to picturesque

Forward to nature, away from nature

59

communities outside the city, Downing argued that “hundreds and thousands, formerly obliged to live in the crowded streets of cities, now find themselves able to enjoy a country cottage, several miles distant—the old notions of time and space being half annihilated.” In The Horticulturist and a number of books, Downing set about selling America on his suburban vision, which was inspired, like Thoreau, by a celebration of nature and rural life. As the preeminent historian in the field, Kenneth Jackson, succinctly notes, Downing soon became the “most influential single individual in translating the rural ideal into a suburban ideal.” Influenced by English country estates, Downing imagined sweeping suburban properties, of at least five acres, each easily reached by rail from city centers. Although he ultimately downsized the size of the suburban estates he imagined (and his successors reduced them even further), Downing’s vision of sprawling, opulent suburbs where Americans lived like Europe’s country gentry proved immensely appealing. As one effusive owner of a Downing-inspired “estate” noted, “the fortunate purchaser of two or three acres … may buy a country seat that challenges comparison with the Duke of Devonshire’s.” Although Downing prematurely died in 1852, his partner Vaux continued his work of turning the love of nature espoused by Romantic poets into a suburban reality. Married to the sister of Jervis McEntee, a painter of the Hudson River School, Vaux had a deep love of rural locales, which he believed was shared by most people living in his era: “almost every American has a … love for ‘the country.’ This love appears intuitive, and the possibility of ease and a country place or suburban cottage, large or small, is a vision that gives zest to the labors of industrious thousands.” In his 1857 Villas and Cottages, Vaux cited and took up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s challenge (from his now famous 1841 essay on “Self-Reliance”) of imagining a distinctly American house that would respond to the needs of its climate, soil, and people. Thoreau, incidentally, had responded to the same challenge a decade before, which prompted his Walden experiment. Downsizing Downing’s vision of sprawling country estates, in Villas and Cottages Vaux celebrates 39 relatively modest houses built in the Hudson River Valley in the 1850s that, he argued, met Emerson’s challenge. As one might imagine, Thoreau’s cabin was a fraction of the size of these suburban houses. Thanks to Downing, Vaux, and others, by the 1850s, as historian Jackson notes, “with an exploding urban population and new transit modes that made commuting feasible, the stage was set for the planning of the suburb as a unit, as a romantic community in harmony with nature.” This was the same decade that saw the publication of Walden, with its own vision of romantic harmony with nature. While it’s important to note the differences between Thoreau’s Walden experiment and the mass exodus from America’s cities to their suburbs that began in the same era (Thoreau’s imperative to simplify being a prime difference, though Vaux also celebrated the simple life on a grander scale), they both shared a vision of the Romantic dream of the good life as a country one.

60

Forward to nature

A few years after Downing’s death, Vaux joined with a new partner: Frederick Olmsted, who was also mentored by Downing. Although the pair most famously designed New York’s Central Park (which we will be taking up directly), together they also designed 16 suburban housing developments in Yonkers, New York; Brookline, Massachusetts; Chicago’s Riverside; and elsewhere. Though lots were smaller (typically about half an acre each) and houses more modest, the pair brought Downing’s suburban dream to life, and to America. In the process, they helped put into motion one of the defining cultural movements across the globe for the next 150 years: a move by hundreds of millions of people away from cities and toward rural locales and an imagined nature, which ended up instead in suburbia. The story, however, does not end in suburbia, as Vaux and Olmsted also encouraged a mass approach to nature that was far more benign environmentally. Ironically, given their preoccupation with the rural, this approach was decidedly urban. To understand how, it will be helpful to take a step back to Shakespeare’s London. As noted earlier, London has an interesting distinction historically: it was the first modern European city to reach a population of one million, which happened around the year 1800. However, even two centuries before, Londoners were feeling the pinch of their city’s astonishing growth. In 1598, the same year that Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing was first performed, the writer John Stow drew attention to the fact that, especially on nice days, Londoners would walk to rural areas surrounding the city, to “sweet meadows and green woods,” in order to “rejoice their spirits with beauty” and the smell of “sweet flowers” and “the harmony of birds” singing. However, Stow was troubled by the fact that by 1598 this was increasingly no longer possible, as the area surrounding the city was developing into what seemed like one big “continual building.” How, then, were Londoners to get access to “sweet meadows and green woods”? The solution to this problem would be worked out over the next three centuries with the development of the modern intra-urban park. An early example would be London’s Hyde Park, which had been a protected royal hunting ground under Queen Elizabeth I, but was opened up for public use by Charles I in 1637. At 630 acres, which is three-fourths the size of New York’s Central Park, it allowed Londoners to stroll through meadows and woods without ever leaving the city. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as London’s population marched toward a million, a range of additional royal lands were converted into public parks. Now, in spite of the fact that the city was sprawling well outside its original medieval walls, most Londoners could be in a green space after a relatively short walk. Initially, these areas were simply left as fields and forest, home to deer and other game previously protected for royal hunting. As time went on, however, these parks were gradually landscaped into places more accommodating to the public, with amenities like carefully ordered paths. Hyde Park had its first major landscaping project completed in the 1730s, which included the creation of a 40-acre recreational lake, “The Serpentine,” which is still striking and popular today.

Forward to nature, away from nature

61

As intra-urban parks expanded with urban growth, they also changed and evolved with the public’s shifting taste in gardens and landscapes. The history of formal European gardens largely begins with Italian Renaissance examples, which were elaborate and geometrically regular. Transplanted into France, the Gardens of Versailles, begun in the 16th century, are arguably the pinnacle of this approach. With their carefully coiffed hedges, topiaries, and rows of symmetrical flowerbeds, such gardens often seem more artificial than natural to us today—a sentiment that was already emerging in the 18th century. The growing preoccupation with wilderness that we have been considering, which in some sense began in the 17th century, soon began to make its way into garden design, culminating in the form known as the “English garden.” Throughout the 18th century, English landscape designers like Charles Bridgeman, who was the official gardener for Queen Anne, and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who designed over 150 public parks, transitioned away from the orderliness of Italian Renaissance and French gardens to landscapes designed to look and feel more like wilderness, which Europeans were increasingly embracing rather than recoiling from. By the middle of the 19th century (the era of Downing, Vaux, Olmsted, and Thoreau that we have been considering), the English garden, which was being imitated all over the Western world, had moved from its origins on wealthy estates to find a home in intra-urban public parks, which were increasingly being made to feel more “natural.” Having visited Hyde and other “enormous parks of London—absolute woods and prairies, in the midst of a populous city,” Downing concluded that “what are called parks in New-York, are not even apologies for the thing … In the parks of London, you may imagine yourself in the depths of the country.” Frustrated, Downing, who, thanks to the success of his Treatise on landscape design and The Horticulturist magazine that he edited, was an influential New York figure by the close of the 1840s, began to call for the creation of a major park for the city. In the spirit of English parks he had visited, he imagined a place that would be distinctly rural. He was joined by one of America’s most well-known nature writers at the time, William Cullen Bryant, who was also the powerful editor of the New York Evening Post. Downing died before he could see his dream come true, but his protégés, Vaux and Olmsted, joined forces in order to submit what became the winning design for New York’s Central Park in 1858. This was also the beginning of their long and profitable partnership. Turning the traditional urban model outside in, Manhattan is not a city surrounded by rural environs, as medieval cities had been, but rather a city surrounding a rural center. Although early modern cities like London pioneered the model, Manhattan Island, especially when viewed from above, with its large, centrally located park, is a near-perfect icon of the idea. It is not coincidental that the park’s design dates from the same decade that gave us Walden. Because Vaux and Olmsted had influences (like Bryant, Cole, and many others) that were similar to Thoreau’s, Central Park is heir to the same preoccupation with wilderness that we tend to associate with Transcendentalists and Romantic poets.

62

Forward to nature

However, while Thoreau and Wordsworth fled the city for rural locales, Vaux and Olmsted created a space, to borrow Muir’s words, where “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” could appreciate nature by flocking to the green heart of the city. On a similar note, Olmsted believed that bringing wilderness into the city was essential and “favorable to the health and vigor of men … it not only gives pleasure for the time being but increases the subsequent capacity for happiness and the means of securing happiness.” If properly designed, such parks actually promise an enhanced experience of nature. Vaux and Olmsted were influenced by the Hudson River School of painting, which, centered just up the Hudson, was the same bioregion as NYC. Consequently, the pair designed beautiful, striking landscapes that were similar to what regional artists were painting at the time (the Hudson River School was at its height in the 1850s). In a sense, it is not an outrageous stretch to call Vaux and Olmsted Hudson River School artists, insofar as they also produced “landscapes,” though not with a brush, but rather by landscaping locales into scenes like those depicted by their local painter friends. Because they were the architects of the wilderness that the public experienced, Vaux and Olmsted were able to excise the dangers that made forests and mountains frightening to medieval Europeans. There were no threatening wild animals or “strange, horrid, and fearful crags” (to borrow the words of the 17thcentury traveler John Evelyn) from which you could fall to your death—just beautiful, welcoming nature. Now, one did not need to travel outside the city on a pilgrimage to visit the sites that inspired popular wilderness paintings. Instead, Central Park brought striking real-life scenes right into the city. It can, of course, be objected that there is something surreal about all this; nonetheless, this approach has an important environmental advantage. Thanks to the inspired design of Vaux and Olmsted, Central Park both provides a wilderness inside the city and also protects what lies outside it. Long before the growth of America’s suburbs, it was known that a city’s natureloving citizens could bring harm to its surrounding environs. John Stow, Shakespeare’s contemporary who noted that Londoners had long enjoyed daytrips to its rural outskirts, recounts that these city dwellers were not particularly welcome there, as they trampled crops and left behind “filth” and “rubbish.” When it was suggested that they should consequently remain in the city, a riot broke out among the day-trippers. A few years later, Ben Jonson argued those that stayed and built homes did more and lasting damage. The distinct advantage of the intra-urban park is that it redirects inward this urge to leave the city back to the city itself, where it can be satisfied by the sort of appealing landscape design that Vaux and Olmsted brought to the picture. In an ideal form (surrounded by a naturally occurring moat, Manhattan is not too far off the mark), daily appreciation of green spaces, as least for citizens on foot, must happen within the city. However, as Downing realized in an insight that helped give birth to the modern suburb, mass

Forward to nature, away from nature

63

transportation would radically change this situation. Before considering cities further, it will be useful to pause for a moment to consider what it means to appreciate nature. In Romantic Ecology, the iconic environmental reading of Wordsworth from 1991, Jonathan Bate dedicated the book to “the proposition that the way in which William Wordsworth sought to enable his readers to better to enjoy or endure life was by teaching them to look at and dwell in the natural world.” The same could fairly be said of Thoreau. The difficulty is that Bate, following Wordsworth, saw the desire to “look at and dwell in” wilderness locales as conjoined. While these two desires have been repeatedly conflated over the past few centuries by a broad range of individuals (many of whom were, ironically, environmentalists and nature lovers), environmentally, it is crucial to separate them out. The appreciation of wilderness that Thoreau, Wordsworth, and others of their era fostered can have positive environmental implications. As was suggested in connection with Rachel Carson, if we do not value nature, we may not undertake its protection. Directly experiencing wilderness can have the desired effect in getting us to help with its preservation. Works that positively represent nature, as Walden did for the title pond and Hudson River paintings did for that river and its valley, can also do the trick—which is proven by their continued ability to help enlist converts into the cause of environmentalism. Hence, both wilderness itself and its representations can foster appreciation and preservation. Landscape architecture is intriguing because it blends the two, as designers like Vaux and Olmsted created representations of wilderness that the public was encouraged to not just view, but to step right in and wander around (try that with a Hudson River painting!). Wordsworth, as Jonathan Bate noted, also encouraged us to “look at and dwell in” rural locales. The problem, which John Stow had already identified in Shakespeare’s England, is that once you step into a rural locale, let alone decide to stay and build a house there, you risk trampling it down. This problem came into sharp focus for Wordsworth in the last decade of his life, when he was faced with the prospect of trains full of nature-loving city dwellers descending on his beloved Lake District. Imagine his sadness in realizing that his poetry and guidebook to the region were serving as beacons encouraging and guiding them there. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, works like Thoreau’s Walden and Hudson River paintings did the same for hundreds of millions worldwide, prompting them to leave the city in search of a rural life. Ironically, these iconic predecessors of modern environmentalism thus played a role in one of the most environmentally injurious movements in the past 150 years. They are not alone in this, of course, as well-intentioned environmental works by Muir, Wordsworth, and thousands of writers, musicians, artists, and other influential thinkers, subsequently celebrated nature and the country life, in the process inadvertently hastening its demise.

64

Forward to nature

Vaux and Olmsted, insofar as they designed quite a few suburban housing developments, also directly played a major role in that movement, especially as their famous, beautifully landscaped communities became veritable advertisements for suburban living. However, the pair also created locales, like Central Park, that provided an ingenious way to enjoy nature while remaining within the city. In that sense, they put asunder the marriage of “looking at and dwelling in” nature that Thoreau and Wordsworth officiated over. A carefully mediated, urban experience of nature, designed to foster an appreciation of it, was now possible. Because the park walks were hardwearing (thanks to features like stone paths) and carefully laid out, damage was kept to a minimum. Admittedly, you could not stay and live there. Still, if you enjoyed it, you could return as much as you wanted. Every day, if you liked. Central Park is, of course, not without its problems. Urban planners, like the late Jane Jacobs, have been drawing attention to them for decades now. And new ways of greening cities, such as New York’s High Line and urban farms, are still being worked out today. Nevertheless, intra-urban parks encouraged a move in the right direction: inward toward the city and away from its outskirts. The problem is that Thoreau, as well as countless environmentalists since, confused the desire to appreciate nature with the urge to tromp out to see it, and, worse, actually move there. In the closing years of his life, Wordsworth realized the problem, its enormity, and danger, but was able to do little to stop it. A decade later, Vaux and Olmsted, inspired by their mentor Downing’s vision of expansive suburbs linked to cities by rail lines, and his call for more and larger intra-urban parks, ironically went in both directions: toward the city’s outskirts, even as they brought nature into the heart of the city. In hindsight, it is easy to fault the pair even as we praise them. However, for the next century and a half many environmentalists would be similarly confused and conflicted, which would globally have profound consequences. To understand how, it will be useful to compare the environmental footprints of urban locales with those of their suburban counterparts. First, however, let’s be clear on just what we mean by “environments” and “nature.”

4 PLACES, NATURAL AND OTHERWISE

Although sometimes used interchangeably, the terms “nature,” “environment,” and “ecology” have very different meanings. Since they are often confused, sometimes with worrisome consequences, it is worth taking a little time to tease out their separate meanings. As the most recent of the three, let’s start with “ecology.” It was once thought that Thoreau coined the word, though scholars now agree that the German scientist Ernst Haeckel first used “ecology” in 1866 in connection with biology, which is simply the study of life. Traditionally, biology had focused on individual organisms and their physiology, morphology, and so forth. But what about when we want to talk about the relationships that organisms share with each other and the places where they live? Haeckel coined the word “ecology” because no existing word adequately referenced the complex relationship that living organisms have with each other. When we talk about an area’s ecology, which is often called an “ecosystem” (short for “ecological system”), we are thus referring to all the interrelated organisms living there. Incidentally, Haeckel put the word “ecology” together from two ancient Greek words: oikos, the word for “house,” and logos, which in this sense means to study something. Using the image of a house for this purpose is admittedly a little awkward, especially as there are a number of Greek words that mean “region.” However, imagining a diverse group of organisms sharing their home (their ecosystem) with each other is nonetheless an instructive image. Because an organism’s individual biology and its ecological relationship to other life are related, in recent decades many university biology departments have been rechristened Departments of Biology and Ecology (or something of the sort) in order to underscore that they take up the study of both. Older than “ecology” by two centuries, the word “environment” has changed quite a bit over the years, though one of its earliest meanings—a “surrounding”—lives on today. When we refer to an environment, we are thus talking

66

Forward to nature

about physical surroundings, including mountains, rivers, the atmosphere, and so forth. Although this can include living organisms, it is not limited to them. Hence, we can talk about the “Martian environment,” where there has never been any life (at least as far as we know at the time of this writing). Nonetheless, when we talk about an environment, we generally include its ecosystems, as life is present in nearly every environment on the earth. An environment can be large or small, as it can refer to a particular region, as well as the entire globe. While an environment can be a pristine area virtually untouched by human beings, it can also be what is commonly referred to as a “built environment,” like a farm or a city. Both ecosystems and environments can suffer damage. Rachel Carson, who introduced the word “ecology” to much of the American public in Silent Spring, principally dealt with the ecological devastation brought about by indiscriminate pesticide use, which threatened a range of ecosystems and the organisms living there. Alternately, in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore largely dealt with the issue of climate change, which is impacting the environmental state of the planet by significantly altering the atmosphere and climate. It is, however, not always possible (or desirable) to separate out ecological and environmental concerns, as the two are often interrelated: climate change is now affecting ecosystems across the globe, even as it is being affected by them. Moreover, when we reference an ecosystem, we often refer to the environment where it is situated, such as it being a salt-water ecosystem. Because “environment” broadly encompasses the surroundings and the ecosystems situated there, it has become the more common way of referring to the field and individuals working in it. Hence, we usually call Carson and Gore environmentalists rather than ecologists, which is a term now often reserved for scientists who study ecology. (However, as she held a Master’s degree in zoology, Carson was both an environmentalist and an ecologist.) Nature is a much older and trickier concept. A few years ago I was asked to write an encyclopedia entry for “Nature.” It proved to be an extraordinarily difficult job. The reason, as the literary historian Raymond Williams once observed, is that “any full history of the uses of ‘nature’ would be a history of a large part of human thought,” as “‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word,” signaling one of the most difficult concepts, in the English language. Other scholars have argued that there are over 60 distinct categories of meaning for the word. For that reason, I was more than a little taken aback when asked to write a concise encyclopedia entry explaining nature in no more than six pages! The core concept derives from two ancient, Indo-European words, bheue and gen, which in turn gave us the Greek physis, the Latin natura, and the Old English cyn. These, in turn, give us a host of English words including physical, physics, physician, neophyte, gene, genital, genesis, gender, genre, progeny, pregnancy, kin, kid, kindred, nascent, natal, innate, nation, and many others including, of course, “nature.”

Places, natural and otherwise

67

It would be very easy to get bogged down clarifying just what we mean by “nature.” However, for our purposes, there is one particular meaning that often comes to mind first for many people when they imagine nature. From a modern environmental perspective, it overshadows all other definitions. It arguably first appeared in its modern sense 350 years ago in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. (You might remember from the Introduction that this poem has had a particular fascination for me. Its treatment of nature is part of the reason why.) As the venerable and generally reliable Oxford English Dictionary concisely notes, in this sense nature is “the phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations” (my emphasis). Following Milton, generations of writers and artists, including William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and many, many others, would speak of Nature (frequently, like Milton, with a capital “N”) in this sense, often in deeply reverent tones. When we speak of nature poetry, loving nature, or nature worship, we often mean nature in this sense. (Incidentally, the phrase “nature lover” was first used to describe Thoreau; “nature poetry” and “nature worship” first in connection with Wordsworth.) When we talk about saving, preserving, or conserving nature, it is also often in this way, as nature is imagined as separate and apart from us, being in need of saving by us—generally from us. The question of where human beings fit into this picture complicates matters. Nature in this sense is distinguished from human beings and our creations, which we often put under the rubrics of “culture” or “art”—which are traditionally imagined as being opposites of nature. Consequently, we human beings and everything that we make, from our simplest tools to our greatest works of art, and even our cultures themselves, are, properly speaking, outside of nature in this sense. When we consider mountains and forests as nature, but not cities and factories, we are generally imagining nature in this way. When environmentalists talk about nature, they are often also thinking about it in this way. This includes Bill McKibben when he talks about the “end of nature”: When I say that we have ended nature, I don’t mean, obviously, that natural processes have ceased—there is still sunshine and still wind, still growth, still decay. Photosynthesis continues, as does respiration. But we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us—the separation from human society. (McKibben’s emphasis) Human activities have not brought about the end of the environment, the “sunshine” and “wind,” nor the end of all ecological systems with their “growth … decay … photosynthesis … [and] … respiration.” Rather, because McKibben argues (and laments) that there are virtually no places on earth where the impact of human beings has not now been felt, it is nature, understood as separate and

68

Forward to nature

apart from human beings, that has been killed off by us. Consequently, if it had not already been taken, The Death of Nature, rather than The End of Nature, would in many ways have also been an apt title for McKibben’s book—with we human beings imagined as the ruthless killers of nature. McKibben’s assumption, that nature and human culture are separate and in conflict (a view shared by more than a few environmentalists) certainly needs to be questioned. For now, however, it’s enough that we have separated out the common uses of “nature,” “ecology,” and “environment.” Having done so, a number of things become clear. Concern for nature, concern for the environment, and concern for ecosystems can be very different, taking very different forms. For example, if our interest is in nature, in the sense of areas untouched or barely touched by human beings, what is our position on other environments, such as cities? Should they concern us as well, or as much? Some nature advocacy groups have often (at least through their actions, if not explicitly) answered a decided “no” to this question by almost exclusively focusing their attention and energies on the conservation of areas threatened by human encroachment. While these are, broadly speaking, environmental groups, given that they are principally concerned with nature (in the above sense), they might better be characterized as “nature advocates.” In order to flesh out this distinction, it will be helpful to consider the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Nature Conservancy as examples of environmental and nature advocacy groups, respectively. Although the EPA was officially formed in 1970, a number of milestone environmental legislative acts were passed throughout the 1960s, including the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Clean Water Act of 1965, and the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965. The EPA was formed in order to “consolidate in one agency a variety of federal research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities” that could deal with these and other environmental issues, which are often interrelated (for example, if not disposed of properly, solid waste can contaminate water supplies). Note that none of the above Acts are exclusively focused on nature in the sense of areas largely untouched by human encroachment. Instead, the EPA is concerned with the environmental protection of the whole country (and, increasingly, because of issues like climate change, the environment of the entire planet). Consequently, the EPA sees to the environmental wellbeing of cities, suburbs, forests, and everything else, including but not limited to “nature.” By contrast, the Nature Conservancy describes itself as the “leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.” What constitutes “ecologically important lands and waters”? A quick look to the more than 119 million acres of land worldwide that the organization has helped to protect reveals, not surprisingly, that much of it is “nature” in the above sense. In the U.S., preservation projects include Illinois’s Nachusa Grasslands, Northern Montana Prairies, the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, the Collaborative Forests Landscape Restoration program in

Places, natural and otherwise

69

Idaho, Wyoming’s Absaroka Mountain Range, and so forth. As they note, in the U.S., “from Canada to Mexico, California to Maine, The Nature Conservancy has a history of success in protecting nature to preserve life for future generations.” While the organization has, through projects like its Last Great Places initiative, emphasized “core reserve areas surrounded by buffer zones, where appropriate human uses are encouraged,” historically the focus has generally remained on those “Last Great Places” where nature, largely separate from human beings, is still alive, if not entirely well. The work of groups like the Nature Conservancy is obviously important and should be applauded, but, as their name suggests, they have traditionally been a nature advocacy group, rather than sharing with the EPA the same sort of broad environmental interests. Consequently, only recently have they given a good deal of attention to urban areas. How does ecology enter into this discussion? One way of answering this question is to consider further which areas organizations like the Nature Conservancy choose to protect. Up until recently, their website revealed strikingly beautiful photographs of nature that generally did not include human beings in the shot. It would thus be easy to conclude that such areas are chosen by nature advocates only for their aesthetic and other value to human beings. At one time, this was largely the case. In 1864, while the Civil War was still raging, Abraham Lincoln signed a Bill protecting the Yosemite Valley, which in the process became America’s first wilderness park (though it did not officially become a national park until the Yosemite Act of 1890) “for public use, resort and recreation.” Most environmentalists today would refer to these as being anthropocentric uses, as they center on the park’s value to human beings. The Nature Conservancy, however, describes their work as protecting “ecologically important lands and waters,” rather than those that are beautiful or useful for recreation. Why “ecologically” important? In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson concisely explained what ecologically important means: For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan, or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in the stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die … We spray our elms and following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm-leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology. Pesticides, however, are not the only danger to ecosystems. If the seemingly insignificant caddis fly loses its habitat, the entire ecosystem will be disrupted, including salmon populations. Consequently, protecting key habitats, those “important lands and waters,” as the Nature Conservancy describes them, is, from an ecological perspective, crucial.

70

Forward to nature

Although we have just been considering “nature,” “environment,” and “ecology,” there is a fourth term that is useful in this discussion. So useful, in fact, that the last few pages have been difficult to write without making reference to wilderness. The word “wilderness” is etymologically related to “wildness.” In the same way that a wild animal is one that is not tame or domesticated, a wilderness is a wild place. Hence, it is, in the sense that we have been using the term, a place where nature still exists. “Nature” and “wilderness” are not equivalent, however, as something can be natural without being a wilderness. People often refer to plants that have been genetically modified as “unnatural” in order to distinguish them from their “natural” counterparts. Wilderness thus generally refers to a certain kind of nature, a subcategory: a landscape that is imagined as being allowed to remain natural (i.e. in the sense of the word introduced by Milton, largely untouched by human beings). As we have seen, our perception of wilderness has changed over time. In medieval and Renaissances Europe wilderness was not necessarily seen as a good thing, but instead often as dangerous and foreboding places that were little more than deserts. This would change dramatically in the 17th through the 19th centuries, when a range of individuals, including Thoreau and Muir, would come to see wilderness as valuable and welcoming. This view is still alive and well today, having not yet been significantly supplanted by something new in the public imagination. When nature is spoken of approvingly, even reverently, it is often its subcategory, wilderness, that is being referenced. Wilderness has become such an exemplar of nature that the two terms are often used interchangeably, which can lead to confusion. When Bill McKibben talks about the “end of nature,” he repeatedly does so in terms of wilderness: McKibben describes the Adirondacks where he lives as “a vast protected wilderness, one where people live in and among the rest of creation.” Changes to the atmosphere (and accordingly, the climate) brought on by human beings threaten to put an end to this wilderness. Similarly, “from the hill out my back door,” McKibben notes, “you can’t see road or house; it is a world apart from man. But once in a while someone will be cutting wood farther down the valley, and the snarl of a chain saw will fill the woods” and “drive away the feeling that you are in another, separate, timeless, wild sphere.” Although McKibben sets out to talk about nature and its ending, he repeatedly references its subcategory of wilderness and its loss. Hence, “The End [or Death] of Wilderness” may well have been a better title for his book. Similarly, although you would imagine from its name that the Nature Conservancy is in the business of conserving nature, their efforts have traditionally been directed toward protecting wilderness, those “Last Great Places.” Why do these distinctions matter? Aren’t we protecting nature and the earth’s environment when we protect wilderness? It is, in fact, not at all clear that protecting wilderness is the most effective way of protecting our planet’s environment.

Places, natural and otherwise

71

Wildernesses are just one part of our global environment. At least threefourths of our planet, having clearly been modified by human action, is no longer wilderness—or, for that matter, “natural.” These “anthropogenic biomes” (a biome is a major ecosystem; an anthropogenic biome is one that has been significantly altered by human beings) should, not surprisingly, be sites of great concern environmentally. If we are interested in the release of greenhouse gases contributing to climate change, for example, this is where we should be directing a large portion of our attention. In other words, if we are concerned about our global environment, we need to be as concerned for decidedly “unnatural” places (like cities) as natural ones. In fact, in some cases arguably more concerned: since urban areas are some of the the most unnatural locales on the planet, it is there that human beings have arguably altered our environment the most. With that in mind, it will be useful to turn to cities. In recent years, David Owen, Edward Glaeser, and others have drawn attention to the fact that cities (Manhattan is a frequently cited example) are comparatively benign environmentally. Owen cleverly explains by way of the personal anecdote that opens his Green Metropolis: My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years we lived quite contentedly in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just 700 square feet, and we didn’t have a lawn, a clothes dryer, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bill worked out to about a dollar a day. The utopian community was Manhattan. Most Americans … think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. In fact, by the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States. The most devastating damage that humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric by comparison with other Americans, including people who live in rural areas or in such putatively ecofriendly cities as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado. Why are cities so efficient in this regard? Part of the reason goes back to Downing’s epiphany from our last chapter regarding mass transportation and the modern suburb. Prior to trains, buses, cars, and the suburbs that they helped to create, most people walked to work. In parts of Manhattan, over a third of the population still get to their jobs this way. By contrast, only 3 percent of

72

Forward to nature

people commute by foot in Los Angeles, which is a city, like most modern suburbs, designed around the automobile. Because congestion makes driving in New York difficult and mass transit there is relatively good, New Yorkers are eleven times more likely than the average American to take mass transit to work. They are also far less likely to drive, as only one in five New Yorkers takes a car to work. Conversely, roughly four out of five people commute by car in Los Angeles. In many suburbs, the situation is even worse than in LA, as mass transit is nearly nonexistent. As Owen notes, “City dwellers who fantasize about living in the country usually picture themselves hiking, kayaking, gathering eggs from their own chickens, and engaging in other robust outdoor activities, but what you actually do when you move out of the city is move into a car.” Andrew Jackson Downing’s vision of sprawling suburbs connected to cities by mass transit did not adequately account for his estate dwellers needing to get around within their expansive suburbs, where a local store can be miles away, rather than just a few city blocks. Owen and his wife went from walking and using mass transit in Manhattan to driving over 20,000 miles a year when they moved to suburban Connecticut. In terms of fossil fuel consumed (and the corresponding climate footprint), these varying modes of transportation are striking. On average, each man, woman, and child in Vermont annually uses five times as much gasoline as a Manhattan resident (545 versus 90 gallons). The sheer density of cities also contributes enormously to their efficiency. The town where I was born, Mount Laurel, New Jersey, which was once a farming community but is now a pretty typical American suburb, has a population of approximately 41,000. At roughly 22 square miles, it is almost identical in size to Manhattan (minus Central Park). However, with over a million and a half residents, Manhattan has over 35 times the population density. With so many houses, shops, restaurants, museums, theaters, and everything else packed so tightly, most things are relatively close, especially as the island is only 2.3 miles across at its widest. Because getting around by car is pretty much the only option in Mount Laurel (though, conversely, one of the least desirable alternatives in congested Manhattan), in the course of a typical day these suburbanites cover far more ground than their urban counterparts using a transportation option that is exceptionally inefficient. With so many Americans living in suburbia, with so many miles to cover, is it any wonder that, with less than 4 percent of the planet’s population, the U.S. nonetheless has a quarter of its cars? As one might imagine, all these suburban cars are playing a major role in climate change. Glaeser notes that the average car trip has a carbon footprint that is ten times the average trip via the New York City Transit system. Hybrid cars, which are frequently touted as viable alternatives to conventional automobiles (I personally admit to owning one), are nowhere near as good as mass transit, as they are only 1.6 times more efficient than the average car.

Places, natural and otherwise

73

As if transportation were not bad enough, suburban life introduces additional environmental problems. Thanks to Downing and those who followed him, suburbia was made in the image of the grand country estates that Ben Jonson was already railing against 400 years ago. As a consequence, suburban houses are typically much larger than city apartments. Moreover, apartments with shared walls and ceilings are more energy efficient than single-family homes. A study from 30 years ago revealed that a typical apartment in downtown San Francisco used 80 percent less fuel for heat than nearby suburban tract houses. Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse in recent decades, as the size of the average new house in the U.S. has increased by 50 percent since the early 1970s. The popularity of the suburban McMansion suggests that Downing’s vision of opulent country life is still alive and growing in the 21st century. Unfortunately, larger houses require more energy. Owen relates that his electricity consumption went from 4000 kilowatt-hours in his Manhattan apartment to almost 30,000 in his house in suburban Connecticut. A variety of our modern practices contribute to the rise of atmospheric CO2 and climate change. Because we consume so much energy, it is often difficult to track down how much we are using and where it is going. Fortunately, David MacKay, a Cambridge professor who was also the chief scientific adviser to the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change, put together a book a few years ago, Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, that sifted through our energy use. Although we could quibble with MacKay’s numbers (especially when translated from the U.K. to the U.S.), his results are nonetheless eye-opening. Let’s take automobile use as our benchmark (I should confess to an ulterior motive here, as it will be useful to introduce cars now since we will be taking them up in Part II in greater detail). How much energy, compared to cars, goes to lighting our homes and places of work? Just one-tenth. To the defense industry? Again, just a tenth. To running all our gadgets, like computers, televisions, and entertainment centers? A little more than a tenth. And transporting all the goods we ship by truck, train, and boat around the country and globe? Surely that must be more. It is actually less than a third. How about farming and the production of food, which takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel for things like the manufacture of modern fertilizers? True, but our cars nonetheless require nearly three times as much energy. So, what competes with cars for energy use and corresponding carbon footprint? Two things. First, heating and cooling, which takes almost as much energy as fueling our cars. Although new green construction techniques promise to help mitigate this, it is still the case that the bigger the dwelling (and suburban dwellings tend to be larger than city ones), the more energy consumed. Second, an enormous amount of energy is needed to make all the products that we consume, from packaging and clothing to cars and houses. Interestingly, cars also play a major role in this category. If you purchase a new car every five years, it actually takes more energy to produce it than will be needed for fuel while you own it. Surprisingly, then, the hidden cost of a car’s manufacture can double its overall energy use and carbon footprint.

74

Forward to nature

A clear message emerges from these numbers regarding suburban houses and car use. Edward Glaeser, who, incidentally, also finds Thoreau worrisome, concisely delivers it: “If the future is going to be greener, then it must be more urban. Dense cities offer a means of living that involves less driving and smaller homes to heat and cool. Maybe someday we’ll be able to drive and cool our homes with almost no carbon emissions, but until then, there is nothing greener than blacktop.” It could be argued that this analysis is misleading, as it focuses on just one (albeit a crucial) part of our environmental predicament: i.e. our carbon footprints and climate change. However, our move from cities to suburbs is troubling for additional reasons. Let’s look at an example. In the 19th century, the popular English garden, with its very “natural” feel, featured large expanses of welcoming, walkable turf. When Vaux and Olmsted helped bring this landscape style to the American suburb, expanses of lawn, which were a rarity at the time, thus became a signature feature of their designs. As their mentor Downing noted in his 1841 Treatise on landscaping: “There are but few lawns in America; but we have great pleasure in observing that they are rapidly multiplying … no expenditure in ornamental gardening is, to our mind, productive of so much beauty as that incurred in producing a well-kept lawn.” Such lawns were in part made possible by a humble technological invention of the 1830s that had become widespread by the 1860s: relatively inexpensive mechanical lawnmowers light enough to be pushed by a single person. As historian Kenneth Jackson notes, “the idealization of the house as a kind of Edenic retreat, a place of repose where the family could focus inward upon itself, led naturally to an emphasis on the garden and lawn.” The fabled locus amoenus, the pleasant, green place imagined in pastoral and edenic literature that we took up earlier in this book, was, it was argued, to be found in the American suburb on its welcoming lawns. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan revealed to a shocked America the degree to which corn dominates our lives and farmland. The 2007 documentary King Corn brought a similar message to the film-going public. From an environmental point of view, an extraordinary amount of fossil fuel, water, pesticides, and other resources are lavished on this crop, which shows up in an astonishing array of the foods that we eat. However, while corn may be King, it needs to bow down to the Almighty Lawn. Our largest irrigated crop is not—by a long shot—corn, which comes in a distant second. Instead, turf grass covers over three times more U.S. acreage than corn. In order to maintain their well-coiffed appearance, homeowners annually use over a 100 million pounds of pesticides on our lawns, which we apply more liberally than farmers do to their crops. With respect to fertilizers, some estimates put the amount used on lawns at nearly six times greater than pesticides. Ironically, much of this may well be unnecessary, as one study found that consumers are dosing their lawns with twice as much fertilizer as experts recommend.

Places, natural and otherwise

75

A number of works have appeared in recent years that examine and critique America’s love of lawns. Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2008 New Yorker article on “Turf War” is an excellent introduction, while Paul Robbins, a University of Arizona professor, considers the issue in depth in his Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. As these and other works make clear, America’s lawns are nothing short of an environmental disaster. This is, incidentally, by no means a new realization: over 50 years ago, in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson lambasted pesticide ads for depicting their use on lawns as benign: “the typical illustration portrays a happy family scene, father and son smilingly preparing to apply the chemical to the lawn, small children tumbling over the grass with a dog.” While lawns are environmentally worrisome in their own right, the picture darkens further when we consider what they replaced: suburban farmland, which had been feeding cities across the globe for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years. In order to understand the profound importance of these suburban farms in the history of civilization and cities, it will be helpful to take another step back in time. As noted earlier, London was the first modern European city in the West to reach a population of a million. It was not, however, the first such city to do so. That distinction belongs to classical Rome 2000 years ago. Rome’s extraordinary infrastructure, its iconic roads and aqueducts, emerged from the need to support its extraordinary population. Providing a daily supply of fresh water to a million people is no easy feat, even in the 21st century. Supplying them with fresh food was also an enormous undertaking. This is where Rome’s celebrated roads came in, as transporting goods overland without adequate roads was a nightmare. (It continued to be for thousands of years. When Thoreau was born in 1817, it cost as much to transport goods 30 miles overland in the U.S. as it did to send them across the Atlantic by ship.) Even with good Roman roads, using carts with wooden wheels to transport cargo was inefficient and difficult. Consequently, food needed to be produced as close to the city as possible. However, Rome’s local farms were initially not up to the challenge of feeding a city of a million people. Bringing in food by boat helped, but it was not enough. What, then, was to be done? The answer, which was easier said than done, was to make farming more efficient and more appealing. When we think of Latin authors, names like Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Caesar, and Cicero often come to mind. However, the first work that survives of connected Latin prose (i.e. the first Latin book) was written by Marcus Porcius Cato. Entitled simply De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture), it is a farming manual. A century later, as Rome’s population was reaching a million, Marcus Terentius Varro wrote a second influential treatment on the subject with the same title. It is not coincidental that the first Latin book is a farming handbook. With a soaring population and inefficient ground transportation (despite the extraordinary achievements of its road builders), optimizing agricultural production on Rome’s surrounding land was crucial. If this issue had not been addressed, and early on, Rome would not have become the great city it did.

76

Forward to nature

There is a temptation to imagine farms from a generation or two ago as small, family-run affairs. Large-scale agribusiness, in turn, is usually seen as a phenomenon of the 20th century, especially the second half. However, Cato and Varro make clear that something resembling agribusiness was already on the scene 2000 years ago. When raising poultry, for example, Varro recommends housing them in buildings that hold 5000 birds each. In general, both authors focused on systematically making farms more efficient. Developing efficient farming practices is one thing, getting landowners to adopt them another. In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Rome’s most celebrated poet, Publius Vergilius Maro, better known to us as simply Virgil, played a major role in this story. The fertile farmland surrounding Rome was principally in the possession of a relatively small number of wealthy landowners, many of whom also had fashionable homes in Rome. The problem was that Rome in the 1st century BCE was an exciting place. After all, as the biggest and greatest city Europe had ever produced, who wouldn’t have wanted to spend time there? Cato and Varro tried to convince these landowners to spend more time in the suburbs carefully managing and improving their farms—thereby helping to feed their ever-growing city—by appealing to their pocketbooks. Huge profits, they argued, could come from efficient farms. This was not enough to convince everyone. Enter Virgil. A contemporary of Varro’s, Virgil wrote his own farming manual, the Georgics, in honor of Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, who was an advisor to Octavian— also known as Caesar Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. Using his considerable rhetorical skills in the service of Augustus at the urging of Maecenas, Virgil glorified farming life in the Georgics. And who better to do so than Virgil? The poet had recently completed his Eclogues, which similarly celebrated pastoral life. However, unlike the leisure of the shepherd’s life, which formed the cornerstone of the pastoral literature that we considered earlier, the Georgics focused on farming as important and necessary work, indeed a patriotic duty, for the good of the Empire. Although the word “suburb” often now evokes images of tract houses, in its original, Latin form, it simply denoted the land surrounding a city. The emphasis that Cato, Varro, Virgil, Augustus, and many others placed on efficiently farming Rome’s surrounding land, its suburbium, underscores the traditional role and importance of a city’s suburbs. Suburbs were more than just important; they sustained a city. Importing goods by boat solved part of the puzzle. (Consequently, most great cities were situated on waterways that offered efficient transportation. Indeed, they still are, which is a worrisome issue in the era of sea-level rise and accompanying storm surge brought about by climate change.) However, suburban food production was essential to a city’s health and growth. Cut off from its suburbs, as ancient and medieval walled cities sometimes were during sieges, a city risked falling as its residents starved.

Places, natural and otherwise

77

Beyond the question of survival, without sufficient sustenance from its surrounding suburbs, a city risked limiting its growth. Consequently, when the population of cities swelled throughout European history, attention quickly fell to their suburbs and ways of optimizing their agricultural production. Following Rome, this happened with London, Paris, and New York. When London’s population soared in Shakespeare’s era, a flurry of farming manuals soon appeared. Interest in Cato’s and Varro’s books, along with Virgil’s Georgics, also soared at the time. By the end of the 17th century, the area in and around London was pocketed with market gardens growing a range of fruit and vegetables. Some of these were even available out of season, thanks to the falling cost of glass, which made hotbeds (miniature greenhouses laid out on the ground) possible. Agricultural historians have argued that the first truly modern market gardens, which have recently been resurrected by way of local farmers’ markets, began emerging around 17th-century London. A century and a half later, the process repeated itself in and around Paris, where the population grew to a million in 1835, and then, astonishingly, to 3 million just 50 years later. In order to feed all these people, Parisians developed what is now often referred to as “French intensive gardening.” Using a variety of techniques, such as intercropping different plants in the same bed, this approach dramatically increased crop yield. Although highly labor intensive, this sort of farming nonetheless proved profitable on even small plots of suburban land. (Consequently, at the close of the 20th century, a new generation of local, market, and urban farmers in the U.S. began looking carefully at French intensive gardening from more than a century before.) While Paris’s suburban farmers were perfecting their highly effective techniques, Downing, Vaux, Olmsted, and others had very different plans for the American suburb. Like ancient Rome, Renaissance London, and Paris earlier in the 19th century, the population of the five boroughs of New York City eventually also reached a million. This auspicious event occurred right about when Walden was published. At that time, the area surrounding the city was still largely used for farming. For example, Yonkers, sometime called New York City’s “sixth borough” because of its close proximity (it is directly adjacent to the Bronx in places and less than two miles from Manhattan at its closest), was still mostly farmland. Consequently, even though it covers about the same area, its population in 1860 was less than 1 percent of Manhattan’s, in spite of the fact that industry was already beginning to settle there. Since even before classical Rome, suburbs have traditionally sustained the great cities they circled, as thousands of suburban farmers daily drove carts full of produce, dairy, eggs, and meat into their cities. Densely packing people in cities meant that nearby suburbs remained free for food production. This farmland was often, like mid-19th-century Yonkers, astonishingly close, even adjacent in places to the city. It needed to be, as horse-drawn transportation was inefficient at greater distances.

78

Forward to nature

This state of affairs began to change dramatically in the U.S. in the mid-19th century. Although Downing realized in 1849 that train transportation could transform a city’s suburbs from farmland to housing developments, it was only able to do so because it also allowed food to be transported into cities from even greater distances. The first refrigerated boxcar, which used ice to preserve perishables while they were transported by train, was introduced (perhaps not coincidently, in New York State) in 1851. Although it took a couple of decades to make the technology practical, by the 1870s refrigerated meat was being transported across the country. Produce, which does not necessarily need refrigeration, was even easier to transport by train. Prior to this time, most food was local food and “suburb” (like the original Roman suburbium) usually meant farmland. However, in a twofold motion, modern transportation, first in the form of trains, then followed by cars and trucks, inaugurated the era in which we find ourselves, where most Americans now live in suburbs and where most fruit and vegetables travel a significant distance (a figure of 1500 miles is often cited) to get to our tables. This is not to say that local food is environmentally better simply by virtue of the fact that it does not travel as far to get to our tables, as transportation from farm to point of sale may account for as little as 4 or 5 percent of a foodstuff’s carbon footprint. Similarly, a city’s suburb may not be the most efficient place to grow food, as it might, for example, have a short growing season and hence require energy-intensive greenhouse cultivation. In general, as James McWilliams and others have suggested, the environmental implications of eating locally are complicated. (If we are sincerely concerned about the climate footprint of our food, we should, incidentally, consider a largely plant-based diet, as this would significantly reduce the climate footprint of the world’s agriculture.) Regarding those 32 million acres of suburban lawn in the 21st century, which already receive more pesticides per acre than cropland, six times as much fertilizer as pesticides, and a third of the water used for all residential purposes, they are a sad reminder of our lost suburban farmland. Covering three times the area of our No. 2 crop (corn), the American lawn is an agricultural and environmental disaster that feeds no one. The astonishing suburban expansion that began in Thoreau’s era and accelerated in the 20th century underscores one of the profound dangers of back-to-nature thinking: not being satisfied with just appreciating nature, which intra-urban parks are designed to facilitate and encourage, but actually moving away from cities to get back to nature—or at least a carefully marketed, suburban vision of it. As I suggested in the Introduction, this path doesn’t lead back to nature at all, but rather to environmental devastation. In the second half of this book I want to turn from attempts to get back to nature and their shortcomings to the question of how we can achieve a better relationship with nature. While we have looked to a few examples of emerging forward-to-nature projects such as New York City’s High Line, I would now like to address how each of us can personally help move humanity forward to nature.

PART II

Writing a new environmental era

5 WRITING A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL ERA

Ever since I began introducing the notion of moving forward to nature back in 2012, I have repeatedly been asked the same questions: If, as I suggest, a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature did not exist in the past and instead must be found in the future, just what will this new relationship be like? And equally important, how do we begin bringing it about now? The sciences are addressing these questions in exciting ways. Climate engineering, directed evolution, synthetic biology, and scores of additional research projects currently underway across the globe offer tantalizing glimpses of what the future could hold. Nonetheless, while these technologies promise to help create a better future environmentally, it is not at all clear that they can deliver on this hope, at least to the extent necessary to avert a global climate disaster. Allow me to humbly offer a counter-suggestion: while science and technology certainly need to play major roles in bringing about a future relationship with our planet that is more harmonious (which is why I repeatedly argued for their importance in the first half of this book), we now need to turn to the humanities at this point for an intervention. And we need to do so quickly. Scientists are often the scholars that we think of first when the issue of climate change is invoked. Conversely, I think it safe to say that cultural and literary historians like me are among the last, if we come to mind at all. Even aside from the issue of climate change, the value of the humanities has repeatedly been drawn into question in recent years, especially in relation to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields, which often seem far more practical and useful. But hear me out, as the humanities really do have at least as much to offer as the sciences in bringing about a better environmental future. While it may be a sobering thought, technology alone is not up to the job. Consequently, we

82

Writing a new environmental era

need to see this for what it is, a human problem brought about by human actions, and mobilize specialists in the human condition to help. One of the goals of this book is to do just that. It is hardly surprising that we think of the sciences rather than humanities in connection with climate change. Were it not for the tireless work of a range of scientists and their careful observations, studies, and predictive models, the reason that our global climate is changing would never have been discovered. We all owe them an enormous debt of thanks. If, after accepting their findings, we ponder what we need to do in response to this problem, the sciences again often first come to mind. However, in this case we shift from the theoretical to the applied and the hope that scientific research will yield technological solutions to our worsening situation. It is certainly comforting to hear techno-wizard nonpareil Elon Musk confidently proclaim that an array of solar panels just 100 by 100 miles (less than one-tenth of the area of either Nevada or Arizona) could supply all the electricity needed by the entire U.S. and that a battery covering a single square mile in area could store all this captured energy. What is even more comforting is the larger message contained in such a reassuring statement: scientists have discovered a major problem that should concern us all (climate change), but just sit tight, as they are hard at work on solutions. Some technologists, like Musk, boast that they already have practical answers for us. His Tesla electric car is a prime example, and you can buy one today. In short, the sciences can indeed—in very specific and concrete ways—not only study the causes of climate change, such as the rise of atmospheric CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs), they can also develop technologies like zero-emission cars to help with the problem. But are these gases in fact the cause of climate change? They certainly play a major role. However, I would like to humbly suggest that we need to step outside the box to approach this issue in another way entirely, as the root causes of climate change are in fact a diverse range of human beliefs and practices. Specifically, environmentally questionable practices such as our love of transportation (especially automobiles and airplanes, both of which we will be taking up), expansive houses, consumer goods, and so forth, as these demand the extraction of immense quantities of fossil fuels that release commensurately enormous amounts of CO2 when burned. If we significantly curtailed these activities, CO2 rise and climate change would be considerably checked. Similarly, if we greatly reduced or outright eliminated beef consumption by human beings (the U.S. has the dubious distinction of being a world leader here), methane emissions, another major contributor to climate change, would be dramatically cut back. Approached in this way, a Tesla is not a solution at all, but rather is simply the latest twist on an environmentally disastrous practice that wholeheartedly endorses that practice (like plenty of car salesmen before him, Musk’s goal is, after all, to sell you a new ride) rather than attempting to disrupt or better yet supplant it. The danger is that such an electric car is sold as a way of adequately mitigating climate change, which it simply is not. Not by a long shot.

Writing a new environmental era

83

Why do we engage in a whole range of such environmentally worrisome practices? Understanding why people do what they do is the domain of the humanities and the social sciences. And once human actions are better understood, possibilities for pursuing more environmentally sound practices open up. In short, as we shall see directly and then through a detailed example in the concluding chapter of this book, the humanities have a major role to play in helping us understand and limit anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) climate change and moving us forward to nature. Let’s stay with the example of the automobile. In 2014, the efficiency of cars hit a record high, as the average automobile in the U.S. now travels 25 miles per gallon of fuel. Hybrids do even better. Still, the motive power, even for (non-plugin) hybrids, comes from the burning of fossil fuels. Purely electric vehicles like the Tesla are game-changers in so far as they can run entirely on renewable energy. They are, however, not without environmental shortcomings. For example, an extraordinary amount of energy and resources is used in the manufacture of all automobiles, including electric ones (we will see just how much in a few pages). In the case of electric cars, the mining and eventual disposal of rare-earth and other materials used in electric motors and batteries are particularly problematic for a host of reasons. Moreover, a surprising number of electric cars on the road are essentially coal-powered, as they run on electricity generated by coal-fired power plants. But most importantly from a cultural perspective, the Tesla is in many respects a rather conventional automobile. One of the most recent models, the Model X, is a Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) that, like many of its gasolinepowered counterparts, weighs over 5000 pounds. Once on the road, 75 percent of these technological marvels will likely, as with the rest of the cars being driven in the U.S., carry a single person. Although such a vehicle can be run entirely on renewable energy, there is no escaping physics, as propelling this much mass down the road at 70 mph in order to transport a single human being is incredibly energy intensive and inefficient. It is, however, currently possible to transport a person 350, 500, even an astonishing 750 miles on a single gallon of gasoline or its equivalent. Not only is it possible, these transportation technologies are no longer still in the experimental stage. To the contrary, they have all proven themselves and in fact have been in widespread use for over a century. What are these wonder technologies? Buses, subways, and trains, respectively. When compared to a 25-mpg car with a single occupant, a bus is 14 times more efficient (i.e. one gallon of gasoline can transport a single person 350 miles), a subway 20 times more so (500 mpg per person), and a passenger train 30 times more efficient (750 mpg). A few years ago, a perceptive student of mine, reflecting on this situation and these numbers, succinctly observed that “what we need is not a 100-mpg car, but rather for taking the bus to become cool and owning a car to be anything but.” I could not agree more.

84

Writing a new environmental era

Incidentally, even 750 mpg can be improved upon—and it’s embarrassingly easy to do so. In parts of Manhattan, over a third of commuters walk to work. Cycling is even more efficient. New Yorkers, incidentally, are eleven times more likely to take mass transit like subways and buses to work than the average American. As noted earlier, Edward Glaeser, David Owen, and many others have thus argued that cities are far more efficient than suburbs and rural locales. This is clearly the case with fossil fuel use and corresponding carbon footprints. The example of Manhattan (and cities more generally) makes clear that it is quite possible for modern human beings to live rich and diverse lives largely free of the automobile. Why, then, do so many Americans drive cars? And why do we drive so many of them? The U.S. has fewer than 4 percent of the planet’s population, yet a quarter of its cars. Placed end to end, they would circle the earth—31 times. As my student realized, in the U.S. cars are cool, really cool. Nonetheless, automobiles are an environmental disaster. A typical car in the U.S. is responsible for emitting about 4.7 metric tons of CO2 per year. Given that the average American’s total CO2 emissions are currently around 16.5 metric tons annually, owning and driving a car can account for well over a quarter of our personal carbon footprints. What’s worse is that many climate scientists advise that our total greenhouse gas emissions should not be much more than 2 metric tons for each person on the earth, if we are to sufficiently mitigate the effects of climate change. Thus, just owning and using an automobile can increase our carbon footprint to over twice what it should be—and that’s before we take into account food, clothing, housing, and everything else that we need to live. If everything else were equal, switching from car to bus could reduce our individual carbon footprints for transportation by a factor of fourteen. Yet, with fewer than 5 percent of Americans taking the bus to work, as opposed to 85 percent using cars to commute, buses are clearly not at all desirable. But why are cars cool and buses not? This is not a question for the STEM fields, but rather the social sciences and humanities, where we seek to understand just why people do what they do. Science may be able to tell us how human beings are changing our global climate, but not why we are doing it. The sciences may be able to offer us more advanced technology (i.e. more efficient cars), but they offer little insight into why we continue to engage in these practices. Why, for example, we love cars. If we can understand why cars are desirable and buses not, we can perhaps then take the next step—and it is a big one—of not just studying culture, but actively intervening in it. For example, we might help foster a culture where riding a bus or train is seen as far more appealing than traveling by car. If we could pull this off, the gains could greatly exceed the impact that a 100-mpg car would have on climate change. This is why I suggested that the humanities have as large a role to play as science and technology in limiting anthropogenic climate change.

Writing a new environmental era

85

But, make no mistake, this will be no easy task. Developing and manufacturing the next generation of lithium batteries (one of Elon Musk’s current projects) will certainly be difficult, but no less so than trying to understand why human beings are engaging in perplexing and at times even irrational practices bringing about a global change to our climate. Driving a car can, indeed, border on the irrational. If you stand back and think about it, riding in a 5000-pound vehicle traveling 70 mph, inches away from others doing the same (some just inches away and hurling in your direction at 70 mph!), is nothing less than insane. As the World Health Organization (WHO) notes, over 50 million people are killed or injured in traffic accidents worldwide each year. Worldwide, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for young people over the age of 10, surpassing malaria, AIDS, and any and everything else. Consequently, the WHO has declared traffic injuries a worldwide epidemic. In addition to being incredibly dangerous, automobiles demand a huge portion of family income, making them far less economical than mass transportation. The average cost of owning, insuring, maintaining, and fueling a car in the U.S. is around $9000 a year. This is a huge financial burden. In contrast, an unrestricted bus pass in my city (Santa Barbara, CA) costs $52 per month at the time of this writing—i.e. just over $600 per year, which is about 7 percent of the annual cost of owning and maintaining a car. How is it that cars, in spite of being outrageously dangerous, a huge financial burden, and more disastrous for the environment than any other single source, are cool? Like everything else, this has a history. Here’s the short version. The U.S. came out of the Great Depression economically because it was drawn into a highly industrialized war. Industrial output during World War II was staggering: the U.S. manufactured nearly 7000 major warships, over 300,000 aircraft, and around 2,500,000 land vehicles in just a few years. When the war came to an end, the challenge was to keep this industrial juggernaut (and accordingly the economy) going strong. The automobile played a huge role in this project. The growth of the postwar U.S. automobile industry depended on convincing the public that cars were desirable. Getting us to spend huge chunks of our income to buy them and risk our lives driving them was no easy task. Nonetheless, car manufacturers, working hand in hand with policymakers and others, pulled it off. In order to ensure that mass transportation did not successfully compete with the car, it received dramatically less federal funding than did industries devoted to building automobiles and road infrastructure. The result was that passenger and freight rail businesses soon went bankrupt and were only bailed out by the federal government so that they could continue on in limited form as Amtrak and Conrail, respectively. Another big part of the solution was to sell the public on the idea of suburbia. In postwar America, if you wanted to get out of the city and into the appealing new suburbs you needed a car to commute. In fact, just to get around in the sprawling suburbs you needed a car. For many families this meant, to the great delight of the auto industry, that you needed two cars.

86

Writing a new environmental era

At its height in the U.S. a generation ago, one in six Americans were either directly or indirectly employed by this industry. And this did not include the massive, complementary industry of road construction, such as made possible by Eisenhower’s Highway Act of 1956, which authorized the creation of 41,000 miles of interstate highways. Although it may sound a little outlandish on first hearing, for decades the backbone of the U.S. economy depended on cars being cool. So cool, in fact, that we would knowingly risk our lives and lavish huge portions of our income on their purchase and upkeep. It is difficult to imagine how a broad swath of the American public would go along with this lose–lose proposition. It’s even more difficult to imagine how it continues today in an age when we are aware of climate change. Although it is a little mind-boggling, the carbon footprint of cars in the U.S. exceeds that of our houses (and any other single source, for that matter). When we look outside the U.S., the situation is even more worrisome. Because the world looks to the U.S. for cultural trends to emulate (like it or not, for many decades we have been playing a major role in globally setting all sorts of standards for what’s cool), people in rapidly developing countries are eager to get their hands on the automobiles that we have sold as so desirable. Take India and China, which now have populations that are separately each over four times that of the U.S. From the 1940s through the 1980s, when America was in the midst of its love affair with the cars that it was producing, nearly everyone in India and China got around by walking, biking, or mass transit. Consequently, CO2 emissions from the transportation sectors in these countries were relatively small. Indeed, during this time the total combined emissions from transportation for both countries, in spite of their swelling populations, were dwarfed by those from the U.S. This, however, is now dramatically changing. India is currently the fifth largest car market in the world and growing rapidly. China, now the largest market, has quickly developed an even greater, in fact altogether extraordinary and unprecedented, love of cars. In 1985, there were 1.78 million total vehicles in China. In 2017, car ownership alone had soared to 172 million. That’s an astonishing increase of more than 10,000 percent in just three decades. There are currently just over a billion cars on the planet. Because the rest of the world is now also quickly becoming infatuated with them, that number is expected to double by 2040. Even if every one of these 2 billion vehicles were zero-emission cars like the Tesla, there is simply no way that the planet could sustain that many vehicles and hope to check climate change. The manufacturing process alone makes this impossible. For example, 17 metric tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere during the manufacturing process of a typical car. Some luxury SUVs have a carbon footprint double that at 35 metric tons. Recall that many climate scientists suggest that each person on the planet should not be responsible for much more than 2 metric tons of CO2 being emitted each year. Consequently, even before you take your first ride, when you buy

Writing a new environmental era

87

a new car you have already blown your entire carbon budget for the next 8 to 17 years. If 2 billion people were to each buy one, our total planetary carbon budget would be shot (let’s face it, the planet would be shot). This is why I suggested that technology alone will not solve this problem. Instead, we need to look hard at rewriting a range of cultural practices, like our love of cars. This is also why I suggested that even though the challenges that we face are daunting—and let’s face it, more than a little scary and depressing— approaching this as a human issue can and should be empowering. There is no need to wait for Elon Musk or anyone else to solve this problem (especially as it is clear that these technologists simply cannot come anywhere near doing it on their own), as each of us can simply write cars out of our lives. As Americans, we can do even more, as a good deal of the world still looks to us to lay down the precepts of what’s cool. In places like Portland and Brooklyn, an emerging eco-culture is eschewing cars to instead embrace mass transit and bikes as cool, really cool. Conversely, in these places gas-guzzling cars like SUVs are anything but cool. In terms of climate change, this sort of exciting, future-oriented culture may be one of the U.S.’s most important exports in the 21st century (yes, even more important—far more important, in fact—than exporting Teslas). Although it may seem that we will therefore need to do with less and perhaps even do without (I am, after all, suggesting that we do without cars), we stand to actually benefit by this bargain. Instead of spending huge chunks of our income on deathtraps that are wreaking havoc on our climate and planet, we have the opportunity to imagine new and better ways of getting around. How can an expert at reading literature like me help with this situation? In my humble opinion, we have much to offer, as cars are not intrinsically cool, but have only been written that way. Thousands upon thousands of texts over many decades convinced the American public that cars were worth owning. Before automobile manufactures could sell us cars, they first had to sell us on the idea that cars were desirable and even necessary. In order to do so, they also had to convince us that taking a bus is a downright embarrassing experience, perhaps even dangerous. Even today, this project shows no sign of slowing down. When asked about the role that mass transit could play in our future, car manufacturer Elon Musk fired back that “It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who[m] might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.” (A serial killer? Really?) Understanding just how the idea of the automobile was sold (while mass transit was simultaneously maligned) to the American, and increasingly global, public is not just interesting, it is crucially important, as it can offer insights into how we can disrupt this decades-old project. In order to explore this further, it will be helpful to again return to Martin Heidegger and his insight explored in the Introduction: namely, that we accept and take as natural and right many of the ideas shared by the culture into which

88

Writing a new environmental era

we are “thrown” at birth. Indeed, they often seem so natural that it rarely even occurs to us to question (let alone reject) them. This raises an obvious question: If these ideas do not originate with us, where in fact do they come from? Heidegger’s answer? “From the world”: the particular historical culture into which we are born. But, specifically, how did they arise there? The answer is straightforward enough, though perhaps startling. Our world was largely written into being. At some point in the past, the ideas that we collectively hold first occurred to someone (or some group of people) who put them into words so that they might be shared with others and opened up for discussion, debate, and revision. Even though this may have taken place centuries ago, these thoughts may endure today and may even still be discussed and evolving, especially if they were reified through writing. If influential, as was the case with the writings of our earlier examples of Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau, they helped shape a future world (in their case, ours). True, ideas do not necessarily need to be put into words for them to spread and endure. For instance, paintings can convey ideas without a single word ever being spoken. Moreover, a recent school of thinking largely inspired by Heidegger, object-oriented ontology, has made clear that even everyday objects can in fact be infused with meaning. However, as Heidegger argued in his most mature writings (many thinkers, even as early as Plato, anticipated him in this conviction and many others have followed him since in it), language is the standard-bearer of ideas. More than any other place, language, especially written language, is arguably where ideas live and breed, sometimes across hundreds of human generations and millions of individual lives. Although I first encountered this idea in my teens with Plato, its far-reaching implications would only sink in decades later. It should give us all pause, especially as thinkers like Douglass and Thoreau are not the only ones writing the world into being. As Thoreau realized over 150 years ago, corporations are also in this business. Indeed, deeply invested in it, they have become masters. It sounds a little like The Matrix, but corporations are in the business of writing us into the beings that serve them best. Quite a few years ago, this became strikingly clear to me while visiting friends. Their young daughter, who was 6 or 7, was watching TV. Glancing over from time to time, it was obvious that the show was geared toward young girls. What caught my attention were the ads. Most were selling what you would expect: toys, sugared breakfast cereals, a local theme park. One ad, however, was another sort of beast altogether. It was for a major cosmetic corporation, showing models having fun on a Caribbean beach. It repeatedly cut to scenes of them applying makeup, which they were having a frolicsome good time doing. Realizing that this ad was running on a show pitched at young girls, I waited to see how it would end. Were they really trying to sell lipstick to 6-year-olds? As it turns out, they weren’t. The ad was not designed to sell a particular product, but rather to sell a brand that makes a broad range of products. It was really just 60 seconds of young women made happy by cosmetics (well, made

Writing a new environmental era

89

happy by a particular brand of cosmetics). So, were they trying to get 6-yearolds to switch to their brand of eyeliner? If they really were trying to sell cosmetics to young girls, you would expect that at least some of the models would have been children. Why where there instead just young women onscreen? This cosmetic company decided that they needed to make more than just cosmetics. Astonishingly, they had also taken up the business of making consumers. First, they present girls with images of happy and appealing young women. Next, they cut to the source of the happiness: applying and wearing makeup. There is no suggestion that young girls themselves should be wearing the makeup; instead, it is held up as an essential part of what it is to be a woman. It may take a decade or more, but by repeatedly and subtly suggesting to girls that the road to womanhood is paved with cosmetics, a generation of consumers is written into being whose very sense of self (in this case their gendered self) depends on the products on offer. With so much at stake—indeed, the fragile, emerging self-identity of a human being—the desire to have, and fear of being without, the product becomes extraordinarily important, as it is presented as an essential part of a happy and successful adulthood. This project does not have to be aimed at children. Moreover, whole industries can take on the job. The National Livestock and Meat Board, via their PR branch the Beef Industry Council, launched the “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner” campaign in the same year (1992) that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced its first food pyramid that called for limiting meat consumption for health reasons. Concerned that the whole industry was threatened, the beef industry pulled together and pulled out all the stops to convince Americans that eating beef was a normal part of each and every day. If the cosmetic industry did the same in order to fashion a new generation of female consumers, their slogan could be “Makeup. It’s What Makes You a Woman.” Although we may think that industries exist to serve us by providing all sorts of appealing consumer goods like cosmetics, it is arguably the other way around: human beings exist to serve the industries. Human consumption is what empowers them. An enormous amount of care and attention is thus given to fashioning human beings willing to work long hours so that these industries can thrive. As we saw in Part I, Thoreau desperately tried to convince us of the truth of the matter. For example, that the goal of the clothing industry was “not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.” Returning to cars, at birth Americans are thrown into a world where our very sense of self depends in part on what kind of car we drive. If we think of ourselves as powerful and successful (perhaps even more importantly, if we want others to think of us this way), we might drive some sort of high-performance, luxury, or oversized car, like an SUV. Conversely, riding an electric bicycle does little to support such a sense of self. Indeed, it might make us seem quite the opposite, even laughable, to a public raised on this thinking.

90

Writing a new environmental era

If the ideas and values that we individually and collectively hold were written into being, this means that their histories might be traced and better understood. This is central to the project of New Historicism, the school of literary and cultural criticism that we considered in the Introduction. But we can go further. If we turn from the past to the future, it is not only clear that our present world was written into being in the past, but also that a future world is in the process of being written into being right now. Consequently, a diverse range of discourses are competing for the future. The winner (or more accurately winners) will play a role in defining the world to come, just as Douglass and Thoreau did over a century and a half ago for our world. Apologies if this seems so obvious that it hardly needs to be written down, but the import of this realization hit me like a ton of bricks, as it made clear that in many ways I (and in fact quite a few scholars working in the humanities, especially the environmental humanities) have been turned in the wrong direction: toward the past rather than the future. What’s worse, as a consequence we are not taking any steps to move our culture forward to nature. Well, not entirely the wrong direction. I still believe that there is much to be learned and gained from the past. A good bit of what I wrote early in my career (as well as throughout the first half of this book) has emerged out of this conviction. Still, with respect to our future, what is written today, for example, texts challenging the automobile industry, will obviously play a crucial role in writing the world to come into being. As I hope to have shown in Part I, the past is clearly important and lessons can certainly be learned from it. However, the present is where the action is, especially at times like these. To return to the example of Frederick Douglass, we can certainly trace the history of slavery in the U.S. back over two centuries before his narrative appeared. We can even go back before that to see how the stage was being set for the modern European incarnation of this horrific institution. However, things were quickly coming to a head in America when Douglass was penning his narrative. That moment in U.S. history leading up to the Civil War was defined by this debate, which in many ways eclipsed all others. Two very different discourses, one that imagined a future with slavery, one free of it (Douglass’s), were fiercely competing for the future, which hung as a prize of inestimable value for the victors. Our moment in history is being defined by climate change. Just a few decades ago this was an issue known only to a handful of research scientists. Now, however, it is the global concern that will likely define our unfolding century more than any other. Consequently, if you are interested in how discourses debate and vie for the future, you are in luck, as this is a time that is as fascinating as it is frightening. Seemingly everywhere, we are witness to cultural clashes over our changing climate. While perhaps most obvious with the debate over the reality of climate change itself and its denial (which we will take up in the following chapter), we can see it everywhere, as our lives now need to change in response to the shifting climate.

Writing a new environmental era

91

The above insight, marking a turning point in my scholarship, teaching, and life, will be the central preoccupation of the second half of this book, as I realized that I needed to turn from past texts to present ones if I wanted to glimpse what the future might hold. This is, of course, dicey business. All sorts of seemingly insignificant texts (such as Walden when it first appeared) will shape the future in ways which we cannot yet understand, much less appreciate. Nonetheless, it is clear that certain texts being written even as you read this will have a profound impact on the future and our ability to move forward to a more harmonious relationship with the planet (i.e. forward to nature). It can and certainly has repeatedly been argued that the most important literature that we as a culture possess was penned by Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Milton, Gaskell, Douglass, Thoreau, and a host of other truly gifted thinkers and extraordinary writers. In a sense, this is true. However, as I suggested in the Introduction through the example of an obscure Renaissance farming manual, altogether different sorts of writings can rival these great books in significance. With this in mind, I would argue that some of the most important texts of our age are, for example, imagining a future where cars no longer play a significant role. In the past few pages, I’ve made a jarring turn from great books to car ads and texts that deny climate change. However, I am firmly of the opinion that literature of this sort in many ways rivals the great books handed down to us over the centuries. Certainly not in beauty or form, but in significance. At the risk of sounding alarmist, the future of life on earth depends on how these texts are written and read. The literature that created our obsession with automobiles and suburbia provides just one example of how environmentally disastrous practices are written into being. Pick nearly any such activity and behind it you will find, if you look long and hard, its history and how it was written into ascendency. The good news is that new discourses are always in the process of challenging and supplanting old ones. Douglass’s is a prime example. This realization got me to thinking. Scholars like me, in spite of the fact that I am a cultural historian, often ironically stand on the sidelines of history. This is not to say that we don’t have opinions, but our professional ones are often directed to the past, and at most perhaps to how the past impacts the present. Consequently, we often fail to play a professional role in directly working to bring about a better future. However, what if we took the bold step of directly entering the game, the culture game, with an eye to helping write into being a better future? For decades now certain scholar-activists have, in various ways, been doing just that. In the past 50 years a range of feminist scholars have tirelessly been working as activists in order to contest patriarchy and misogyny. Why couldn’t environmentally disastrous practices be similarly challenged?

92

Writing a new environmental era

It strikes me that there are two principal ways of offering such challenges. The first, which in some sense is what I have been doing throughout this book, is to first study and then draw attention to worrisome cultural practices and the role that each of us plays in them. If we draw enough attention and open enough eyes, perhaps we can help disrupt these practices. For decades now, feminist scholar-activists have been doing this to great effect. There is another way of challenging worrisome practices that is in ways even bolder. What if, in addition to 1) studying and 2) drawing attention to such practices, we then took the next step of helping to write better ones into being? In so doing, we could directly play a role in helping move our culture forward. While just drawing attention to a troubling cultural practice can certainly be useful, it is not oriented toward the future in the sense that it does not offer anything to supplant it. What if, by offering something new and better, we actually took part in helping to write the future into being and, in so doing, moving us forward to nature? I resolved to try to do just that. Although automobile use first came to mind as a practice sorely in need of rewriting, before I could formulate some sort of intervention, fate intervened (and much for the better, I think). Because I serve on the Sustainability Committee for my university, our Climate Action Plan, which included a detailed assessment of greenhouse gas emissions for the campus, crossed my desk. This report not only calculated the carbon footprint for the immediate campus and its vehicle fleet, but also a range of facilities and activities that support it, including campus housing. On reading it, I was taken aback by one statistic in particular: flying faculty and staff to conferences, talks, and meetings accounted for roughly a third of the total carbon footprint for my campus. It immediately occurred to me that academic air travel was a practice in urgent need of sweeping revision. True, it paled in comparison to automobile use in the U.S. as a climate change problem (then again, everything does), but it felt like a far more manageable problem. With a little luck, perhaps it could in some way be rewritten. Although something of a long shot, I soon resolved to spend at least a couple of years of my life trying. A good deal of what follows in this book will focus on my efforts to do so. While I will be laying out my approach to the problem in this chapter, in the chapter that concludes this book and the Appendix I will be recounting in detail how I rolled up my sleeves and got to work on this surprisingly significant issue. For environmental reasons, it would obviously be ideal if we could simply abandon this practice. The problem is that conferences and lectures are of central importance to academia. Before ideas appear in print, they are often delivered months or even years before as talks at conferences and as invited lectures, where they can elicit lively debate. This has long been the case. When Einstein was feverishly trying to generalize special relativity during the years from 1910 to 1915, he repeatedly presented his incomplete theory at conferences and at lectures so that colleagues could help him work through the problem, which they did to great success. The simple fact is that

Writing a new environmental era

93

academic conferences are essential (and often exciting) breeding grounds for new ideas. They are also an environmental disaster. Returning to the carbon footprint of my campus, all the aforementioned air travel annually releases over 55 million pounds of CO2 or equivalent gases directly into the upper atmosphere, where they contribute most to climate change. Putting 55 million pounds of CO2 into human terms, this is equal to the total annual carbon footprint of a city of 27,500 people in the Philippines. Note that this is more than my campus’s undergraduate, graduate, and faculty populations combined. This issue can also be approached personally. When Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, did the math, he found that twothirds of his annual GHG emissions came from travel to and from conferences and meetings. The remaining third was from his car, electricity use, natural gas for heating his home and cooking, food, sewage, and everything else. Not all scholars travel this much; however, a single roundtrip transcontinental flight releases 1 metric ton of CO2 per coach passenger, which equals half of the recommended annual emissions allowance for each person on the planet if we hope to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degree Celsius (the goal of the Paris Agreement set forth at COP 21). Although GHG emissions obviously vary across individuals and institutions, this is a major issue for academia. Put bluntly, air travel is, environmentally, academia’s biggest dirty little secret. And opting out is generally not much of an option. “Publish or perish” has a less famous corollary: present or perish. At many institutions, conference and lecture presentations are tallied up alongside publications at tenure and other merit reviews. From graduate students advised to network at these events to seasoned scholars delivering the keynotes, conference participation is in academia’s DNA. As the U.S. is home to nearly 5000 colleges and universities, tens of thousands of academic conferences take place every year. Some are quite large. The annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention averages over 7000 participants. And academic conferences are just the tip of the iceberg. Some estimates put the total number of participants at all conferences, seminars, and similar meetings in the U.S. alone at over 200 million annually. Yet, traveling by air is a privilege that few share globally. The overwhelming majority of people on the planet will never step foot in an airplane. Only 5 percent of the world’s population flies annually. Even among Americans, half do not annually fly and just a quarter do so three or more times a year. Unfortunately, academics often find themselves in this last, rarified group because of conference travel. If we were to equate this to ground transportation, we would not be among those walking, biking, or using mass transit, or even those carpooling in hybrid cars. We would be the solitary SUV drivers. And the traditional conference has more than just environmental shortcomings. The cost of airfare from anywhere in the developing world to anywhere in North America or Europe is often greater than the per capita annual income in

94

Writing a new environmental era

these countries. Consequently, scholars from most of the world’s countries, and nearly the entire Global South and developing world, have long been quietly, summarily excluded from international conferences. Even in wealthy countries like the U.S., conference participation is, owing to vagaries in funding, a privilege unequally shared. On reflecting on this situation, I realized that something needed to be done, and done now. It also occurred to me that, as with the aforementioned issue of car use, technology alone simply could not solve the problem. The fact is that it would be terrific if this were an issue that could be tackled and resolved through some tour de force application of new technology, perhaps a new type of carbon-neutral, electric aircraft. The problem is that no such technological marvel is hovering on the near horizon. True, small experimental electric aircraft have flown, but there is no expectation that there will be electric airliners traveling over 500 miles per hour anytime soon, if ever. If not electric power, then perhaps biofuels. In early 2016, United Airlines introduced a limited number of commercial flights burning 30 percent biofuel (the remaining 70 percent being petroleum-derived jet fuel). However, the source of the biofuel obviously needs to be taken into account, as using farmland for fuel rather than food for a hungry planet is clearly problematic. Moreover, Paul Crutzen, the chemist and Nobel laureate who coined the term “anthropocene,” has argued that the production of biofuels contributes more to climate change through the release of nitrous oxide than is saved by their use as a substitute for fossil fuels. There is also the possibility of making the current generation of airliners more efficient. The British airline Easy Jet, for example, has proposed using electric motors in the wheels of its airliners, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, in order to taxi before and after landing. Since an average of 4 percent of the fuel expended during a flight is for taxiing, this could result in real, if modest, savings. More significantly, the airplane manufacturer Airbus is working to reduce the weight of its airliners, thus making them more energy efficient. The Airbus A350XWB, which is composed of over 53 percent lightweight composite material, promises to be 25 percent more fuel efficient as a result. Let’s assume that it becomes possible, using the above and still-to-emerge technologies, to engineer a 50 percent cut in net emissions from airliners by 2050. This is in fact the most optimistic scenario that has been entertained by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The problem is that the number of passengers and flights is growing at a much faster rate. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) notes that worldwide there were 3.3 billion airline passengers in 2014. The IATA projects that number will more than double by 2034, jumping to 7.3 billion—in the process thereby canceling out emerging technological gains much faster than they can come into effect. It is clear that technological solutions to the problem of air travel will not likely be sufficient in themselves. Instead, we need to ask why it is that people (in this case, scholars) are doing all this flying. It might seem more expedient to

Writing a new environmental era

95

jump right in with an admonishment that we should all stop flying, thereby solving the problem. However, without first understanding why we are engaging in this practice on a wholesale level, such a prescription may well go unheeded. More importantly, if we understand what is gained through this cultural practice, we may find ourselves in a position to suggest alternatives that can be of more help with this issue than anything that United Airlines, Easy Jet, or Airbus has to offer. There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to curtailing anthropogenic climate change: 1) to deploy technology that either reduces or sequesters GHG emissions or 2) to reengineer a range of the cultural practices that are responsible for high levels of GHG emissions. A great deal of attention has been given to the first approach, sometimes with the promise that we will not have to resort to the second. Technological solutions can be appealing because they sometimes come with the promise that we will not have to change much in our day-to-day lives. Transitioning from a 5000-pound gas-guzzling Cadillac SUV to a 5000-pound electric Tesla SUV requires little change on our part. Nonetheless, this nonchange can make us feel good about ourselves, perhaps even smug. This in part accounts for the appeal of the techno-approach (and success of the Tesla, for those that can afford them). Asking us to make major changes to our day-to-day lives is another matter altogether. It is hardly surprising that the knee-jerk response is often to resist change or even deny that it is necessary. Part of the success of climate change denial literature comes from the fact that many people are predisposed to accept its arguments because they are themselves in a state of denial. Since it can be hard to come to grips with the fact that there may be horrific environmental consequences to how we live our lives, a knee-jerk response is simply to deny that the problem exists at all. This is especially the case when the suggested change involves us having to do without what we have been raised to value and desire, like cars and beef. Is it any wonder that tens of millions of Americans are thus in a state of denial regarding the reality of climate change? But what if the required changes are both better environmentally and more desirable? What if they could even make us feel better in the bargain? As I pondered how best to try to make an intervention in the time-honored (but environmentally disastrous) practice of the academic conference, these questions kept echoing in my head. The traditional academic conference certainly has much to offer. If it didn’t, it could never have become a core practice of my profession. However, it’s far from perfect. While I was initially preoccupied with its environmental shortcomings, the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that this ubiquitous practice had a host of major problems. It soon occurred to me that some sort of virtual, online conference could have a dramatically reduced carbon footprint. The upcoming chapters on air travel will explain in detail the online conference model that made the most

96

Writing a new environmental era

sense to me and our experience with it at UCSB (at the time of this writing, we have staged five proof-of-concept events). For now, it is enough to note that this approach replaces traditional face-to-face events with an online, nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference model that has three main parts: 1) Speakers record their own talks, which are made available on a conference website. 2) Conference “goers” watch the online talks at a time and place of their choosing. 3) Participants contribute to online, text-based question-andanswer (Q&A) sessions while the conference is open, which is usually for two or three weeks. Although admittedly unusual, this approach has significant advantages over the traditional conference. Here are a few of the most significant: 1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

The environmental advantages are pretty staggering. Our pilot NCN events had greenhouse gas emissions that were less than 1 percent of their traditional counterparts. If renewable electricity were used to power the computers and transmit the data (all of UCSB’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2025), emissions could be reduced to 1/10 of 1 percent. In other words, 1000 NCN conferences would have the same carbon footprint as just one fly-in event. Without the requirement of travel, scholars can participate from nearly anywhere on the globe, as prerecorded talks can be viewed at any time and text-based Q&A sessions extending over multiple weeks eliminate the challenge presented by world time zones, thereby facilitating truly global interaction. One of the pilot NCN conferences had participants from six continents. This approach is generally more accessible than its traditional counterparts, as a) eliminating travel also eliminates many hurdles to physical accessibility, b) the prerecorded talks are closed captioned for hard-of-hearing individuals, and c) with respect to the visually impaired, conference websites can be optimized for audio screen readers and talks can also be made available as audio podcasts. Similar to open-access journals, the archive created by NCN conferences (both recorded talks and Q&A transcripts) give nearly anyone anywhere on the globe, as long as internet access is available, instant and lasting access to all the cutting-edge material introduced at the event. In contrast, traditional conferences are often closed-door affairs open to only a privileged few. In many respects, this online conference archive thus challenges the need for the print publication of select conference proceedings. On average, the pilot conferences’ Q&A sessions generated three times more discussion than takes place at a traditional Q&A. A few sessions generated more than ten or fifteen times more, making clear that, while different from a traditional conference, meaningful personal interaction was not only possible, but in certain respects far superior.

Writing a new environmental era

6)

7)

8)

97

Because the cost of a NCN conference is considerably less than its traditional counterparts, a range of groups and institutions, such as schools in the developing world currently lacking the significant financial resources required to coordinate international conferences, are now able to do so. Our pilot conferences were cobbled together largely using free, opensource software. Such events can result in far more efficient use of a conference goer’s time, as one can quickly scan through the text of a talk or a Q&A session for material of interest. Consequently, this NCN approach allows us to listen to all the talks of interest to us—and none of those that are not—in the order, and at a time, of our choosing. Conference talks can be closed captioned in more than one language. Although this was not done for the pilot conferences, future events are being planned with talks by speakers in their native languages that will be closed captioned in English. In addition, we plan to have all talks captioned in Spanish as well as English. Consequently, this NCN approach opens up the possibly of true multilingual conferences.

On reflecting on these advantages, it soon became clear that this conference approach was not just environmentally better, but better in a host of ways for all involved. It addressed some of the downright nasty and very worrisome aspects of the traditional academic conference, such as the fact that these events have long excluded scholars from most of the developing world. Not only has the developing world lost out, so has everyone else, as much of the world’s collective brainpower is excluded from these academic gatherings. On standing back from the particular issue of academic conferences, it occurred to me that changing our lives in response to climate change suggests to many people that we will need to do without, or at least do with less. But what if we got something back, perhaps got a lot back, in the bargain? On balance, even without the environmental advantages, these might be deals well worth taking. Reflecting on this situation, I realized how breathtaking this process could be, as we are in the position to rejuvenate a host of tired practices by rewriting them in new, exciting ways. Although our primary motivation might be environmental, opportunities for all sorts of improvements to our culture and lives are possible. In other words, let’s just not fix climate change, let’s fix a whole range of things and social ills in the process of our moving forward to nature. While the humanities have a central role to play here, it is clear that the humanities cannot do this alone. It is, to adapt C. P. Snow’s famous phrase, a true “two-culture” project. Without a range of computer and network technology that was cobbled together for the purpose, our NCN conferences would not have been possible to even imagine. Indeed, certain limitations of the traditional conference only came into relief for me when online alternatives were considered. Alternately, greener technology (in the form of the next generation of more efficient aircraft, mentioned above) without greener cultural practices

98

Writing a new environmental era

(like a new generation of conferences that sidestep air travel altogether) is clearly not enough by itself in this case. In short, what is needed is to think outside the box by way of a joint applied-science, applied-humanities approach. This is arguably not only the case with air travel, but also with ground transportation, housing, food systems, clothing, and so forth. In fact, once you start thinking about it, it becomes clear that by working together the sciences and humanities could solve scores of our most pressing problems, environmental and otherwise. In the final chapter on “Going Nowhere Fast,” I will explore my personal efforts to move forward to nature by reengineering the particular cultural practice of the academic conference. My goal is to make these events not only more environmentally sound but advantageous in a host of additional ways, such as by being both more egalitarian and accessible. This concluding material also offers up an answer to a question posed at the opening of this chapter: How do we begin bringing about a new and better environmental era? In a general way, this chapter answered the question: we need to write it into being. If you are curious how in practice a single person could go about doing this, the material on air travel recounts my efforts in detail. I like to think of it as a case study in the joint applied-science, appliedhumanities approach that I am proposing. Before outlining my efforts to rewrite the traditional academic conference in detail in the chapter that concludes this book, I want to first address another way that literature specialists like me can intervene in climate change. To understand how, we need to take up its denial, which is currently a thriving industry.

6 CONFRONTING DENIAL

A great battle is underway. Millions of lives hang in the balance. Hundreds of millions risk becoming refugees in what may well be the greatest diaspora in human history. The world economy may teeter; entire nations disappear. As in all wars, animals and plants will also suffer; tens of thousands of species will become extinct. No place on the face of the globe will be left untouched, from the upper limits of the atmosphere to the deepest ocean floors. What will cause all this? Climate change brought about by a range of human practices. To mitigate as best we can the above and a great many more consequences, we need, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other experts, to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit). To do this, something like 88 percent of the earth’s coal reserves, 35 percent of its oil, and 52 percent of its natural gas must remain in the ground, unextracted. The problem is that these resources are of enormous economic value. In 2014, five of the seven wealthiest companies (in terms of revenues) on the planet were in the fossil fuel business: Sinopec, ExxonMobil, China National Petroleum Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, and British Petroleum. All of them primarily measure their worth not in terms of money in the bank, but rather by the value of unextracted fossil fuels that they control. If we mandated that the above percentages of these resources remained in the ground, it would staggeringly reduce the values of these companies. Imagine having $100 in the bank and being faced with the prospect that 88 percent of it could never be taken out. For all practical purposes, you would now have $12, not $100. You would not likely be pleased. Not surprisingly, these companies are not at all happy. Why is this an issue of special concern to literary critics? I referred to this as a battle not because we need to wage war on climate change (although we do

100

Writing a new environmental era

indeed need to do just that); rather, because a battle of words—my stock in trade—is underway. On the one hand, groups and individuals, myself included, are calling for actions to check climate change. In opposition, others are either denying that our climate is changing or denying that the environmental change is human-caused (anthropogenic). At first glance, this may seem to be a battle for scientists to wage with the climate change deniers. However, the underlying science is no longer seriously in question. As you may have heard (the paper has been referenced in the media more than any other on climate change), a 2013 study that looked at roughly 12,000 journal articles dealing with climate change found that 97 percent of these scientists concluded that it is real, underway, and is principally anthropogenic. The challenge, however, is convincing the public that anthropogenic climate change is real. To say that this is an urgent matter is a gross understatement; global emissions must peak by 2020 if we are to have a chance at holding temperature rise at 1½ to 2 degrees Celsius. Given the urgency, we need to act right now, not even a few years from now. Unfortunately, many Americans question whether anthropogenic climate change is real. Consequently, when ranking the policy priorities that Americans believe their leaders should be addressing, climate change is not even in the top 20, being trumped by terrorism, economy, jobs, education, Social Security, budget deficit, healthcare costs, Medicare, reducing crime, the poor and needy, military, immigration, race relations, world breakdowns, tax reform, the influence of lobbyists, transportation, money in politics, scientific research, and moral breakdown in America. (Terrorism, incidentally, is the No. 1 priority for most Americans, which is why certain politicians love to harp on it.) Even in terms of environmental problems, concern over climate change and global warming rank surprisingly low in the minds of the American public, being surpassed by six other issues: pollution of drinking water; contamination of soil and water by toxic waste; pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs; air pollution; extinction of plant and animal species; and the loss of tropical rain forests. The situation is in some sense even worse globally, as 40 percent of adults worldwide have never even heard of climate change. Why are so many individuals unaware, unconcerned, or in denial about climate change? Americans are clearly being influenced by a massive campaign of disinformation that has been ongoing for decades now, supported by a range of groups that includes a number of conservative think tanks (generally referenced as CTTs), such as the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which are in part funded by fossil fuel interests. Dating from the Reagan administration and earlier, these groups have long seen themselves, to quote the Cato Institute, as the defenders of “America’s heritage of individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government.” In practice, the Heartland Institute has, for example, fought bitterly against issues like tobacco regulation, which was one of its earliest initiatives in the 1980s, and has been an organizer of Tea Party protests.

Confronting denial

101

With respect to climate change, a 2013 study by Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques, which looked at 108 English-language books denying anthropogenic climate change dating from the 1980s to 2010, found verifiable links to CTT groups for 87 percent of those emerging from publishing houses (links with selfpublished denial books, now proliferating, are more difficult to trace). That number was once even higher: 100 percent of all books from the 1980s and 95 percent from the 1990s. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; CTTs support a range of websites, blogs, and other online activities, as well as more traditional advertising. A billboard campaign by the Heartland Institute featured a photograph of convicted “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who thinks of himself as an environmentalist, beside the words, “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” A television commercial by the Competitive Enterprise Institute argued that the greenhouse gas CO2 is not, in fact, a contributing factor to climate change. To the contrary, it is represented as “essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breath it in … They call it pollution. We call it life.” When I opened this chapter by referencing a great battle now underway, which I then called a battle of words, I had this denial literature in mind and the groups and individuals funding and generating it. Many, many millions of dollars are annually being spent by CTTs and other groups to support the campaign. And many thousands of pages of texts are being generated in order to cast doubt on the validity of climate change—which they have done with astonishing success. The Climate Change Reconsidered trilogy, a cornerstone text published directly by the Heartland Institute, which purports to contain “the largest-ever survey of scientific research on the likely causes and consequences of global warming,” is nearly 3000 pages in length. Ultimately, as years pass and the real-world consequences of anthropogenic climate change become impossible to deny, the CTTs and their allies will lose this war. However, each year that they sway public opinion away from the truth regarding climate change and our acting on that knowledge, the more severe will be the consequence, as many more trillions of pounds of fossil fuels will annually be extracted and burned while we wait. From the point of view of the fossil fuel industry, their goal is to take every dollar that they possibly can out of the ground before legislation stops them from doing so. How much will be extracted? Quite a bit depends on this debate over the nature and validly of climate change. What is fascinating here is that there is no real debate. As noted above, the thousands of scientists researching this issue have concluded beyond any reasonable doubt (they certainly no longer debate the issue among themselves) that anthropogenic climate change represents a real, pressing, and significant global danger. Nonetheless, a media spectacle is being staged by climate change deniers with the goal of influencing public opinion. Unlike many debates, winning over opinion to one side or the other isn’t necessarily the goal. True, on the one side, scientists would like to convince us that anthropogenic climate change is indeed real, but, as far as deniers are concerned, all that matters is that a broad swath of the public is confused or unsure whether human beings are indeed significantly changing our

102

Writing a new environmental era

planet’s climate. In this sense, their goal is to create doubt, as an individual doubting the validity and scope of a problem is unlikely to make sweeping life changes and support the spending of trillions of tax dollars in an attempt to remedy it. In the case of climate change, two discourses are competing for the prize of writing the future into being. With the November 2016 election of Donald Trump, it is clear that one side is currently winning in the United States. Although a number of states, cities, corporations, universities, and millions of individuals are lining up against federal action, Trump’s actions will nonetheless have a profound influence on our nation’s policies for years to come. Globally, however, as nearly every other country on the planet has adopted and ratified the Paris Agreement laid out at the COP 21, the other side is winning. But how, exactly, can a literary and cultural historian like me help? I study ideas and the cultures that create and maintain them. The notion that we can get back to nature (which we explored in Part I) is an example, as writers have been fostering this idea for centuries. My job is to try to understand why and how they went about doing this. How specifically, for example, they took an idea that they inherited from their culture and previous writers and reshaped it in a way that was influential. I also look at the reception history of ideas in order to try to understand how these ideas are received (or rejected) by the culture that gave birth to them, as well as the cultures that inherit these texts. Why, for example, Walden received little attention when it was first published yet became a cult classic over 100 years later. At the risk of stating the obvious, in order to make a proper study of these texts, one needs to read carefully. More than anything else, as a Ph.D. student I was apprenticed in the art of careful, thoughtful, and informed reading. With respect to the past, literary and cultural scholars like me can use these skills to understand how past texts shaped their future, now our present. If we apply, as I suggested in the previous chapter, these same skills to the texts of the present, we can catch a glimpse of how our environmental future is being fiercely debated and written into being. Aside from the individual arguments and issues, the larger debate centers on whether our species does indeed want to move forward to nature by forging a future relationship with the earth and its nonhuman beings that is far more harmonious than our present one. My focus in this chapter is on reading, not writing. While the previous chapter took up the issue of how we might rewrite everyday practices (such as automobile and air travel) to make them more environmentally sound, in this case I want to better understand the debate over climate change through careful reading. While studying this debate may sound like a job just for scholars, it soon occurred to me that all responsible citizens need to direct their attention to this debated issue and hone their skills as careful readers in order to make sense of it. This is a job for everyone, as climate change will impact every human being on the planet (now and in the immediate future).

Confronting denial

103

Once this realization and the implications of the climate change debate became clear to me, I decided to explore it in the classroom by putting together a course that focused not on the literature of Shakespeare or Milton, but on the climate change debate. As far as I know, this was the first course of its type offered in a U.S. university. The idea was to apprentice students into the art of careful reading so that they could develop an informed opinion of their own. I gave students a range of readings, from the official IPCC report on climate change to a host of writings denying its validity. Their job was simple: read through to the truth. The first iteration of this course took place a year before the inauguration of Donald Trump. After the election, the importance of the course (and why I needed to continue teaching it) came into striking relief for me. I had no choice but to sadly conclude that teachers like me have in many ways failed the American public, who seem increasingly unable to reliably differentiate real news from fake, unequivocal facts from “alternative” ones, or a random correlation from a causal relationship. Any college-educated American deserving of the degree should be able to carefully read through the facts concerning an issue like climate change to conclude that it represents a real and present danger to our country and planet. Indeed, a high school education should be enough to sharpen the necessary reading skills. Yet, a surprisingly broad swath of Americans can’t read through to the truth, leaving them easy prey for well-founded special interests intent on swaying their opinion—and taking their vote. As noted above, scientists have done their job, presenting their sobering findings to the public. Unfortunately, this is where things start to fall apart. Thanks to the aforementioned well-financed campaign of disinformation, bookstores and now especially the internet are filled with conflicting perspectives on the issue. This is where I come in, as teachers like me should have been outfitting students (i.e. present and future voters) with the tools needed to read through the facts, both real and alternative ones, to get at the truth of the matter. As recent headlines have made clear, climate change is just one of many issues on which the public is being duped through seemingly endless disinformation, fake news, and outright lies. Consequently, regarding my profession, I have come to see that teaching how to read is in many respects as important as teaching what we read. Although I still regularly teach great works of literature, my classes are increasingly devoted to apprenticing students into the art of careful, informed reading. Long after our aging powerbrokers are dead and buried, today’s students will inherit a world shaped by contemporary decisions on issues like coal and solar. Consequently, carefully considering how they are framed and represented is of crucial importance. Examples include characterizing the development of alternate energy as, to quote our President, “a big mistake,” and unabashedly endorsing “clean coal” as something that actually exists. Returning to the idea of moving forward to a more harmonious relationship with nature and the question of how to begin this process, it became clear to me that we first need to resolve to move in this direction. Sadly, we have not

104

Writing a new environmental era

yet done so in the U.S. To the contrary, the mantra to “make America great again” seems to imagine a future that resembles the past. The goal is to turn back the clock to relive the past in all its imagined greatness. It is even imagined, like the 20th century, as being largely powered by fossil fuels, rather than based on the renewable energy of the 21st century. The present moment in history is so interesting and exciting because the nations of our world (not including the U.S., unfortunately) have collectively resolved to work toward bringing about a better future environmentally. In other words, they have vowed, at least regarding climate change, to make significant efforts to move forward to nature. My course on climate change literature was an admittedly humble attempt to intervene in history. The idea was to apprentice students in the art of careful reading so that they might, as informed and knowledgeable citizens, play a role in shaping the world to come. As this particular course (which I am again teaching as I am writing this) focused on climate change, the idea was to help us move forward to nature. Of course, I realize that apprenticing a few dozen students in the art of careful reading is not going to make much of an intervention in history. However, as I have come to realize over the years, we all need to do what we can to write a better world into being. Perhaps surprisingly, teaching reading can help. I would argue that it can help a lot. I usually start by explaining to students that one of the keys to effective reading, regardless of whether the text at hand is a Victorian novel or content on a website, is that the process be active. When reading for pleasure, it is perfectly fine to enter into an imaginative world and just sit back and enjoy your time there. However, in reading critically, it is necessary to carefully consider what the author and text are doing. Authors have enormous power, as they can, one word at a time, influence each step of a reader’s experience of a text. In this sense, an author is like a guide walking us through what may be unknown territory. They not only decide what we see and when we see it, they are also in a position to influence how we see it through their careful representations. Jane Austen has a great deal of control over whether we like or dislike Mr. Darcy, and she hides the truth about what a good guy he is until she thinks it’s the right moment for her readers to learn it. It is testament to her consummate skill that readers first recoil from a character who by the end of Pride and Prejudice becomes one of the most beloved in all of English literature. The more skillful the author, the more power they have over the representation and hence also over the reader. In order to understand where the author is taking us and why, we need to do a good bit of investigative digging. This is in fact a cornerstone of literary analysis. For example, knowing that the author of a Victorian novel was an outspoken racist or misogynist can be of great help in approaching the text and where the author is taking us. Conveniently, literary scholars have already done much of this work for many of the texts that we read in literature classes. In the case of recent climate change texts, however, this obligation largely falls to the reader.

Confronting denial

105

I suggest to students that they begin this process of investigative reading by addressing the following issues. In general, these are things that we should all keep in mind when reading. Hence, they are pretty obvious, but nonetheless worth listing: 1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

Author. What do we know about the author or authors of a text? While it can only take a minute (literally) to do an online search to learn about a person, the results can be revealing. Do they have expertise in the area? What are their credentials? Do they seem credible? What else have they written? Where have their other texts appeared? What are their affiliations (groups or companies with which they may be involved)? Are they funded? If so, by whom? Finally, do we even know the author? If not, then many of these questions can be addressed to the publication venue. Publication. What do we know about the place (periodical, website, publishing house, etc.) where the text appeared? As with learning about the author, a quick online search can be eye-opening. For example, is a publication or website sponsored by, or affiliated with, a particular group or organization (as this can be somewhat unclear, we might have to do some investigative digging)? If sponsored, does the sponsor have a vested interest in this subject? What other sort of texts does the venue publish? Is there anything that links the various texts that appear in this publication? What do you know about the reputation of the publication? Audience. Most authors (and publications) have an imagined audience, which is the group that they both imagine will read them and hope will be moved in some way by what they read. What is the imagined audience of the text at hand? Does it seem likely to influence this group? Why or why not? Specifically, how is the text vectored toward this audience? Supervision. Has the text been vetted in any way? For example, major publication houses employ seasoned editors to carefully scrutinize books before publication. Major newspapers do the same and go one step further by having fact-checkers carefully research each article’s claim and reference. Similarly, scholarly texts are generally peer-reviewed before appearing in print. In contrast, many blogs are entirely written by a single person without any oversight. References. Does the author(s) supply a list of references or refer to other works? Are the references credible? Who are the authors of these references and where do they appear? Are the references appropriate? In other words, does the reference in fact support what the author claims? Authors will sometimes reference a very credible source but it may have little or nothing to do with their argument. As with the author and publication, some digging into the references may be necessary.

In addition to investigating the above, it is important to realize that authors can use a variety of different techniques and appeals to sway or influence readers. Here are a few that I suggest students be on the lookout for:

106

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

8)

9)

Writing a new environmental era

Common sense. We need to be wary of appeals to common sense when not supported by facts. An example would be the argument that because meteorologists cannot accurately forecast weather even a week or two in advance it thus follows that attempting to predict climate change decades in the future is simply impossible. Even a cursory look into the subject reveals that climate modeling and meteorology are separate fields with completely different methodologies and results. As careful readers, our job is to look into such facts. Logic. We need to be careful not to be swayed by logical fallacies, such as confusing correlation for causality. For example, most children in the U.S. showing symptoms of autism have received a series of disease immunizations. This simple correlation does not prove that these immunizations are the cause of autism. In fact, study after study has shown that immunizations are in no way causally related to autism. Emotion. Authors will often make appeals to emotion as much as they do to logic and reason. Is this being done? Why? What is gained? How, exactly, are emotions being leveraged by the author? Facts. An author will often make a number of statements of fact. Are they in fact facts? How do you know? Can they be corroborated? A little online searching should reveal if they are accurate or not. Inclusions. Why has the author(s) included what they have? Do the inclusions all line up in support of the author’s position? If so, it may suggest that they are being cherry-picked in order to support the position. Emphasis. Related to what an author includes is what they emphasize. How and why has the author emphasized what they have? Specifically, what do they gain by this maneuver? Omissions. What has the author(s) omitted? In some cases, omissions can be glaring. Often, however, it will again require some digging to find what the author desires to keep in the dark. Downplaying. Related to omissions, authors will sometimes mention a glaring issue only to downplay its significance. What is the author downplaying and why? Is this maneuver successful? Misdirection. Is the author staying on point or directing you to something else? If so, why?

Although much of the above may seem like common sense (there is nothing particularly profound about these suggestions), this is not to say that reading with all of the above in mind is easy. To the contrary, it’s hard work. Attending to all of these issues could double or triple the time that it takes to read a text. There was once a time when a good deal of this work was unnecessary. If you got your news from a credible source, say the New York Times or Washington Post, there was little reason to question the integrity of the publication, author, editorial supervision, references, and so forth. On the rare occasions when an author intentionally played with, let alone fabricated, facts, it was itself a newsworthy event

Confronting denial

107

that may well have resulted in his or her dismissal and the paper itself being publicly discredited. Now, however, we are in a strange era when our President denounces publications like these as fake news. In response to this bewildering state of affairs, I introduced a second course with an even more ambitious goal: to not only read through to the truth, but to also take on the formidable job of finding it. For the first course, I provided students with a Reader containing a range of carefully chosen, hopefully illuminating texts in order to help walk them through the issue. Unfortunately, in life no one hands us a Reader when we come to a confusing state of affairs. With that in mind, I tried a different approach. This course took up a simple but important question: How do we know what we know? We explored this question by learning about individual issues relating to climate change, such as the coal industry and its role in our future. First, what do we know about this industry? Most students (like most people) know little about coal. Moreover, what they do know is sometimes wrong. For example, the majority of coal used to generate electricity in the U.S. today is not mined by men working in dangerous underground tunnels, but rather though open-pit mining on the surface (which, incidentally, is also very dangerous work and environmentally disastrous). Starting with what they knew, both right and wrong, students began to investigate the topic. There was once a time when this meant that students would spend hours (perhaps days) in the campus library doing research. Now, however, the world’s knowledge is just mouse clicks away. This is not to say, however, that online research is easier, more effective, or even quicker. To the contrary, students encounter an overwhelming amount of material online, some of it deeply in conflict. Their job is to find credible sources. In an era when all reference to “greenhouse gases” and “global warming” have been removed from the EPA website, finding reliable sources can be quite a challenge. There once was a time when I told students that any .gov website was a trusted source. That time has now passed. Consequently, before we can know anything, such as how competitive solar is with coal (and hence what the future might hold for these two energy sources), we first need to find where to learn it. At the risk of stating the obvious, in order to answer the question of how do we know what we know, we need to be able to trace back to where we acquired this knowledge. If this is not reliable information from a credible source, then what we know may well not be worth knowing. Consequently, it is essential that we are very clear on how we know what we know (i.e. I know it because I read it on the EPA’s website). I know, this is very different from teaching students how to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Consequently, more than one colleague has questioned whether I am still teaching English literature. A literature course without assigned readings of any sort is certainly unusual. And what we do read is certainly not what most people would call Literature (with a capital “L”) at

108

Writing a new environmental era

all. Not only colleagues, but some students were taken aback by the class. Once started, a few immediately dropped the course when they realized what it involved. I am, of course, not unsympathetic to reading great literature. However, now more than ever we need to hone our skills at reading not-so-great literature. In particular, we all (myself included) need to get better at finding and critically reading information online. While this may sound like a rather trivial sort of reading when compared to the complex literary analysis that specialists use when reading Shakespeare and Milton, it is arguably as important (though, of course, in an entirely different way). At the risk of again sounding alarmist, the future of democracy and our planet depends on all of us acquiring and using these reading skills. While we need to address climate change denial literature in the classroom, we scholars also need to research it as well. Sadly, literary scholars who focus on environmental issues (ecocritics) have surprisingly shown little interest in doing so. If you happen to have read Merchants of Doubt, which was coauthored by Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, both of which I heartily recommend, or related though often less well-known works, like the aforementioned study by Dunlap and Jacques that appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, you already consequently know a good bit about climate change. If, however, you have relied on literary scholars (ecocritics) for engagement with texts denying climate change, this may all be news, as precious little attention has been given to these denial texts and the battle they are supporting. In general, literary critics have been surprisingly slow to engage with the issue of climate change. As Timothy Clark notes in the Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, the first “academic article directly on the topic of climate change ever to appear in the leading ecocritical journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment” (ISLE) was not published until 2009 (as it happens, I authored that essay). Given that the first denial book, Sherwood Idso’s Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe was published in 1982, literary critics— myself certainly included—were startlingly slow in taking up what may well be the most important issue of this century. Fortunately, this is now changing. Just five years after they published the first article on the issue, in a milestone “Global Warming Special Issue” of ISLE in 2014, editors Scott Slovic and Kathleen Dean Moore made an impassioned appeal for ecocritics to immediately take up the issue of climate change. “What would it mean,” asked Slovic, “to drop everything and seek a new voice and a new vision of reality in response to recognition of a global crisis?” (1). Moore was even more poignant in her plea: What does this moment in history ask of us in particular, we writers and scholars, members of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment? Can we hide out below decks, persevering in whatever task

Confronting denial

109

we signed on to do, even as we brace against the lurch of the ship? Or are we called to join the effort to stop climate change, putting our literary skill and moral muscle to new and necessary work? And if we are to help with the great turning, what is our work exactly? (3) I keep returning to this issue of ISLE; it as informative as it is stirring. In particular, I repeatedly find myself reflecting on Moore’s pithy question: “What is our work exactly?” By way of the diverse writings that they anthologized in this issue, Slovic and Moore offered an answer. Instead of the scholarly articles that usually begin ISLE, the issue opens with over 30 creative works of diverse genres, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, before moving to a critical section that includes an essay by John Sitter considering Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Patrick D. Murphy on Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Agnes Woolley on Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, and Nels Anchor Christensen on James Galvin’s The Meadow and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. As I applaud the fact that concerned individuals from across the arts and humanities are taking up the issue of climate change, I both appreciate the rationale behind the organization of this ISLE volume and sympathize with Moore’s declaration “that literature is a means by which cultures carry on a complicated, collaborative discourse about what is true and what is right—and what is not” (3, her emphasis), even though I imagine that her reference to “what is true and what is right” might raise a few critical eyebrows. Nonetheless, if the last few decades of literary study have taught us anything about approaching texts, it is that all sorts are worthy of study, not just literature penned by the likes of Samuel Johnson and Barbara Kingsolver. Many, many illustrations could be given here, but the example of postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak’s move away from canonical literature, such as the poetry of W.B. Yeats (the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation and first book in the 1970s), to look to a broad range of texts policing the boundaries between colonized and colonizer, between the subaltern other and normative self, is now rightly the stuff of legend in academia. Building momentum in the same decade that saw the publication of the first climate change-denial book, Spivak made clear that literary critics could engage with fraught political issues by way of a broad array of texts, such as official documents of State. Of course, Spivak was not the first scholar to make this move, but, as she was one of the harbingers of a generation of such critics, she is an inspiring example. More recent works like Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, which approaches postcolonial concerns from the perspective of environmental justice, have made clear that ecocritics can also make important cultural contributions. By looking to the writings of novelists like Arundhati Roy and Indra Sinha, while at the same time considering activists such as Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, Nixon was able to make a much-needed environmental intervention, which would simply have not been possible had Nixon limited his archive to works like novels.

110

Writing a new environmental era

Nonetheless, with respect to the debate over climate change, ecocritics have for the most part been sitting on the sidelines of what is shaping up as one of the most important debates of this century. This is more than a little unfortunate. Because much needs to be considered in this battle of words over climate change and its denial, we are uniquely situated to make a crucial contribution. This is not to say that climate change is not now being taken up by ecocritics, though it is often through fiction that touches on the issue (such as cli-fi novels). Sadly, however, there has been little direct engagement by ecocritics with the battle over the American public’s perception of climate change. I am not sure why this is the case. Perhaps it is because arguments denying climate change are imagined by ecocritics as being simplistic with little or no factual support. To the contrary, as I only discovered when I began reading them, the arguments are often clever and rooted in incontrovertible fact. But even if they were not, they would still be worthy of our attention. Quite a bit of 19th-century American literature written in support of slavery would have seemed simply ludicrous to many informed readers at the time. However, this did not make it any less effective or dangerous. Surprisingly, as it turns out, denial literature is often aimed at informed, educated readers. In fact, it is especially effective at convincing this group in certain cases. Nowhere is this clearer than with individuals who self-identify as Republicans. A 2015 Gallup poll revealed that 23 percent of Republicans with a high school education (or less) worry about “global warming a great deal.” Surprisingly, only a third of that number (8 percent) with a college education say the same. Similarly, agreement with the statements “Global warming will never happen” and “Global warming is caused by natural causes” jumped roughly 12 percent for the college-educated. This jump toward denial is clearly being facilitated by literature with this aim. Not surprisingly, having been exposed to it, college-educated Republicans believe that they are especially well informed on the issue. As the Gallup pollsters noted, “college graduates who are Republicans are actually more likely than college graduates who are Democrats to say they understand a great deal about the issue” of climate change. Consequently, as fewer than one in twelve of college-educated Republicans is losing sleep over global warming, from the point of view of individuals like me who are concerned about the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, dubbed “climate change alarmists” in denial literature, this battle is not going well. My courses that focus on the literature of climate change denial were designed to bring this issue into the classroom. As researchers, ecocritics also need to turn their attention to the literature on all sides of this debate. In many ways, this would foster an ecocriticism focused on how certain literature of our era, especially literature intent on influencing policy, is not just debating, but shaping our environmental future. Whether we decide to take on the formidable challenge of attempting to move forward to nature hinges on this debate and its literature. Hence, we need to give it the attention that it deserves.

Confronting denial

111

The following chapter returns to my current hobbyhorse: my efforts to rewrite a common practice (the academic conference) to make it not only more environmentally sound, but better in a host of additional ways.

7 GOING NOWHERE FAST

In May 2016, a conference on climate change was staged at my school, the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). Had this been a traditional fly-in conference, its speakers would have collectively traveled over 300,000 miles, generating the equivalent of over 100,000 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the process. A conference taking up the issue of climate change while simultaneously contributing to the problem to such a degree would be, at least as far as I am concerned, simply unconscionable. In contrast, this conference took a digital approach. Because it took place online (the talks were prerecorded; the question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions interactive), conference travel was unnecessary. Consequently, total conference greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were approximately 1 percent of what they would have been as a traditional, fly-in event. Since conference travel is a significant source of GHG emissions for most universities, the widespread adoption of such a nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference approach could keep billions of pounds of GHG from annually being released. Given that the environmental advantages of this approach are so great, the time has come to think long and hard about how we might rewrite the traditional conference for the 21st century using online technology, especially as this time-honored practice is showing its age in other ways, such as through a host of cultural shortcomings. The conference model described in detail in this chapter and the Appendix is by no means perfect. It was imagined as a proof-ofconcept to confirm that an online conference could compete with traditional events. Now that we have staged five such conferences, it is clear that they can. In a more general sense, it was imagined as a proof-of-concept that a joint applied-science, applied-humanities approach could be brought to bear on realworld problems. In some sense, there is nothing new about this sort of approach, as

Going nowhere fast

113

new technology (if it is to succeed) must take into account how human beings will use and interface with it. However, this often originates with the applied science of technology. In our case, however, the process originated by identifying a particular cultural practice and then imagining how it might be rewritten. After that, a range of off-the-shelf technologies were considered and ultimately deployed. This approach also drew heavily from the social sciences, as I coordinated all of our NCN conferences with my friend John Foran, who is a Professor of Sociology at UCSB. The underlying technologies behind this NCN conference approach are hardly new. Consequently, an event of this sort could have been (and in some cases similar events were) staged a decade or more before the 2016 UCSB conference. Thus, there may be a temptation to dismiss the approach as simplistic and dated, especially as there are exciting, cutting-edge technologies on the horizon that might, for example, allow us to interact at events like this by way of lifelike avatars, perhaps in three-dimensional (3-D) virtual reality. However, the conference model described here can easily be implemented now, using largely open-source software. In this sense, its simplicity is one of its greatest advantages. With a little ingenuity, it can be done with near zero cost. The goal of the conference was to encourage as many individuals as possible— either as coordinators or speakers—to take part in NCN conferences. Consequently, a university in the developing world with a limited budget and largely outmoded desktop computers or an individual with a smartphone or tablet costing less than 50 U.S. dollars are as well positioned to take part in such conferences as anyone else. Moreover, since the technology used is relatively commonplace (the Q&A sessions, for example, are similar to online forums), this type of online conference experience proved to be largely intuitive to participants at the UCSB pilot events. The simple fact is that NCN conferences have the potential to largely supplant their traditional counterparts. If we hope to meet the ambitious goals for climate change mitigation set by the COP 21 in Paris in 2015, we all need to get to work rethinking a range of personal activities that we often take for granted. With respect to academia, conference travel is environmental enemy No. 1 and an excellent place to start. In a nutshell, here is how this NCN approach works (note that it differs significantly from a typical webinar using Skype or similar technologies): 1)

Speakers record their own talks. This can be a) a video of them speaking, generally filmed with a webcam or smartphone, b) a screen recording of a presentation, such as a PowerPoint, or c) a hybrid of the two, with speaker and presentation alternately or simultaneously onscreen. Alternate approaches are also possible, such as a talk from the May 2016 UCSB conference that was a short documentary with the talk as a voiceover. Note that even smartphones can now record videos of broadcast resolution.

114

2)

3)

Writing a new environmental era

Talks are viewed on the conference website. Once made available on the conference website, talks can be viewed at any time. Talks are organized into panels (i.e. individual webpages) that generally have three speakers each and a shared Q&A session—just like a traditional conference. As they are prerecorded, videos can be closed captioned for greater accessibility, as were all the talks for UCSB’s second and subsequent NCN conferences. Participants contribute to an online Q&A session. During the time that the conference is open, which is generally 2–3 weeks, participants can take part in panel Q&A sessions, which are similar to online forums, by posing and responding to written questions and comments. Because comments can be made at any time in any time zone, participants from across the globe can— and this is important—equally take part in the conference.

While this NCN is just one of many possible models, because this approach has advantages that go beyond helping to mitigate climate change, it makes clear that a range of new technologies have opened up exciting possibilities for reimagining the traditional conference. At first glance, it may seem that conducting an online academic conference using real-time video conferencing solutions (such as Skype, Zoom.us, WebEx, GoToMeeting, or Google Hangouts) would be a viable alternative to this NCN approach; however, doing so would risk eliminating nearly all of its advantages. Unlike real-time approaches, prerecording talks make them more accessible, as they can be conveniently viewed in any country or time zone and can be carefully closed captioned in advance for accessibility, including in additional languages. Asynchronous Q&A sessions taking place over a number of weeks not only allow truly global interaction between participants in different time zones, but also provide a space for more and arguably higher quality discussion, as well as more efficient use of participants’ time. Moreover, the material presented and generated there can be archived as a lasting reference. The issue of asynchronous talks is taken up in detail below. Let’s be honest: it is unlikely that an online conference experience will ever truly replicate face-to-face interaction. Granted. However, given the horrific environmental costs and inherently exclusionary nature of traditional conferences, the time has come to radically rethink this cornerstone practice of our profession. Considering the issue of conference travel requires us to turn, perhaps a little uncomfortably, in on our own practices. Nonetheless, since academic conferences are our profession’s largest source of GHG emissions, such a turn is absolutely necessary. UCSB’s pilot NCN conferences were an effort to rethink the various practices of the academic conference. I proceeded from the belief that technological solutions are obviously necessary but it is equally obvious that by themselves they are not always enough. Consequently, this approach might best be thought

Going nowhere fast

115

of as a form of technology, but one that is not emerging just from the sciences. In other words, in addition to being a work of applied science, it is also a product of the applied humanities. In rethinking the academic conference, I asked basic questions about what constitutes a conference venue, a scholarly talk, its audience, Q&A sessions, networking with colleagues, and so forth. From the start, it became clear that attempting to simply remove air travel from the picture and then replicate the traditional conference was likely doomed to failure. For example, even if bringing in dozens of speakers via a Skype-like technology was possible without any technical glitches (if you have ever been to an event that brought in just one speaker this way, you know that this is a very big “if”), these projected images would always suffer by comparison to a real person. In general, as long as the online conference experience attempts to slavishly replicate the traditional one, it will risk being perceived as coming up short. This was a lesson learned early on by a range of organizations offering online services. For example, online stores do not look like brick-and-mortar ones. While there were early experiments with skeuomorphic websites that resembled actual stores, complete with reasonably realistic-looking shelves covered with product, this approach was quickly abandoned because it seemed like little more than a caricature of reality. In its place came online stores that looked and worked decidedly differently from their brick-andmortar predecessors, yet offered new possibilities, such as the ability to quickly sort through products based on their cost, popularity, and so forth. Online social networking is another example, as it reimagined how relationships are made and sustained. While it might seem that online relationships would suffer in comparison to face-to-face ones, studies repeatedly report that many individuals (especially millennials, who matured alongside social networking, and the generation following them) feel equally strongly about both. In the past few years, a number of technologies have matured to the point where they can make a nearly carbon-neutral conference of this sort more practical, and potentially more effective, than its traditional counterparts. 1)

2)

By 2020, half the world’s population will possess the ability to personally produce videos of near-broadcast resolution. How will this be possible? We have the extraordinary proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and computer webcams to thank. Not so long ago, cameras that could record such video cost thousands of dollars each. Now, people all across the globe have this ability literally in their back pockets. Broadband internet connections are now becoming the norm in various regions of the world. It’s now possible, as hundreds of millions of people prove daily with services such as YouTube and Netflix, to stream highdefinition video to a computer or mobile device.

116

3)

Writing a new environmental era

Sophisticated online collaboration is now possible. The Polymath Project, led by Cambridge University professor and Fields Medal recipient Tim Gowers, has used WordPress’s collaboration features to leverage the collective ability of hundreds of mathematicians to solve a host of previously unsolved equations.

On reflection, it became clear to me that a NCN conference could be coordinated using the above three technologies (along with a range of supporting ones). Specifically, as suggested above, if 1) each speaker used the computer or mobile device already in his or her possession to video record a talk, 2) these videos were then made available for streaming from the conference website, and 3) an online Q&A session were made possible using a collaborative environment like WordPress, then such a conference would be possible. The pilot UCSB NCN conferences were conceived as a proof-of-concept of this idea. Since computer programing is a hobby of mine, it was relatively easy to cobble together free, open-source software in order to build the conference spaces (websites). Taken together, these technologies open up the possibility of better conferences, as participants can now see, hear, and interact with each other without geographical, financial, or temporal (i.e. time-zone) limitations. Note that a smartphone or relatively inexpensive tablet not only is all that is needed to view talks and contribute to Q&A sessions, but also all that is required to produce a talk, as the cameras now included with nearly all such devices can produce high-definition video at a high frame rate. These devices, incidentally, generally have very small energy and carbon footprints. (Although the issue is more complex than they might make it seem, Apple reports that the total CO2 released for the production, transport, recycling, and all energy use over the life of its current generation of iPhone to be approximately 176 pounds, which is considerably less than one-tenth the CO2 emitted in a single roundtrip flight from New York to Los Angeles.) Of course, access to the necessary technology is still an issue. However, most of the world’s universities now provide computer and internet resources for their students and faculty. As noted above, it may seem that this conference approach is a type of webinar or live teleconference. However, because these sorts of events generally take place with real-time interaction between speakers and audience members, and consequently have major limitations, this conference model takes a decidedly different approach. A 1 p.m. talk in California may be conveniently timed for those present at the event, but it would be far less so if simultaneously viewed in Berlin, New Delhi, or Sydney, at, respectively, 10 p.m., 2:30 a.m., or 6 a.m. local time. Its timing would, in fact, be problematic in most locales outside of the Americas. It may seem that the easiest way to sidestep this problem would be to have an initial online broadcast of the live event, perhaps as an interactive webinar, that would be immediately archived for on-demand streaming at other times.

Going nowhere fast

117

However, the time-zone problem remerges with the Q&A session, as only those present at such a live talk would have the ability to take part in it by raising questions. This would risk having the live event perceived as the “real” one with the recorded talk seen as just an archive, especially as there would not be a way to interact with speakers when recorded in this way. As a consequence, it would essentially create a two-tiered conference, privileging the live event, and hence its time zone and geographic locale. The conference approach outlined here sidesteps this time-zone problem by making both the viewing of talks and participating in Q&A sessions asynchronous and multiday, consequently effectively breaking the NCN conference free of its geographical and time-zone moorings. Once prerecorded talks are made available on the conference website, participants can view them and pose questions at a time convenient to their locale. If the NCN conference is open for multiple weeks, Q&A participants can, even if separated by major time-zone differences, have lively conversations with a dozen or more exchanges. Note that, even if emerging technologies are harnessed for NCN conferences, such as real-time 3-D avatars or virtual world settings, they are generally not able to surmount this time-zone issue. Indeed, any type of real-time interaction, even if online and virtual, by definition, can’t. This also includes existing realtime video conferencing solutions such as Skype, Zoom.us, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Google Hangouts, etc. Prerecorded talks have additional accessibility advantages. If talks are recorded a week or two in advance, there is sufficient time to carefully closed caption them for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals. Similarly, they can also be closed captioned in additional languages. While near real-time voice-recognition technology for closed captioning exists (YouTube is currently deploying it), it leaves much to be desired in terms of accuracy. Similarly, computer-based translation technologies such as Google Translate generally offer rather poor results. However, YouTube allows their computer-generated closed captioning to be edited for accuracy, which all NCN participants are asked to do prior to the conference opening. Moreover, separate captioning files can be created for additional languages. In sum, talks that are recorded and carefully closed captioned prior to a NCN conference are arguably the most viable option at the present time if we hope to make these events as egalitarian and accessible as possible, especially as they sidestep time-zone issues, thereby also allowing for lively, asynchronous Q&A sessions. Fortuitously, such conferences can be put together with readily available, largely open-source software. While Chapter 5 “Writing a new environmental era” introduced some key advantages of the NCN conference, it is worth taking the time to explore them in greater detail. Taken together, they make a compelling case for the need to supplant the traditional conference with NCN events, which promise to not only be more carbon neutral, but also more egalitarian, more accessible, more affordable, and more productive.

118

Writing a new environmental era

Setting aside the particular example of the NCN conference model, in order to effect a cultural change, we need to do all that we can to draw attention to the shortcomings of disastrous environmental practices, like the traditional conference, while also offering better alternatives. Many cultural practices have had decades, even centuries, to take root. Now that we have successfully been sold on the idea of automobile and air travel, it is going to take a lot to displace these practices. Consequently, we need to offer alternatives that are not just better environmentally, but better in a host of additional ways. This is, of course, exciting, as it gives us the opportunity to rethink and rewrite all sorts of practices that are problematic and showing their age. With that in mind, here are some of the key “selling points” of the NCN conference model. 1)

2)

Environmental. Conference travel is academia’s largest source of greenhouse gases. Even institutions that have vowed to dramatically reduce GHG emissions have generally not attempted to tackle this issue. For example, in November 2013 the University of California (UC) pledged that its buildings and vehicle fleet would become GHG emission-free by 2025. The UC terms these emissions from its buildings and vehicles either Scope 1 and 2 depending whether they are produced by way of its own co-generation plants or from energy sourced elsewhere, respectively. While this is a laudable goal—the UC was the first university system to ever make such a pledge—there is something missing from this timeline: a promise to also reduce the emissions from air travel (dubbed Scope 3) by 2025. Because there is no quick technological fix for this issue on the horizon, the UC has not committed to eliminate these Scope 3 emissions until 2050. However, switching to NCN events of this sort suggested here could not only reduce the carbon footprint of the traditional academic conference to roughly 1/100th its current size right now, it would also convert the remaining 1 percent from a Scope 3 GHG emissions problem to either Scope 1 or 2 (depending on where the electricity is sourced), which can be supplied by renewable sources. In fact, by 2025 the UC goal is to have Scope 1 and 2 emissions eliminated as energy supplied and purchased by the UC will come from renewables, such as the photovoltaic arrays now being installed on its campus buildings. If conferences of this sort have been adopted by the UC by then, they could largely be renewably powered— and hence have carbon footprints that would be as little as 1/1000th of a traditional conference. Less exclusionary. The cost of airfare from anywhere in the developing world to anywhere in the United States or Europe is sometimes greater than the average annual income in these countries. This simple fact has effectively long barred an overwhelming majority of the planet’s population from ever taking part in international conferences, ensuring that they remain open to only a privileged few. Even in wealthy countries like the U.S., the ability to participate in academic conferences is a privilege unequally shared. If you

Going nowhere fast

3)

4)

119

happen to be lucky enough to teach at a wealthy institution, your travel funding may be relatively generous. Alternately, if you are a Ph.D. candidate from a university with a limited budget, you may have access to a fraction of such funds, if any. NCN conferences promise to be more equitable, as they allow nearly any scholar anywhere with a computer or mobile device and adequate internet access to equally take part in such events. Consequently, this approach opens up the possibility of truly global, interactive conferences that privilege no one time zone, locale, or economy. Because, as noted above, the online Q&A session of the NCN conference is open as an online forum for a number of weeks, it eliminates the challenge presented by world time zones. Conversely, if a multiday online conference were conducted in real-time (such as by having all speakers and participants attend via a Skype-like technology), it would disadvantage a broad swath of participants. However, because it is possible to view a prerecorded talk and contribute to an online Q&A at any time of the day or night, the NCN conference approach explored here sidesteps this obstacle. More accessible. Although most airports have been fitted with accessibility features, negotiating an airport and airliner can be a difficult, even insurmountable challenge for some individuals. Similarly, even when reading lips, taking in a talk can be a challenge for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals and listening to a PowerPoint presentation is often of limited use to the blind or visually impaired. In different ways, the NCN conference can address each of these issues. Because it eliminates the need for travel, such a conference sidesteps many hurdles to physical accessibility. If prerecorded talks are closed captioned, especially if the captioning is carefully edited for accuracy, hearing becomes unnecessary. If best backend practices with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) are used, the conference’s website can be made more accessible to the audio screen readers used by the visually impaired. Similarly, knowing that the online audience may be diverse, speakers can also make a point of narrating what is onscreen for those who cannot see it. Improved discussion. The core mission of academic conferences is arguably to disseminate and promote discussion of ideas. In certain essential ways, the NCN conference can considerably best its traditional counterpart at this mission. At the first implementation of this conference approach at UCSB in May 2016, the average online Q&A sessions generated, in total words, approximately three times more discussion than generally takes place at a traditional, 15-minute Q&A. One of the sessions generated ten times more discussion. This raises an obvious question: Why is it desirable to have a Q&A session take place immediately after a talk, in a single room, over a 15-minute period? When the academic conference emerged along with the modern

120

Writing a new environmental era

university, it no doubt became clear that the physical and temporal logistics of a conference demanded an approach of this sort. Certainly, the notion that a Q&A session could take place over three weeks, with participants returning to the Q&A whenever a new question occurred to them, or when they received word that someone else had posed one, would have once seemed absurd. And it would have been, considering practical restraints. However, now that we are in a position to reimagine the traditional Q&A session, compressing it into a 15-minute period is beginning to seem like the more absurd option. For example, given the demands of teaching and administrative duties, attending even a short-lived conference during an academic term can be difficult, sometimes even impossible. It would be far better if we could, again over 2–3 weeks, listen to talks and take part in the Q&A whenever we had a free hour or two. Moreover, wouldn’t it be preferable to have the opportunity to not only think over questions, comments, and answers in advance, but, if so desired, also do a little research before weighing in? And why should the Q&A primarily be an exchange between speakers and those that came to hear the talk? Wouldn’t it be desirable to enter into a discussion, or even multiple discussions, with other audience members during the Q&A, perhaps in order to jointly raise issues for the speaker(s)? On reflection it becomes clear that a 15-minute Q&A session is a short and awkward period of time for collaborative thinking. As the name suggests, it is principally imagined as an exchange between the audience and presenters, rather than an open discussion between all participants that can follow many threads of thought, including tangential and even marginal ones. Also, being spoken in real-time, it may well lack the precision of well-considered writing. If scholars from across the planet are able, unhampered by time zones and given 2–3 weeks in which to do so, to contribute to a Q&A that followed many threads, it could grow in size, perhaps even to the point of rivaling all of the talks on a panel combined, as did at least two of the Q&A sessions at the May 2016 UCSB event. Because participants are able to meet and interact with others with similar (perhaps even esoteric) interests, discussions can unfold between them during, rather than after, the Q&A (discussions that additional participants could enter into at any point). There are, of course, challenges here. Because the online forum has, in various forms, been in existence for some time now, it has its own cultural baggage. For example, it tends to be less formal in nature than scholarly writing. However, if participants realize that Q&A sessions may well become cited resources, they tend to treat it as akin to scholarly writing (as a consequence, avatars are not used with this NCN model and participants need to preregister with their full names and institutional affiliations, which appear alongside each of their comments).

Going nowhere fast

5)

6)

121

It could be objected that this extended Q&A will require a greater commitment of time from conference goers. However, conferences already take up a substantial block of time, usually at least a couple of days, often with little occasion for anything else. Security checks, flight time, ground transportation, hotel check-in, and the like take a surprising amount of our time and energy, most of it unpleasantly spent. In contrast, participating in an online Q&A session allows us to devote these lost hours to what will hopefully prove to be useful and interesting discussion. Greater dissemination of ideas. There has recently been a good deal of debate concerning the paywalls that surround many scholarly journals. As with the traditional conference, journals are obviously exclusionary to many, in this case because of the prohibitive cost of their subscriptions. Similarly, the high cost of academic publishing means that scholarly books are often priced well beyond the reach of many institutions and individuals worldwide. Fortunately, there have been recent efforts to surmount and even dismantle these paywalls, such as by way of open-access journals. The NCN conference approach described here is another avenue that deserves our attention. This is especially the case as it promises to give a range of previously excluded scholars access to the epicenter of exciting new ideas. In the process, such conferences could even help shift scholarly attention more toward a field’s leading edge. In a sense, academic books often contain yesterday’s news, since the ideas contained in them were often first bandied about years before in conferences. Thus, if you want access to the leading edge of a field, it is far more likely to be found in conferences than books. Unfortunately, as only a privileged inner circle has historically had access to the conferences introducing these emerging ideas, the rest of the world has been left lagging behind with delayed, spotty, and sometimes nonexistent access. In contrast, the NCN conference and the archive that it leaves behind give nearly anyone with the proper technology instant and lasting access to the ideas introduced there. This not only includes the talk itself, but the accompanying Q&A, which can prove equally useful and interesting. If properly constructed, the online conference archive can challenge the need for the publication of conference proceedings. After all, the online archive, such as created by the UCSB pilot events, contains the conference proceedings (talks and Q&A sessions) in their entirety. In certain fields, like the sciences, material sometimes appears as “preprints” before it is actually published. One of the reasons for doing so is to get findings out, and accordingly receive comments back, quickly. The NCN conference model being suggested here has the same ability. More institutional parity. The traditional conference is not only largely the domain of privileged individuals, but privileged institutions as well. Providing accommodations for keynote speakers, catering, ground transportation,

122

7)

8)

Writing a new environmental era

rooms with data projectors, and so forth can be well beyond the means of many colleges and universities across the globe (and all this also obviously adds to a conference’s carbon footprint). Shifting from a physical conference space to an online one means that nearly any institution anywhere would have access to the same space, providing that relatively modest software and hardware resources were available. Note that not only institutions, but scholarly groups and societies would also be well positioned to stage such conferences, as they would not need institutional support in the form of a physical space to house the event. Cost savings. The prospect of a less-expensive conference model will no doubt appeal to some institutions, regardless of their available financial resources, as it promises yet another opportunity for cost-cutting. However, this model offers the promise of not only better (as outlined above) but more conferences. Because it would allow for the staging of conferences that would have not otherwise have occurred, this approach promises to increase the number of quality conferences, while also making them accessible to a broader range of individuals, even as it reduces overall conference expenditure. More efficient time use. Being able to quickly scan through the text of a Q&A session for material of interest is obviously one of the advantages of this NCN conference model, as it is far more efficient than sitting through a traditional, spoken Q&A. Similarly, if unabridged transcripts of conference talks are made available (which is something that we have been experimenting with in our most recent NCN conferences), the same can be done with talks. Moreover, this NCN approach has additional advantages that can allow for a more efficient conference experience. Traditional conferences sometimes keep us from attending talks that are important to us and, conversely, often require us to listen to others that are not. In the first case, owing to time constraints, it is often necessary for coordinators to schedule parallel conference sessions, which puts us in the frustrating position of having to choose between two or more talks of potential interest. Alternately, we sometimes sit through a panel of three talks for the sake of a single relevant one. Breaking free of these constraints, this NCN approach allows us to listen to all the talks of interest to us (and none of those that are not) in the order, and at a time, of our choosing. Moreover, not only do we sometimes sit through two or more talks on a panel for the sake of just one, we sometimes discover, as a talk unfolds, that, while it sounded promising from its title and description, it is in fact of limited use to us. However, not wanting to slight the speaker, we often stay through the entire talk and perhaps even its Q&A. On analyzing the viewing data from the UCSB conferences, we discovered that participants did not necessarily watch every talk through in its entirety. While we were

Going nowhere fast

123

initially somewhat dismayed by this fact, it soon occurred to us that conference participants were likely just using their time more efficiently. After watching a few minutes of a talk, or perhaps after “scrubbing” through for potential moments of interest in the videos, viewers simply moved on to other talks. For the above and additional reasons, the time has come to rethink the traditional academic conference. In the course of staging our pilot NCN conferences, a range of questions were put forth by participants and observers. While responding to some of these concerns helped to directly improved the NCN approach, all of the questions helped clarify how the model works, as well as its strengths and shortcomings. Hence, the Appendix will take them up in detail.

EPILOGUE About this book

When the late Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad with much fanfare, he boasted that it was Apple’s “most advanced technology … at an unbelievable price.” While there was certainly quite a bit of hype in this announcement, the pricing was nonetheless unusual, as new technology is typically priced so high that only the most eager “early adopters” will spring for it. When it was released in 1983, Apple’s Lisa, the company’s first computer with its signature graphical operating system, cost the equivalent of more than 40 original iPads. Regardless of whether Jobs’ statement was mostly hype or fact, introducing your best, newest work in a way that immediately allows the greatest number of people access to it is an intriguing idea. Sadly, this approach is as rare in academia as it is in the business world. When a new idea appears in the academic world, it is often first delivered as a paper at a conference. A year or two later, it may show up in print in a highly specialized journal. If the idea is thought to have legs, it is then expanded into book form. All three (conference paper, journal article, and book) are intended for an esoteric audience of early adopters. From conference presentation to published book usually takes years, as professors have a host of additional demands on their time, teaching obviously being the greatest, with administrative duties not far behind. These demands, incidentally, are so great that most professors only write one or perhaps two books in their careers. In time, the author may repackage the idea for non-specialists. However, as being on the cutting edge is where many professors like to imagine themselves, few bother with this step. Notable and laudable exceptions include E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker. While there is clearly merit in this time-honored system, Thoreau, Muir, and Carson did not usually write just for an esoteric, academic audience. Nor did the overwhelming majority of the authors that history has deemed valuable.

Epilogue

125

Indeed, unless you find yourself within the ivory towers of academia, it is doubtful that you have encountered much of its highly specialized literature. If you had, you would likely know it, as to a non-specialist it may well have seemed inscrutable or mind-numbingly tedious. Perhaps because I spent most of my adult life as an avid reader outside of academia, the shortcomings of its literature are especially glaring (and jarring) to me. Consequently, over the years I have come to question the notion that ideas should slowly trickle down, as much as a decade or more after their early adoption in academia, to the rest of the world. In order to break free of this model, ideas need to be understandable from the start. Many years ago, someone advised me “if you can’t explain something to your 15-year-old cousin, you probably don’t understand it.” I forget what I had said that prompted this advice, but I clearly remember being as confused as I was vexed. Imagining that I was in possession of some sort of deep truth, I felt justified in not being able to explain it in a way understandable to any random person off the street. Over the years, however, I have come to recognize my inability to express an idea in a simple form as a sign that perhaps I do not, in fact, fully understand what it is that I am talking about. True, it might be possible to convey the idea in an article or book intended for scholars who are immersed in the same literature, methodology, and jargon, but the real judge of whether an idea has fully gestated is that it can, with at least relative ease, be conveyed to nearly anyone. This also gives it value. After all, if an idea is not understandable, it’s of no use to anyone other than the person who has it. If only a few people get it, its value is greatly limited. There is a parallel here with good furniture design. Having spent most of my life as a furniture maker wrestling with the challenges of how a particular table or chair should look, work, and feel, over the years I came to see the design process as typically one of reduction. Only after stripping away everything superfluous—which often seemed absolutely essential when the work was first conceived—is the most functional and pleasing form of the idea ultimately revealed. This, incidentally, is easier said than done, as the complex often obstinately resists giving way to the simple. This is easy enough to see, as the world is filled with unwieldy furniture and books proving the point. I should know: early in both my careers I made a few of each. However, in the case of even marginally successful works, when the final, simple form of a previously inchoate and overly complex idea emerges, it often reveals that the original idea has not in any way been diminished, but rather has been improved upon by the process of reduction. The goal of this book is to present my “most advanced” work in an accessible way. Because I have been wrestling with the ideas contained here for years (I first started talking about the idea of moving “forward to nature” in 2012), a good deal of what originally seemed essential, which included quite a bit of scholarly references, theory, and terminology, has dropped away, leaving, whenever possible, just plain and simple ideas. Consequently, even though it runs

126

Epilogue

counter to the trickle-down culture of academia, this book is designed to be as accessible to non-specialists as it is to scholars in the field. Any discussion that it elicits should include everyone as well. Like many authors, one of my greatest fears is that few people will read my book. As I write this, I am looking out the door at my young daughter toddling around her garden. American life expectancy being what it is, there is a good chance that she will see the end of this century. Let’s hope. I think a lot about the year 2100, as most of the projections made by climate scientists and the IPCC end there. Hence, when I imagine human beings moving forward to nature by writing a better world into being, I often have 2100 in the back of my mind. Not as an endpoint, but rather as a time when humanity has resolutely and significantly reversed its uncontrolled downward spiral that is wreaking havoc with our planet, instead each day moving closer to nature. Regardless of whether this happens or not, I want my daughter to know that I did what I could to help. These pages recount my various efforts up to this point, modest though they may be. If few people pick up this book and its challenge for the future, I will, of course, be saddened. However, if that should prove to be the case, it was still worth writing, even though it will have largely been written for an audience of just one. Jordan, this is for you.

APPENDIX Writing a new practice, details, details

Because we have now staged five conferences based on this nearly carbonneutral (NCN) model, it has elicited a range of questions from individuals interested in the approach. Here are a few of them and my responses. Many of the below points have nothing to do with environmental issues, such as climate change. I am of the mind that if we hope to rewrite a cultural practice, perhaps the best approach is to make it appealing for a range of reasons (in this case, some environmental, some not).

Environmentally, just how big is this problem? Unfortunately, it is staggering in scope. Let’s take the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) as an example. As part of its Climate Action Plan, UCSB carefully calculated its total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This evaluation revealed that 30 percent of UCSB’s total GHG emissions come from air travel, such as to conferences, talks, and meetings. If we remove commuting from the equation, air travel jumps to 35 percent. This 30 percent (or 35 percent) figure for air travel represents approximately 55,000,000 pounds of CO2 or equivalent gases. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is an astonishing amount of GHG emissions. A little math reveals the enormous global scope of the problem: Just 20 schools like UCSB would have combined GHG emissions for air travel of more than a billion pounds per year. As there are nearly 5000 colleges and universities in the U.S. alone, the planet’s institutions of higher learning are responsible for many, many billions of pounds of GHG emissions annually. All just from flying. While these dismal figures contain a sobering indictment of our profession, or at least one of its cornerstone practices, the good news is that this is a problem

128

Appendix

that can be largely solved—and solved now. This would not have been the case 20 or even 10 years ago, as the necessary technology had not matured to its current level or price-point. For example, 10 years ago the modern smartphone (which helped bring inexpensive, high-definition video capabilities to desktop computers as well) did not exist. Similarly, broadband internet capable of streaming broadcast-quality video was globally something of a rarity at the time. The challenge now is to find digital alternatives that can supplant the traditional conference. While I am endorsing a particular NCN conference model here, any and all alternatives that can respond to this challenge should obviously be considered.

What about the loss of direct human contact? This is undoubtedly the No. 1 concern that is raised in relation to this conference model. However, once they learn that air travel to conferences and similar events is our profession’s single largest cause of GHG emissions, few scholars believe that direct human contact is worth the environmental cost. Nonetheless, this is an important issue that needs to be taken up. It should be acknowledged from the start that it is unlikely that any kind of virtual interchange can truly replicate face-to-face human contact. Most of us have had experience with Skype-type talks, conference versions of these, phone calls, as well as written back-and-forth discussions in forums, emails, instant messaging (IM) chats, etc. None of these replicates a face-to-face meeting. Nonetheless, if human contact at conferences primarily centers around the discussion of ideas, then the NCN model is fully capable of giving traditional conference interaction a run for its money. As noted previously, the average amount of online discussion in the Q&A sessions for the UCSB pilot conferences was three times greater than takes place in a conventional Q&A. Of course, this sort of discussion is not of the face-to-face variety. However, studies suggest that people take online relationships more seriously than we might suspect. In their book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson note that studies reveal that “young adults consider their Facebook friends just as important as the people who live close enough to meet physically” (2). After the May 2016 UCSB conference concluded, its speakers were polled for their feelings on this issue. They were first asked “Did you meaningfully ‘connect’ with people in the Q&A sessions?” 73.3 percent of those who responded said “yes,” 26.7 percent “not sure,” and 0 percent “no.” They were then asked “Was the lack of direct human contact at the conference a significant shortcoming?” 60 percent replied “no,” 20 percent “not sure,” and 20 percent “yes.” The fact that 1) only one in five of the respondents found the loss of direct human contact a significant shortcoming and 2) nearly three out of four felt that they had meaningfully connected with others during the conference, suggests that this issue may not be as significant as one might imagine.

Appendix

129

It is also helpful to put this potential shortcoming of the NCN conference in perspective with its advantages. When taking up this issue in one of the Q&A sessions for the May 2016 UCSB conference, Jon Mills, one of the speakers, had this to say: Of course, not having direct human interaction with the audience and colleagues is a limitation, but it is a small price to pay, almost inconsequential, when we look at the overall value of getting ideas distributed on a global scale, which certainly may have more impact … than just a handful of people attending a talk, especially when it is archived and potentially available to viewers any time, as well as those who could not attend, or were disinclined to, or could not afford to attend. Note that Mills focuses on the cultural rather than environmental advantages, which are obviously significant. But it is true that there are other types of contact at conferences, such as casual discussion in halls and at dinners. These interactions can be important to us all, but especially to individuals who are early in their career, hoping to make contacts that will benefit them in the years to come. At the onset, it needs to be acknowledged that, like the traditional conference itself, this risks being both a practice of privilege and a limiting one. Many individuals will never be able to receive the benefits of direct human contact owing to geographical and financial limitations, issues of physical accessibility, and so forth. This is not only limiting for those excluded, but for all of us as we miss out on the opportunity to meet a broad swath of scholars unable to attend such conferences. It is, consequently, unfortunate that such crucial academic relationships have traditionally required direct proximity. Wouldn’t it be far better if proximity and time zones were not an issue and we could interact with scholars the world over with interests that intersected with ours? This NCN conference approach seeks to leverage the power of social media to help build and strengthen academic relationships online.

Will speakers want to take part in these conferences? Prior to releasing the Call for Papers (CFP) for the May 2016 UCSB conference, this was a major question and concern for me. As was noted on the initial CFP, instead of traveling to the conference to attend panels and deliver a talk, prospective speakers needed to agree to the following unusual requirements: 1) 2) 3)

Film themselves giving a talk of 15–17 minutes. Take part in their online Q&A session by responding to questions raised by their talks. View as many of the talks as possible, posing questions of their own.

130

Appendix

For a typical conference of this sort, 25–50 submissions might have been expected. The UCSB pilot conference received over 100. Speakers ranged from Ph.D. candidates to senior scholars. It soon became clear that the format contributed to the success of the conference rather than jeopardized it, as scholars from eight countries spoke at the event. As John Ryan, one of the speakers succinctly noted in one of the conference Q&A sessions: Living in Thailand now, after 7.5 years in Australia, the issue of equity really resonates. Professors at Thai universities earn between $10–12,000 US per year, a high salary for Thailand. There also appear to be fewer research funds and conference travel support programs here. Attending an international conference, after the registration fee, flights, taxis, accommodation, and meals, could cost 1/10th of an academic’s annual wages. So an online asynchronous format has huge potential to remedy some of the issues of equity in the global academic environment while bringing important research from under-served regions such as SE Asia to an international audience. Consequently, while some scholars may eschew participating in such an unusual event, many others around the world may well embrace the opportunity.

Will keynote speakers want to be involved? Yes, if our May 2016 UCSB conference is any indication. Once we explained that we were trying to stage a conference that was more egalitarian, accessible, and environmentally sound, potential speakers became sympathetic to the cause. This included Peter Singer (the DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University—in 2005, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world) and Kim Stanley Robinson (one the most respected climate-fiction novelists writing today in the English language). An advantage for keynote speakers is that geography is no longer a limiting factor. Consequently, keynotes have the potential to reach new audiences. Speakers from the Global South, for example, might welcome the opportunity to be heard in North America.

What is the carbon footprint of such conferences? Just to clarify, it was not claimed that the May 2016 UCSB conference was carbon-free, just nearly so when compared to conventional ones. Consequently, its subtitle really has an implied second part, as this was “a nearly carbon-neutral conference (when compared to its traditional, fly-in counterparts).” Nonetheless, there is a real concern that streaming video, which was the technology used for the conference talks, consumes a worrisome amount of energy.

Appendix

131

The fact is that a staggering percentage of the energy that goes to running the Internet is used to send videos out to viewers. This is in large measure due to the fact that video takes much more bandwidth than, for example, text files. The average video file for one of the panel talks at the May 2016 conference was approximately 1 gigabyte (note that some are of 720p resolution, some 1080p). In contrast, if a talk took the form of a text file, it could be less than 100 kilobytes—i.e. ten thousand times smaller! Consequently, a text-only conference would have a much smaller carbon footprint. Of course, if talk files included images, sounds, or videos, they would grow significantly. Nonetheless, the point still fairly stands. Just how much of the internet is taken up by streaming video? According to the Washington Post, by 2020 “80 percent of the entire world’s Internet consumption will be dominated by video.” Netflix already accounts for “36.5 percent of all bandwidth consumed by North American Web users.” That’s a lot of movie and TV show watching. However, returning to the May 2016 UCSB conference, it used a relatively tiny amount of energy, mainly because the talks were not viewed nearly as much as other online video content. We know this because I carefully monitored how often the talk videos were watched. For most panels, the talks were viewed around 2–4 times per day each. Not a great deal; however, the conference was open for 21 days. Thus, if we assume an average of 3 per day for the duration of the conference, we are looking at 63 views or so per panel talk. In 2014, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) considered just how much energy is required to stream video to viewers. Including the streaming source, transmission pathway, access network, and equipment for playback and viewing. It is 7.9 megajoules (MJ) of energy per hour. In the process, 0.4 kilograms of CO2 is emitted per hour. An average conference panel talk is approximately 15 minutes. Consequently, everything else being equal, each time such a talk is viewed 0.1 kilograms of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Let’s assume that the above estimate of 63 views per talk is conservative (especially as people may continue to visit the website and view the talks after the conference is over) and increase it by 50 percent to round it off to 95 views, which would translate into 9.5 kilograms or 21 pounds of total CO2 for each panel talk. Now let’s consider what the carbon footprint would be for a speaker flying to a conference, using the May 2016 UCSB event as an example. Since we know where each of the speakers would have needed to travel from to get to Santa Barbara, we were able to calculate that collectively they would have needed to fly just over 300,000 miles to get to and from our campus. Divide that by roughly 50 speakers and you have about 6,000 miles each. That’s a lot, the equivalent of a round-trip flight from Los Angeles to New York. But keep in mind that this was a truly international conference with speakers from Canada, England, Europe, and a significant contingent from Australia (round-trip from Sydney to Santa Barbara is a whopping 16,000 miles). In any event, a round-trip, 6,000-mile flight releases roughly the equivalent of 2,000 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere.

132

Appendix

Consequently, 95 views of a panel talk, which would cause 21 pounds of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere, has about 1 percent of the carbon footprint of flying the speaker in for the talk. These are back-of-napkin calculations. Still, even if there are factors that we are failing to take into account and our 1 percent figure needs to be doubled or tripled, it still amounts to a very small percentage of the carbon footprint of a traditional conference. True, there are other energy needs for a conference like this one, such as running the website and Q&A session. However, since the Q&A is text- rather than video-based, it is a rather small source of carbon emissions. But also consider that a traditional conference’s carbon footprint involves more than just air travel. Ground transportation to and from both the departing and arriving airport (four trips total) for each of the participants, catering, energy to heat and power the venue where the conference is taking place, as well as hotel rooms, and so forth all require GHG emissions. We are also only counting the speakers here. If all of the registered participants would have come to Santa Barbara, the total amount of CO2 released for air travel would have more than doubled. Finally, since videoed talks are the backbone of the NCN conference approach detailed here, it is worth putting their viewing into perspective with other online video services. In 2016, the year that the first NCN conference took place, YouTube’s most popular music video (Gangnam Style by the artist Psy) received more views than would all the talks for 625,000 conferences the size of the UCSB event. Approached another way, if every one of the roughly 5000 colleges and universities in the U.S. staged 125 such NCN conferences each, in total they would have the same carbon footprint as this single YouTube music video.

What is the environmental impact of the devices used? Electronic equipment, such as is needed to run a NCN conference, can have bewilderingly complex environmental costs. Consequently, if conference organizers required scholars to obtain specialized equipment for NCN conferences of this sort, they would in part be responsible for the environmental footprint of these devices. Consider a related example. At some universities, instructors require students in large lectures to purchase a device called an i>clicker, which looks somewhat like a TV remote control and which allows students to respond to multiplechoice questions projected on the screen. Instructors use this device both to take attendance and to poll students during a lecture. In requiring students to purchase such a device, instructors need to realize that, although themselves small, these devices have a substantial environmental footprint, including the mining of the materials used in their making, the manufacturing process itself, the energy required to run the device, and dealing with it as e-waste, as well as perhaps dozens of disposable batteries required during its life. Not to mention the social costs and the conditions to which workers at all steps of its life are subjected.

Appendix

133

However, in the case of NCN conferences, the situation is rather different. In this, the second half of the second decade of the 21st-century, every scholar on the planet should have access to some sort of computer or tablet device and reliable access to the internet. This is absolutely a requirement. Although this is not the case everywhere, this is a wrong that needs to be righted. Since scholars are already (or at least should be) in possession or have access to this technology, only a relatively small portion of such a device’s use and lifecycle needs to be devoted to NCN conferences. Consequently, environmentally the best conference solution at the present seems to be some sort of NCN conference that makes use of our existing devices and networks. The worst solution, which is more problem than solution, is flying. Of course, we should do everything that we can to make sure that our various computers and devices are made, used, cycled (in the sense of having a long-life cycle before being replaced), and recycled responsibly. And that the energy sourced to power them and their networks is renewable whenever possible. Yet, they obviously can and should be part of our lives. If leveraged effectively, these devices, which many of us already possess, can bring about real gains, such as more egalitarian, more accessible, more cost-efficient, and more environmentally sound conferences.

Can this model be adapted for talks and roundtables? Yes. Bringing in an individual speaker obviously has a much smaller carbon footprint than an entire conference; nonetheless, for some scholars, flying to give talks can nonetheless significantly contribute to their individual greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, using a NCN approach for both talks and roundtables is straightforward—in fact, far simpler than staging a conference, as only a single webpage need be created for these events. Moreover, the page format is virtually identical for NCN conference panels, individual talks, and roundtables In the case of roundtables, the same format used for a NCN conference panel (i.e. the same HTML) can be used, although in this case by adding additional speakers, assuming that there are more than three, rather than subtracting them for an individual speaker. In this instance, a two-tiered approach to the Q&A may be preferable, with the first week reserved for roundtable participants to interact with each other, followed by two weeks open to everyone.

Are breakout sessions possible in this approach? Breakout sessions are a staple of many traditional conferences, as they allow participants with similar interests to meet for extended discussions. The difficulty is that scheduling time for these sessions either makes for a longer conference or requires overlapping parallel sessions. With this NCN approach, breakout sessions can occur throughout a conference in at least two ways. Because traditional Q&A sessions are short (generally just 15–20 minutes), breakout sessions are sometimes scheduled after panels to allow for extended conversation. In contrast, the written Q&A sessions of NCN conferences are themselves breakout

134

Appendix

sessions of a sort insofar as individuals with shared interests have a place and time for extended interaction that can last for weeks. In addition, separate breakout sessions can either be scheduled in advance of the conference or put together during the event. While the themes of these sessions can be related to one or more panels, they need not necessarily be so. This approach was first employed at the October/November 2016 UCSB conference. At this conference, which took place during the U.S. presidential election, a breakout session entitled “Making Sense of the 2016 Presidential Election” was hastily put together the day after the election. Opened by a brief (3-minute) talk by the conference coordinator (me), a conversation soon ensued with participants from a range of countries. By the close of the conference, over 16,000 words—the equivalent of more than 60 double-spaced pages—of lively discussion had occurred during the Q&A for this session. Given the success of this experiment, similar breakout sessions will be incorporated into future NCN conferences.

Is the archived presentation a talk or an article? In certain ways, a paradigm shift is taking place with talks of this sort. I am obviously not taking credit for this, as conference talks have been recorded in a variety of ways for some time now. Nonetheless, with this type of NCN conference, recorded talks now become central and required. Traditional conference talks are for the most part a sort of ephemera. Unlike journal articles, they do not usually have material existence in print (or anywhere else, for that matter, other than in the notes from which they are given). Consequently, just a few hours after they are given, talks begin to fade in the memory of the audience. Within a few months, all that may remain in the minds of most might be the core idea and perhaps a few other tidbits, if that, and if remembered correctly. Of course, an audience member can take notes; however, these rarely are cited in books or articles. Though it certainly may happen, it is a rarity. With talks that are recorded and archived, this now changes. Arguably, they become more like journal articles than traditional conference talks on this count, as they can be quoted from with confidence and precision. And yet, conference talks are different from journal articles precisely because we deliver them with the expectation that they will soon fade. We may even hope that they are eventually forgotten by everyone present. Not necessarily because we want to disown the ideas, but because we would rather that the world became acquainted with them in a more mature form in an article or book. And yet, with respect to the conference experience, they sometimes only reached that final written and archived form because of lively feedback that we received when first delivering them. Conference coordinators could help try to make the talks more ephemeral by taking a SnapChat approach, erasing the talks and Q&A sessions when the conference concludes. However, because there would be plenty of time

Appendix

135

(three weeks in the case of the May 2016 UCSB conference) to pull quotes from the talks or copy Q&A comments, it is doubtful that this would be very effective. Another option would be to give each speaker the option of having an emphatic “DO NOT CITE FROM THIS TALK” inserted under their talk’s video. This would help to ensure that it does not show up later in print. They could even request that its ideas not be paraphrased. On the other hand, creating a lasting archive is important for reasons that have little to do with the primary motivation in conducting a conference such as this one, which is environmental. As noted above, a range of scholars across the globe do not have access to books and articles because of the high cost of purchasing and subscribing to them, respectively, which can be beyond the ability of many institutions (and certainly individuals). The NCN conference archive short-circuits all this, giving us all access to exciting new ideas at the moment when they first publicly see the light of day. It also creates a lasting archive of conference talks and Q&A discussion. If NCN conferences become common, services that aggregate information on them could grow as well. For example, the MLA International Bibliography, which maintains a database of journal articles, could do the same for conference talks. However, unlike many of the articles indexed by MLA that reside behind journal paywalls, conference talks would all be available free of charge to anyone with internet access. Finally, it is worth reflecting upon what we have always known: that conference talks contain inchoate ideas, which, when tested out on an audience, can prove to be incomplete and sometimes simply wrong. And one day perhaps even prove embarrassing. These are core features/risks of the genre. However, it seems clear that the primary reason that this genre of intellectual discourse exists at all is so that ideas can be improved upon by way of a critical audience. It might seem like it would be great to deliver a talk and receive nothing but praise, but, at the end of the day, it would substantively be an almost useless experience.

Will these talks “count” during promotion reviews? As with a traditional conference, for our pilot conferences we expended a great deal of effort jurying the talks. A majority of the submissions that were received were not accepted. In this sense, it was no different than a traditional conference. There is, however, a difference in that the talks are permanently archived. With a conventional conference, the only information that a hiring or review committee generally has is the talk title and the venue. Consequently, if one were to give a talk and then spend the next three days sightseeing, no one back home would likely know. However, if a committee is interested in doing so, with a conference of this new sort they can view the talk itself. Moreover, they can also assess total conference participation, as it is easy enough to check the Q&A sessions to see who is contributing, and how much and of what sort.

136

Appendix

Given that this conference is unusual, it seems natural enough that a talk’s inclusion on a CV or in a merit review might raise some questions, but it seems clear that it should certainly receive as much consideration as a traditional talk. If the situation were reversed, and the digitally archived conference was being challenged by a new face-to-face variety that left no material trace of the talk given or overall conference participation, it certainly might raise concerns. In this case, however, the opposite is occurring, as reviewing committees are now being given much more information for consideration.

Why are talks in video form but Q&As text-based? When putting the 2016 May UCSB together, I decided on a presentation approach with videoed talks and text-based Q&A sessions. The rationale was that it would feel more like a traditional conference if one could view the talks. Similarly, since online forums are common and allow multiple conversation threads to simultaneously take place, adapting one for the Q&A sessions seemed promising. Because we human beings generally read much faster than we speak, this also makes it quicker to scan through for questions of particular interest. However, other permutations would certainly be possible. For example, the talks could be text-based with audio visual material embedded directly in the document. Alternately, the Q&A sessions could be largely video-based using services such as FlipGrid. Note that with either alternative, talks and Q&A sessions could take place over a period of weeks and would be asynchronous (which, as noted above, is a key feature of this conference approach). In an effort to ascertain if the approach used at the pilot UCSB conference was well received, speakers were polled for their opinions after the event closed. They were first asked “Was the format of this conference, with videoed talks and text-based Q&A sessions, successful?” Of those that answered, 86.9 percent responded “yes,” 13.3 percent “not sure,” and 0 percent “no.” They were then asked “Would it have been preferable if the talks had been supplied as text (such as via PDFs) instead?” 100 percent of the respondents said “no.” Finally, “Would it have been preferable if the Q&A sessions had taken video form?” Similarly, 93 percent of the respondents said “no.” While further experimentation with different approaches would be useful, it seems clear that videoed talks and text-based Q&A sessions are generally well received. In general, the traditional conference experience appears to be replicated reasonably well by this model. One of the speakers polled after the May 2016 UCSB event had this to say on the subject: “I think the conference combined the best features of recorded videos (potentially better rehearsed, more carefully scripted, and more polished than typical conference breakout session presentations) with the best features of an in-person conference (in particular, using a particular month in time to give a sense of being an event rather than merely a website with videos).”

Appendix

137

Are transcripts of the talks available? As an experiment, unabridged transcripts of talks were made available for two of the panels at the October/November 2016 UCSB conference. These transcripts were timestamped in order to point to moments of potential interest in the videos. Because they were derived from the closed captioning created for the talks, the transcripts were faithful to the actual talk given, rather than notes that may have been used by the speaker. Since many speakers, especially those who use PowerPoints and similar presentations, are no longer reading verbatim from prepared talks, this approach is arguably preferable. Transcripts have obvious and significant advantages, as they can be quickly scanned to provide an overview of the talk. Moreover, as video files are huge by comparison—they can be more than ten thousand times larger than a talk transcript—reading rather than watching may be a welcome option if a fast internet connection is not available. This could provide crucial access in parts of the developing world and elsewhere lacking fast connections. Note that, as the embedded video is not accessed until the “play” button is selected, just reading the transcript obviously uses far less energy than viewing the talk video and consequently is responsible for fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Providing a full transcript for each of the talks on the panel webpage has another advantage: this makes the talks visible to search engine crawlers, ensuring that the full text of a talk will be indexed by services like Google. A major shortcoming of online journals that keep articles behind paywalls is that, as they are not necessarily made accessible to such indexing, the text of the articles remains invisible to Google. Moreover, as these crawlers do not ordinarily index closed captioning text (at the time of this writing, Google does not index YouTube’s automatic closed captioning), the text of videoed talks is similarly inaccessible. In contrast, publicly posting the full text of a talk to the conference webpage ensures that it can both be found by anyone and that they will be directed to a single page that contains video, transcript, and Q&A session. Offering talks in two formats, as both a video and a written transcript, also promises to make them more engaging for a broader range of individuals. As one of the participants in the October/November 2016 UCSB conference noted, “It is good to be able to read the talk, and to skim it before deciding which one to watch and hear in its entirety. In teaching (and training future educators), I constantly reiterate that different formats work better for different participants. So the greater the range offered, the greater the range engaged.” Another noted that “I like having the transcript to refer back to— I think this encourages people to use the presentations in a more thoughtful way.” It is clear that transcripts proved popular at the October/November 2016 event. There is, however, the abovementioned concern that creating a lasting record (in the form of a video) of a talk makes it more akin to a journal article

138

Appendix

than a conference talk. Providing a transcript presumably makes it even more so. This is an inevitable consequence of an online conference of this sort that is arguably more advantage than shortcoming. Note that YouTube, the video-streaming source for the October/November 2016 and subsequent conferences, automatically generated closed captioning for the above talks using voice recognition technology. Unfortunately, YouTube’s software leaves much to be desired in terms of accuracy. However, as YouTube makes their closed captioning easily editable, most of the October/ November 2016 conference speakers either personally edited their talk’s closed captioning for accuracy or entrusted the job to someone else. Consequently, the transcripts were generally accurate and faithful to the talks given.

What form can the conference talks take? Although talks generally take a variety of forms, three in particular stand out: 1)

2)

3)

A video of the speaker delivering the talk. These can be filmed with a computer webcam, a smartphone, a camcorder, or a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera with video capabilities. All of these devices can now record highdefinition video of near broadcast quality. Note that talks can be delivered anywhere (at home, in the office, a garden, etc.). A recording of a presentation, such as a PowerPoint. Most computers have the ability to simultaneously record what is happening on screen, such as a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation, along with audio of the speaker as a voiceover. In this case, no camera is necessary, as the speaker never appears on screen. A combination of speaker and presentation. In this approach, the speaker is alternately (or simultaneously in a small window) on screen with a presentation, such as a PowerPoint or Prezi. This is generally made possible by software that simultaneously records what is happening on screen along with the speaker delivering the talk through a webcam. Once both “tracks” are recorded, they can be edited into a video that either switches between the two or inserts one into the other as a small window.

In general, prerecorded talks allow for greater control over the presentation, as they can be edited before uploading. With a little ingenuity, they can provide provocative and engaging alternatives to the traditional conference talk.

Can this approach be used for “flash conferences”? Yes. In fact, this is one of the strengths of this approach. As noted above, during the second UCSB pilot conference, which took place in October/November 2016 and which took as its theme “The World in 2050,” Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. Since this

Appendix

139

event changed the course of world history in a way that will arguably impact the world in 2050, the day after the election (as noted above) I posted a special panel on “Making Sense of the 2016 Presidential Election.” It proved to be exceptionally popular. This panel underscored the flexibility of an online approach such as our NCN model. Since a conference website can be authored in a day and speakers can create videos of their talks using desktop or handheld equipment, an entire “flash conference” could have been up and running a day or two after the election. Compare this to traditional, fly-in conferences, which generally take months to coordinate.

Where are the avatars, virtual rooms, and 3-D goggles? In a sense, this NCN conference model is based on yesterday’s technology, rather than tomorrow’s. It neither requires specialized equipment to produce the talks nor to watch them, such as a studio outfitted with a green screen to allow for shifting backdrops or 3-D goggles. To the contrary, a decade-old computer or entry-level tablet or smartphone is all that is required. Consequently, there is no need to rush out to buy specialized hardware that may ultimately contribute to GHG emissions in its manufacture, use, and disposal. Similarly, the software used can all be free and open source. It is also unclear what advantages many of these technologies bring to the asynchronous NCN conference model explored in this document. Being able to interact in real-time with another person as an avatar in a 3-D virtual world may be exciting and have other benefits, but it would be profoundly inconvenient if the parties were separated by a 12-hour time difference. Alternately, prerecording a talk as a 3-D avatar would seemingly have limited benefits. Of course, the adoption of new technologies for NCN conferences should be considered as these become available and affordable for the majority of the world’s scholars.

Is this conference approach a form of social media? Yes, arguably it is. Consequently, this conference model has much in common with social media services (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.), as these all involve the sharing of, as well as the ability to interact with, usergenerated content. In the process, individuals are able to meet and network online, usually by commenting on posted media. In the case of the NCN conference model explored here, the Q&A sessions allow for written discussion of user-generated videos of talks. Like this NCN conference approach, social media services are generally also asynchronous. The extraordinary success of social media—Facebook, for example, has over 2 billion active users—is arguably in part due to this fact, as it allows individuals to interact at a time of their choosing, even if they happen to

140

Appendix

be in the same time zone or locale. Surprisingly, even though nearly half of Facebook friends live within 25 miles of their online friends, they do a good deal of interacting via this social media service, suggesting that many individuals prefer to interact asynchronously as well as in real-time. In contrast, real-time online events, such as facilitated by Skype or GoToMeeting, are not social in the same way, as they largely seek to replicate face-to-face interaction (though generally seem to be perceived as coming up short in the process). In offering a viable, asynchronous alternative to traditional social interaction, rather than trying to simply mimic it, successful social media services facilitate what is in many ways a largely new type of social interaction. In other words, realizing that efforts at duplicating traditional, real-time social interaction online would likely come up short, social media services reimagined social interaction for the digital age. Social media has helped to pave the way for this NCN conference approach, as it has normalized asynchronous online social interaction for billions of individuals worldwide. This is especially the case with the millennial generation that matured along with social media. The fact that this NCN conference model builds upon the familiarity that a great many individuals now have with social media should not only make the approach more accessible, but also contribute to its adoption. Consequently, future NCN conferences may incorporate additional features borrowed from social media services.

Why is it important that conferences be global? At first glance, this NCN approach may not seem desirable for regional conferences, especially those focusing on local issues. For example, a conference on the topic of point-source pollution and environmental justice in the Southern United States may seem to be of little interest outside of the immediate area, especially as most of its speakers may hail from the region. Because a majority of participants would likely drive rather than fly, staging such an event as a live rather than NCN conference may thus seem preferable. Alternately, because most participants would come from just one or two time zones, staging it as a real-time teleconferenced event by way of a service like Zoom or GoToMeeting might also seem an appealing option. However, the American experience with this particular issue, as well as the significant body of scholarship now surrounding it, may be of great interest to scholars in other regions of the globe now wrestling with similar problems. Not only may they be able to learn much from the conference, they may also have much to contribute because of their familiarity with similar issues in their own locale. The same can be said for many—arguably most—regional conferences. Unfortunately, traditional conferences that offer only local speakers and which leave no trace behind in the form of an archive miss out on the opportunity to facilitate the sharing and discussion of ideas more broadly. Not only is the dissemination of ideas in such cases limited to a specific locale, discussion traditionally takes place among a small gathering of scholars behind closed doors.

Appendix

141

Consequently, making talks and discussion equally available to scholars anywhere on the globe, even when the issue may seem local in scope, is a distinctly appealing idea.

Are the Q&A sessions a form of collective intelligence? While this NCN approach shares much with conventional conferences, its Q&A sessions allow for a level of discussion that is simply not possible with its traditional counterpart. Consequently, it is useful to consider what these sessions have in common with recent experiments in the online deployment of collective intelligence. At the October/November 2016 UCSB conference, one of the Q&A sessions generated over 16,000 words (roughly 60 double-spaced pages) of discussion. Although lengthy, this does not capture the depth of what happened there, as the questions, answers, and comments were often more thoughtful than their spoken counterparts. As one of the Q&A’s participants succinctly noted, “there’s a depth to the Q&A here that I do not experience in ‘normal’ conferences.” This sort of depth is possible because this NCN approach to the Q&A session is making a shift from the spoken to written word. Consider the dialogue that one encounters in really good fiction. One of the joys of reading such a conversation comes from the fact that it is often just too good, with phrases and retorts chosen just too perfectly, to have been spoken in real-time. And it wasn’t, as the author had the benefit of time in writing and revising it into a polished form. In transitioning from the spoken to written word in an online Q&A session taking place over multiple weeks, conference participants have the same luxury. Consequently, while it may read like the transcript of a spoken conversation (as does the dialogue in a novel), a NCN Q&A session is potentially more thoughtful and precise. When such careful thinking and writing comes from a range of individuals and is focused on a particular issue, it is possible to collectively think through the matter at hand. While this sort of collective thinking is not new, and in fact occurs in a traditional Q&A session, this online approach extending over weeks greatly expands and enhances the process. To understand how, it will be helpful to consider how online collective thinking has recently been deployed and explored. Faced with a particularly difficult theorem, Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal recipient, did something unusual in January 2009. Instead of attempting to work through the problem himself, he posted a question to his popular personal blog: “Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?” “It seems to me that, at least in theory,” Gowers ventured, “a different model” than the traditional approach to problem solving “could work: different, that is, from the usual model of people working in isolation or collaborating with one or two others. Suppose one had a[n online] forum … The idea would be that anybody who had anything whatsoever to say about the problem could chip in.”

142

Appendix

Putting his theory to the test, Gowers posted the problem, the density HalesJewett theorem, to his blog, inviting anyone—professional mathematicians and laypeople alike—to help work through it. Almost immediately, a host of individuals, ranging from high school math teachers to other Fields Medalists, collectively weighed in on the problem. Working through the theorem step by step, ideas were proposed and discussed. Some were rejected, some accepted; often they were modified collectively. Six weeks and 170,000 words of online discussion later, not only had the original theorem been proved, but so was an even more difficult root problem of which this was only a special case. The findings were so significant that two scholarly articles were generated by the experiment. Why did such a collective approach work? There are a number of reasons, but perhaps none more important than expertise. As is the case with many fields, mathematics is highly specialized. Consequently, when the collaborative mathematicians reached a potential impasse, it was sometimes the case that an individual contributor, who may well have been wholly incapable of proving the theorem alone, was able to draw on esoteric expertise and interests to make the next incremental step. Bring enough of these specialists together from all over the world, which Gowers did online, and you have enough collective intelligence (as it is increasingly being called) to solve what no one individual, with only a single lifetime of accrued skill and knowledge, ever could. Gowers’s experiment is just one of many that have suggested to some thinkers, such as Michael Nielsen, that a paradigm shift in human intelligence is presently underway. Important discoveries, they argue, may increasingly not only come from lone geniuses, as they have traditionally, but also, as in the case of Gowers’s experiment, from the collective intelligence of many. The claim of newness can, of course, be misleading, as scientists and scholars have always worked collectively. Albert Einstein, a particularly popular lone genius, had, in fact, reached an impasse somewhere around 1912 that kept him from generalizing special relativity. Fortunately, he had a friend, Marcel Grossmann, who mentored Einstein in his own esoteric specialty, non-Euclidean geometry, which provided the underlying mathematics that made general relativity possible. Whether through contact with friends, colleagues, and students, or through seemingly endless hours of solitary reading, we are always thinking with and through others. But Gowers’s experiment reveals that the times are indeed changing, especially with respect to scale, speed, and the underlying issue of authorship. Imagine if the collaborative mathematicians had worked together through the traditional journal format. Gowers would have submitted his opening thoughts on the theorem for publication. Assuming that referees judged the work important enough for publication (which may well not have been the case, as the density Hales-Jewett theorem is really not a very significant mathematical problem and Gowers offered just the beginning of a proof), it would have appeared in

Appendix

143

print in a year or two. The process would have then started all over again with each of the subsequent contributors. Of course, personal conversations and correspondence can speed things up, but such a process is often slow, involving just a handful of players. Now, however, such collaboration, which can involve a startling range of far-flung specialists, can happen online at breathtaking speeds. Is a similar deployment of collective intelligence possible in other fields? Theorists like Michael Nielsen are doubtful: “Think of criticism of English literature. Critics are not going to one day put down their quills and arrive at a common understanding of Shakespeare. Indeed,” Nielsen continues, “arriving at a common understanding isn’t the point. In such fields a plurality of views is a feature, not a bug, and a new way of understanding Shakespeare is to be celebrated.” While Nielsen is correct in arguing that a “plurality of views” is certainly crucial to literary criticism, he ignores the fact that such diverse perspectives ideally come together in a shared understanding of Shakespeare’s works. If a community of scholars generally accepts a new perspective on Shakespeare, our “common understanding” (to use Nielsen’s phrase), at first challenged, soon benefits. A quick look to the past few decades of Shakespeare scholarship reveals just how much our shared understanding has changed over the years. Returning to the NCN Q&A session, it is implemented using the same technology (the robust collaborative commenting system at the core of WordPress) that Tim Gowers used for his original, as well as a range of subsequent, experiments in collective intelligence. Consequently, it has many of the same advantages, some of which are explored in this Appendix, of the approach used by Gowers, such as the ability to facilitate an extended, worldwide conversation among scholars separated by geography and time zones. The early implementation of this approach at the UCSB events suggests that there is considerable potential for collective intelligence in this NCN approach. The challenge, which will be addressed in future NCN events, is how to focus the intellectual energy of the experts that a typical conference brings together. Part of the reason that Gowers’s experiment worked is because he focused the online community that he brought together on a specific problem. Similarly, the abovementioned Q&A session at the October/November 2016 UCSB conference that generated over 16,000 words of discussion was so active because it centered on a particular issue of timely interest to nearly all conference participants. If a conference coordinator were to pose a single question, likely relating to the conference theme, that was interesting enough to entice a broad swath of participants to engage in its discussion, contributors might very well collectively develop provocative answers to it in a shared Q&A session. Of course, multiple questions (each with its own Q&A session) could also be posed. In a sense, this is what each of the panels does insofar as they center on a shared interest. However, keeping overall focus on a single issue would seem less likely to fragment participation. Opening the event with an intentionally brief talk by the conference coordinators—the UCSB session’s video was just 3 minutes—would help entice conference participants to look into what is going on.

144

Appendix

There are, of course, no doubt other approaches to focus collective thinking at NCN conferences. One of the things that makes such events exciting is that they offer the opportunity to reinvent the traditional conference by the inclusion of features not previously possible, such as those designed to leverage the exciting potential of networked collective intelligence.

What about supplementing with real-time interaction? When asked for suggestions on how to improve this NCN model after the May 2016 UCSB conference, one of the speakers noted that “I think more focus should be made on having regional/national hubs.” Another asked, “What if there were a 24-hour video café feature, where people could hang out (and schedule times to hang out together as they’d like) to talk in real time?” Because the May 2016 UCSB event was imagined as primarily asynchronous in nature, real-time interaction was not a major focus (with the exception of a real-time closing event). However, while video conferencing obviously does not replicate face-to-face interaction, it is potentially a meaningful way to interact. In order to explore the usefulness of such discussion in a conference setting, at the October/November 2016 UCSB conference I created “NCN Salons” where participants could casually interact in real-time using a Skype-like technology. The challenge involved scheduling, as participants were in a range of different time zones. The solution was to create three separate global NCN Salons. Most of the world can be divided into three blocks comprising six or seven time zones. An example would be the Americas, as 4 p.m. in Brazil (the most eastern part of the two continents) is 10 a.m. in Alaska. Consequently, a onehour NCN Salon opened from 10–11 a.m. in Alaska / 4–5 p.m. in Brazil would be reasonably convenient for most of the Americas. A second such block includes Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. A third Russia, Asia, and Australia. All three of these time blocks were well represented by speakers at the October/November 2016 UCSB conference. The idea was to open, via a real-time video conferencing service, three one-hour NCN Salons where, in the words of the above speaker, “people could hang out” and interact casually, perhaps scheduling times to meet. As this speaker further noted, “this would have an added benefit of not leaving a permanent record. I would have availed myself of such a feature.” Participants were free to visit NCN Salons outside of their regions if the inconvenience of the time difference was accepted. Unfortunately, as with many events of this sort using real-time video conferencing technology, the results were in many respects disappointing. There were two primary issues: 1) Some participants had difficulty negotiating the software, such as turning on their audio and video feeds. Some never even succeeded at logging in. 2) Poor internet connections ultimately forced more than half of the participants to turn off their video and take part with audio only. The second issue was by far the most problematic.

Appendix

145

Real-time video conferencing may work well in a university or corporate setting where a reliable and fast internet connection can be counted upon. However, as our participants from across the globe were for the most part logging in from their homes, connections were far less reliable. Somewhat paradoxically, conference goers generally did not appear to have nearly as much difficulty watching the prerecorded video talks, even though they were in many cases of a higher resolution than the feeds for the video conference. The reason has to do with the fact that video services like YouTube and Vimeo typically buffer their video streams (usually by approximately 30 seconds) so that a few seconds of lagging internet connection goes completely unnoticed. Unfortunately, as a real-time video feed by definition cannot be buffered, the repeated presence of such lags can disrupt a real-time event. What is the solution to this problem? As time goes on and internet connections across the globe become faster and more reliable, NCN Salons could perhaps become more rewarding experiences. Alternately, participants could ensure that they already have such an internet connection, perhaps in their university offices.

Why isn’t the academic rank of participants noted? In one of the Q&A sessions of the October/November UCSB conference a participant noted that “It is a relief to be free of the power dynamic that often lies just below the surface in the academic Q&A.” In putting together this model I debated whether to have speakers sign in with their academic rank or position (i.e. “Ken Hiltner, _______, UC Santa Barbara,” with the blank filled with “Professor,” “Ph.D. Candidate,” “Lecturer,” etc.). I decided to drop the titles in the hope of making conferences of this sort more egalitarian, which in a variety of ways was one of my central goals. Unless you happen to know the person (or go to the trouble of looking up their bio), a comment can thus be judged on its merit, rather than its author’s position or rank. It is also the case that some people are simply a little reticent in certain social situations. As the above NCN conference participant noted, “Many of us are uncomfortable speaking in a roomful of strangers, but are happy to post something in writing. I’ve found this to be a pleasant surprise about the format here.” In general, many of us have had the experience of wanting to ask a question at a conference but felt reluctant to do so, especially as some Q&A participants sometimes speak with intimidating authority. Unasked, the question stayed with us, becoming more developed and refined. After an hour or two of taking form, we might regret not having asked it when we had the opportunity. At a conference of this sort, such an opportunity doesn’t slip away in even a day or two.

146

Appendix

How might a university help support this approach? This NCN conference approach asks speakers to do something unusual: produce a video of a conference talk. While recording a talk with a webcam or making a screen recording of a presentation such as a PowerPoint can be relatively simple, it can sometimes be a challenge. Producing a hybrid video that switches back and forth from speaker to presentation can be even more so. Moreover, even though the quality of the videos that webcams can produce has improved dramatically in recent years, they still fall far short of professional equipment, such as high definition DSLR cameras capable of extended video recording. Many universities fund travel for faculty. Ideally, a small portion of these resources could be redirected to provide modest video production capabilities. Some institutions already have facilities that could be adapted for the purpose. If not, a repurposed classroom with a podium would be all that is needed. If so desired, the room could be adequately sized for a small audience of interested friends, students, and colleagues who could help energize a talk. The equipment required (a high-definition digital camera, podium microphone, adequate lighting, data projector, laptop computer, etc.) would likely cost less than providing funding for four or five faculty members to attend a single national or international conference. A student or staff technician with modest training and experience could operate the equipment. In this approach, the speaker would deliver the talk to either the technician or small audience. A video switcher would allow the presenter’s PowerPoint (or other presentation method) to be simultaneously captured along with a video of the speaker. The technician could, in real-time, create a videoed talk that switched back and forth from speaker to presentation. A few minutes after the talk was finished, it could already be uploaded to a server for streaming. Such archived videos can easily be embedded in a conference webpage. A copy of the videoed talks could also be archived by the university for safekeeping. Alternately, the university could dedicate a server for the purpose and itself become the streaming source. This could be a particularly appealing option if the server was powered by renewable energy. This would also create the opportunity to centrally archive and index all of the talks made by a university’s faculty. Along with the videos, the archive could also contain the text of the Q&A session that it generated. If the Q&As exist as HTML, as do the sessions for the pilot UCSB conferences, they could simply be saved to a blank webpage. Such a modest facility could produce 20–30 talks per week (i.e. a thousand or more per year) at a fraction of the cost that colleges and universities have traditionally provided for faculty conference travel, accommodations, meals, and so forth.

What about greenhouse gases other than CO2? The carbon dioxide released for fly-in conferences contributes to climate change more than any other source. However, other greenhouse gases are also emitted for such events. For example, jet airliners release oxides of nitrogen (NOx) into

Appendix

147

the upper atmosphere where they form ozone, which contributes to global warming. Similarly, catering and dinners for conferences, especially where beef is served, are responsible for the release of methane. Consequently, it would be more accurate to refer to the conferences described here as “nearly free of greenhouse gas emissions” rather than “nearly carbon-neutral.” However, while “greenhouse gas emissions” may one day replace “carbon” as the preferred term in the popular imagination (so that, for example, we would refer to our footprint of greenhouse gas emissions or simply “climate footprint” rather than our carbon footprint), this has not yet happened. Consequently, I provisionally used the moniker “NCN conferences,” even though by this I mean all sorts of events (including individuals that fly in to give talks, roundtables, etc.) that are nearly free of greenhouse gas emissions.

Why should we tackle this particular issue? After all, there are plenty of other things that we can do to help mitigate climate change. However, if there is one thing that we scholars, either individually or institutionally, can do to make the biggest difference, this is clearly it. Let’s start by considering this issue as an institutional one, again using UCSB as an example. As noted above, approximately one-third of UCSB’s total GHG emissions currently comes from air travel to conferences, talks, and meetings. Before considering these emissions directly, let’s consider the other two-thirds and what can be done about them. The total GHG emissions from the electricity that UCSB purchases is, coincidentally, just about equal to those that come from air travel: roughly 55,000,000 pounds annually. The University of California system is deeply committed to reducing emissions from purchased electricity. For this to happen, the State of California’s current energy infrastructure needs to be completely revamped. California is already one of the leaders in the nation in this effort, as 30 percent of its electricity came from renewables in 2017. The long-term goal is 50 percent by 2030. Many billions of dollars will be spent in this effort, as this entails nothing less than a transition out of a fossil fuel economy and into one that instead has renewables as its backbone. Following behind GHG emissions that come from air travel and electricity are those that come from the combustion of fossil fuels on the UCSB campus, principally for heat and cooking. This is annually responsible for roughly 38,000,000 pounds of CO2 or equivalent gases. Currently, roughly 75 percent of the UC’s power supply comes from natural gas. This is especially disturbing as the majority of natural gas in the U.S. is obtained from the environmentally disastrous practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). The UC hopes to both become more efficient in its natural gas use and to replace it with biogas. However, as noted above, biogas may present more environmental problems than it solves. With respect to greater efficiency, UCSB has long been committed to this goal. Its Bren Hall was both the

148

Appendix

first building in the nation to receive a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating of “Platinum” by the Green Building Council, as well as the first to receive a second Platinum LEED award for its operations and maintenance. However, only so much energy can reasonably be saved. With a sustained, concerted effort, the two-thirds of UCSB’s GHG emissions that do not come from air travel (i.e. purchased electricity, stationary combustion, and a range of smaller emission sources) could perhaps be cut in half in the upcoming decades. The UC is in fact committed to doing this sooner; however, in order to do so it will have to purchase both renewable electricity and biogas from limited supplies in the state. This is in no way a solution that every institution and individual in California could enact, as there is simply not nearly enough renewable electricity and biogas to go around. By contrast, the third of UCSB’s total GHG emissions that come from air travel is indeed very low-hanging fruit, as we are in a position—right now—to reduce this by a factor of 100. This will not cost billions of dollars. In fact, significant funds could be saved in the process, as NCN conferences cost less than their traditional counterparts. The story is similar if this issue is approached from a personal perspective. As noted above, climate scientist Peter Kalmus was able to reduce his GHG emissions by two-thirds simply by giving up air travel. Not all scholars travel this much; however, as noted above, if we assume the equivalent of three transcontinental flights per year factored by an average American’s carbon footprint, we are back to the one-third figure. These numbers will obviously vary across institutions and individuals; nonetheless, eliminating (or greatly reducing) academic air travel represents an extraordinary opportunity to simply and easily—relatively speaking, especially in relation to other concerns, such as natural gas and electricity use—to dramatically reduce GHG emissions. For many institutions and individuals, it can reduce GHG emissions by a third. Of course, we should also do everything else that we can, such as the programs being enacted by the UC and elsewhere, to halve the other two-thirds. If we succeeded at both, we would be at a third of where we started. Why should we tackle this particular issue? It is simply the fastest and easiest way for our profession to help mitigate climate change. No other technological innovation or shift in cultural practices can come close by a long shot.

Is the time right for NCN conferences? Given the significant environmental and cultural advantages that can come with such an approach, it seems likely that most conferences in 2040 or 2050 will largely take place online. The fact that an online approach can both reduce a conference’s GHG emissions by a factor of a thousand or more while also allowing a range of individuals who would not otherwise be able to attend—because of issues relating

Appendix

149

to cost, geography, time zones, accessibility, and so forth—full access to the proceedings argues strongly for the adoption of such an approach. However, it is unclear that the time is right for such an approach now. When I teach Silent Spring, students often astutely observe that Carson’s message was well timed. Had she delivered it ten years prior, in the early 1950s, it may well have gone largely ignored. In the case of an online conference approach, there is little doubt that the technology is now available to make it possible. As noted above, by 2020, half of the world’s population will personally have the ability to produce and watch high-definition videos of broadcast quality—thanks to the astonishing proliferation of smartphones. Moreover, as a broad array of socialmedia services have proven, desktop, laptop, and mobile devices are already facilitating online social interaction for billions of individuals. But is the time right for the online conference? Given the optimism surrounding the COP 21, it may be the case that we are, to adapt a phrase used by Bill McKibben in his keynote address for the second UCSB pilot NCN conference, ready to “walk the talk” and immediately do more to mitigate our global GHG emissions. Moreover, given that traditional, fly-in conferences are our profession’s single largest source of GHG emissions, it may be the case that academia will lead the way on this count. Let’s hope. Has the time come to adopt the online conference? Perhaps a better and more useful question is to ask what needs to be done to make such conferences ready for widespread adoption. Or, even better, us ready for them. In other words, are we prepared to abandon a longstanding cultural practice for an altogether new alternative? As with most cultural changes, inertia may well dictate the knee-jerk response. However, given that a new generation of individuals are now living a broad swath of their lives online, we may well be prepared for it—or at least may be in the process of being prepared for this new take on an old practice.

Why are we waiting? In January 2008, just three months after it was announced that Al Gore and 1500 scientists jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an opinion piece with the pithy title “Academic Travel Causes Global Warming.” It was written by Mark Pedelty, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. In just a few hundred words, Pedelty drew attention to both the scope of the problem and possible solutions. He began by noting how air travel for a single conference can have a carbon footprint greater than 10,000 people in India for all aspects of their lives for a year. But he did more than just outline the issue, he considered alternatives by describing an online talk that “demonstrated how rich and useful video conferencing could be if conducted on a larger scale. Distance educators have discovered the potential of video conferencing, and so should the rest of academe.”

150

Appendix

Although Pedelty did a commendable job of succinctly bringing this problem and its potential solution to the attention of the Chronicle’s many readers, little has been done to address this issue in the years since its publication.

Why is this the case? Although there are a range of reasons, three in particular stand out: 1)

2)

3)

Many scholars are simply not aware of the problem or its scope. The Chronicle never published a follow-up article and there has been little coverage elsewhere. Consequently, nearly all UCSB faculty who I informed that one-third of the campus’s total GHG emissions came from air travel to conferences, talks, and meetings were shocked by the fact. On a personal note, they were often equally distressed to learn that a third or more of their personal GHG emissions may come from academic air travel. Although it reached a large audience, Pedelty’s message seems to have been largely forgotten. Teleconferencing technology is frankly disappointing. Although many scholars have attended talks coordinated via Skype, GoToMeeting, and Google Hangouts, it is very likely that the experience was not rewarding, especially when compared to face-to-face talks. Consequently, in the minds of many scholars, an entire conference using this technology would not likely be very successful. Many scholars are concerned about the loss of direct human contact that is integral to traditional conferences (see above).

Taken together, these three issues offer a reason for why we are waiting, as many scholars are not aware of the enormous scope of the problem or are doubtful that digital technology can offer an adequate alternative, especially to direct human contact. The NCN conference approach advocated for in this book attempts to address these issues by fostering greater awareness of the issue through what I believe is a viable alternative, which, among other advantages, provides for abundant and productive interpersonal contact. Importantly, this model can be implemented now, using a globally installed base of technology. This is, of course, not the only model possible. Consequently, I very much welcome alternate approaches. In fact, an ideal scenario would be if a range of groups and individuals dedicated themselves to this problem. Enormous amounts of time and funding have been devoted to, for example, digitally sharing photographs and snippets of thoughts online (Instagram, Twitter, etc.). If just a fraction of this energy could be applied to the pressing issue of conference travel, we could keep many billions of pounds of greenhouse gases from being released into the upper atmosphere each year. If, instead of conference travel, we were taking up the issue of flying for other purposes, such as vacations and family visits, it is unclear just how such a problem might be best approached. Certainly eliminating frivolous travel, such as the

Appendix

151

“getaway weekend,” would be a start, but even this would likely meet strong resistance. Consequently, we would be waiting for some sort of solution not yet offered to the problem. However, with respect to conference travel, there is no need to wait, as NCN approaches already have the potential to actually deliver a superior academic conference experience than their traditional, fly-in counterparts. Why are we waiting? Many scholars are either unaware of the scope of the problem or how easily it can be solved. With this in mind, an immediate course of action (which is the one advocated for in this book) is to stage NCN conferences in order to draw attention to academia’s air-travel problem while simultaneously offering a viable alternative.

NOTES

Note that portions of Chapter 3 first appeared in pages xiv–xvi of a previous book that I wrote entitled Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). Similarly, portions of Chapter 7 were published to my personal website in an online White Paper/Practical Guide to the NCN conference approach (http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?page_id=14080). Finally, portions of Chapter 5 appear in a chapter that I wrote for the book Climate Futures: Reimagining Global Climate Justice (Zed Books, forthcoming).

Introduction 2 a bygone way of life on the quiet shores of Walden Pond In a previous book, I referred to this maneuver as “the signature turn of the Romantics,” meaning Romantic poets like Wordsworth. While the about-face turn is a signature feature of the thinking of Wordsworth, Thoreau, and others in their era, it is more generally one of back-to-nature thinking. What Else is Pastoral: Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 11. 4 in talks at various universities starting in 2012 I began introducing the notion of moving “forward to nature” in late 2012 and the spring of 2013 in public talks at Rutgers (“Abandoning the Past, Toward a New Environmental Ethic,” December 2012), the University of Oregon (“Forward to Nature,” March 2013), Princeton (“The Role of the Environmental Humanities in Our Future,” April 2013), Penn (“Environmental Criticism: What Is at Stake?,” April 2013), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität at Munich (“Reconsidering Milton, Ecology, and Place,” May 2013), and elsewhere.

Notes

153

5 I see this applied-humanities approach as a form of technology For decades now, humanities scholars have talked about technology as something that can emerge out of social practices. Perhaps the most famous example is Michel Foucault, who developed the idea most completely in his lecture on “Technologies of the Self” delivered at the University of Vermont in 1982. My approach to technology is in this tradition. 6 the emerging field of the climate humanities The term “climate humanist” has only recently come into use. In the January 2018 edition of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the editor, Yale’s Wai Chee Dimock, wrote an article entitled “Climate Humanists” that profiled three scholars: Harvard’s Peter Sachs, Penn’s Bethany Wiggin, and me. It was one of the first (perhaps the first) public uses of the term. 7 suburbs, villages and agricultural lands … are being [almost] completely left out of the picture “Ecologists Shun the Urban Jungle,” Nature, The International Journal of Science, July 16, 2010. The quote is by Laura Martin, a graduate student studying ecology at Cornell University. 7 they risk delaying conservation efforts and making their subject irrelevant Ibid. The quote is by the article’s author, Zoë Corbyn. 10 hoping to reveal more of our deeply held beliefs about the natural world Coincidentally, this was the historical period that I also suspected would be the most revealing in this regard, as it is when modern thinking about environmental issues first began to consolidate. Although there had been some earlier ecocritical work on Renaissance texts, no one had yet written a book that compellingly applied contemporary ecocritical approaches to early modern texts. I saw this as a fascinating opportunity and just the sort of challenge (formidable and more than a little intimidating) that, for some odd reason, appeals most to me. 11 for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man The quote is from Muir’s The Yosemite (New York: Century, 1912), 249–262. As Muir wrote in a letter to Ezra Carr (November 15, 1869), “I must return to the mountains—to Yosemite … I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there.” Quoted from John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings (Seattle, WA: Mountaineers Books, 1996), 109. 14 interest in Walden has exploded Great books never exist in isolation. Thoreau was not alone in writing into being a new environmental sensitivity, as he, like all great writers, was preceded and followed by other great writers. The appreciation of nature that Thoreau championed was only possible because he had been influenced by a range of earlier writers (including John Milton, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and many others) who imagined provocative new ways of understanding the relationship that we have to our planet. Conversely, another cadre of writers, perhaps most famously John Muir and Aldo Leopold, subsequently further shaped modern environmental thinking by expanding on Thoreau’s provocative ideas.

154

Notes

14 both the Narrative’s and Walden’s world-changing ideas Not surprisingly, such books (the one that Douglass penned is a prime example) sometimes initially seem odd and inconsequential—and perhaps just plain wrong or even evil —as they contain thinking that flies in the face of the conventional. Because they may seem so strange, such books may well not be judged great at the time of their creation. Indeed, what appears to be a great work early on may quickly fall in the estimation of history, while the seemingly insignificant may prove to be the most important of all. This is not always the case, of course. Silent Spring was immediately recognized as important, in spite of the fact that it offered a new way of thinking about the environment and our place in it. 15 is entirely random and obviously beyond our control Heidegger’s claim, which he made early in the 20th century, was not without controversy. For thousands of years, following Plato, most Western thinkers believed that our ideas had an existence outside of any particular culture. Standards of justice and beauty were thus believed to be unwavering across cultures and time. In this view, a just act or beautiful person would be recognized as such by any human being at any moment in history. Thanks to Heidegger and the thinkers who came before and after him, many people today would disagree with this view. An act that might have seemed perfectly just by prevailing American standards in the first half of the 19th century, such as keeping slaves, would not even remotely resemble an example of justice today. 15 our attitudes toward complex topics like this were culturally constructed over time As a gay man, Foucault was particularly interested in where our ideas, and taboos, toward homosexuality originated. Startlingly, he found that homosexuality as a category, as a species of person that you could be counted among, first appeared in the 19th century. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 43. Foucault proclaimed that before this moment in history there were no homosexuals. What he meant by this was that prior to this time having sex with a partner of the same sex was seen as a temporary aberration that did not result in your being labeled a different kind of person. However, by the end of the 19th century a new way of understanding this form of behavior was emerging, which consequently needed a new term to describe it: the word “homosexual” was coined in English in 1892 (OED, “Homosexual” A). 16 can reveal more about contemporary attitudes toward the environment than any of Shakespeare’s plays When it was first suggested in the 1980s that culturally important texts, like the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, should be included among the books read in high school, howls of protest were heard proclaiming that it was not a great work of literature. (Actually, this is a bad example, as this book is wonderfully written. Really. Read it. You’ll see.) That objection missed the point, as Douglass’s book is among the greatest produced by his era, as it offers piercing insights into one of the century’s most worrisome issues.

Notes

155

Stephen Greenblatt and those who followed him not only imagined a new role for literary study; they also opened up a whole new range of texts for consideration. Once this happened, it became clear that what had been held up as great literature were sometimes deemed so by dominant cultures that had much to gain by marginalizing other texts, like Douglass’s, that had the potential to disrupt the status quo.

1 Turning from the past 23 roughly half of Americans believe the biblical account of creation set in Eden to be historically accurate Although it is tempting to see the idea of the lost paradise as little more than a charming and sometimes amusing myth, belief in a biblical Eden is still widespread in the U.S. today. When asked in a 2012 Gallup poll about “their views on the origin and development of human beings,” 47 percent of Americans responded that the following statement came closest to their views: “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” Regarding Eden, the age of 10,000 years is significant, as most biblical scholars agree that Eden was lost soon after God created human beings, somewhere around 6000 years ago. Consequently, although Gallup did not ask specifically about Eden, since creationism is rooted in a literal reading of the myth of Eden as recounted in Genesis, the biblical Eden likely figures prominently in the beliefs of many of these Americans, especially as Gallup’s related 2005 poll revealed that, when given a range of options, 53 percent of Americans agreed that “God created man exactly how [the] Bible describes it.” It is important to note that while belief in Eden is central to fundamentalist and literal readings of Genesis, it is by no means a tenet of faith for all Jews, Christians, and Moslems. Beginning at least as early as the 17th century when faced with the reality of a universe that was no longer geocentric, a number of thinkers began developing strategies for retaining their faith even though they found scripture at times inconsistent and doubtful. With the rise of modernity, and with it challenges to Genesis (such as evolution), this approach became influential as theologians worked its tenets out in detail. For example, since the 1950s the succession of Catholic Popes has largely endorsed evolution. For the surprising number of Americans who believe in the biblical Eden, our opening question has a straightforward answer: Environmentally, it all began to go wrong about 6000 years ago when God, dispensing punishment for human disobedience, informed Adam that “cursed is the ground for thy sake.” Cast out of Eden, human beings would no longer be provided for by a benevolent earth. To the contrary, we would have to forcibly take from the earth what we needed, which now brought forth only “thorns and thistles.” As a further consequence of our sin, not only every human being, but all life on earth, as well as the planet itself, is now fallen. While human beings can be saved through Christ, who offers a way off the planet and into heaven (which is often

156

Notes

imagined as a new, even better Eden), the earth and all its plants and nonhuman beings are arguably in a state of irretrievable decay. Consequently, in this view the environmental “tipping point” for our planet may have already occurred 6000 years ago. 25 they were in no position to know what the lives of early human beings were really like It is important to note that there is something particular about edenic thinking: it looks back to a fixed point in time, the moment of creation. Ever since Darwin (and even before), we have understood that life on earth is constantly changing and evolving. Indeed, this endless change goes back before life emerged on our planet, and even before the earth’s formation, to the explosive creation of the universe over 13 billion years ago. This initiated a chain of events that led to the growth of everything, which is everywhere forever still in a state of transformation. Although this view of life, the earth, and the universe as continually evolving is now a cornerstone of evolutionary biology, cosmology, and other sciences, it was not always so, even in the 20th century. In its original form, Einstein’s theory of relativity held that the universe had been in a static state since its creation. In fact, Einstein had to introduce an extra term into his equations, the cosmological constant, so that his preconceived notion of a static universe jibed with relativity. When the astronomer Edwin Hubble provided empirical evidence in the late 1920s proving that the universe was in fact expanding and in a state of flux, Einstein recanted his model of a static universe, calling it the “biggest blunder” of his life. Similarly, it was only at the close of the 18th century that geologists began to suggest that the earth was shaped by forces that render it in an ongoing state of change. This view, known as uniformitarianism, was made popular by Darwin’s friend Charles Lyell in 1830, who argued that the earth must be at least 300 million years old. It was, however, not until the 1960s that a theory of plate tectonics was advanced that explained these transformations. Although it is perhaps a little disconcerting, up until relatively recently the view that we tend to associate with creationism (the belief that the earth and all its life, and indeed the universe itself, are and have always been in a relatively static state since their creation) was accepted even by scientists. However, the sciences now give us a vision of the past that is constantly evolving. It is simply not possible to go back to a time to some sort of fixed, static origin point when human beings lived at peace with the earth and other creatures, as the earth and its life (including everyone on our family tree, the genus Homo) are continually shifting and evolving. Although the origin point is central to biblical creationism, it is simply not a precept of modern science. Not only is returning to a fixed, edenic point in history impossible, returning to a specific place is also problematic. In the biblical creation story, the first human beings resided in a single place, Eden, which was often speculated as having been somewhere in southern Mesopotamia (though some Christian offshoots, like Mormons, imagine it elsewhere, such as Jackson County, Missouri).

Notes

157

However, the historical record suggests that early human beings first left Africa over 100,000 years ago (it could have been much sooner; the exact date is currently being fiercely debated) to then spread across the globe. If we both subscribe to edenic thinking and accept this modern revelation regarding our past, where exactly did human beings live at peace with the planet? In Africa? Asia? Europe? Somewhere in the Americas? Not only is determining when we lived an edenic life problematic, so is pinpointing where it was lived. 31 prehistoric people existed in an Edenlike condition Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 24. 33 the greatest event in human history since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Reprinted in The Ecocriticism Reader, Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 4. 33 Following White and Merchant, scores of environmental writers have, in a host of ways, subsequently made much the same argument White and Merchant were hardly the first thinkers to implicate technology with the loss of paradise. In fact, the general idea has been alive and well in the U.S. for centuries. In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), a classic work of literary criticism from 50 years ago, Leo Marx noticed that depictions of technology repeatedly and intrusively enter edenic and pastoral scenes in American literature. Examples of the “machine in the garden [of Eden]” offered by Marx include the train heard from Walden Woods and the steamboat that separates Huckleberry Finn and Jim. American literature is filled with such scenes. These are particularly revealing because, influenced by edenic and pastoral traditions, such scenes repeatedly depicted North America as a pastoral locus amoenus (which, incidentally, likely influenced how Udall and others imagined Native Americans, the innocent inhabitants of this edenic land). However, American culture in the past three centuries was impacted by the growth of technological modernity. Consequently, for hundreds of years hundreds of American writers have in a variety of ways told the story of a pastoral, edenic land threatened by the intrusion of technology, the machine in the garden. As with the extraordinary influence of the Eden myth and Greco-Roman pastoral, American pastoral, which frequently identified technological modernity as an evil threatening paradise, diffused into the popular imagination. You do not need to have read Walden to find science and technology environmentally suspect; it is written large in the American imagination. For example, for decades now power plants with billowing smokestacks have simultaneously become icons of environmental devastation and technological modernity. 34 hence, they called it “seacoal” For more on the emergence of the first fossil-fuel economy on earth, see my What Else is Pastoral (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 2011), 95–124.

158

Notes

35 our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Mariner Books, 2002), 277. 35 all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls Ibid., 278. 36 new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures Ibid., 296.

2 Turning toward the future 41 the future is always mightier than the present Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 20. 44 phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental David Foreman, “Voluntary Human Extinction,” Wild Earth (Summer 1991), 72. Note, this article was published under the pseudonym “Les U. Knight.” 45 Carson may well have enthusiastically embraced genetically engineered crops Pamela Ronald, “Would Rachel Carson Embrace ‘Frankenfoods’?— This Scientist Believes ‘Yes,’” Forbes, August 12, 2012. See also Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). As Bacon scathingly notes in The New Organon, “One must also speak plainly about usefulness, and say that the wisdom which we have drawn in particular from the Greeks seems to be a kind of childish stage of science, and to have the child’s characteristic of being all too ready to talk, but too weak and immature to produce anything.” This edition of The New Organon was edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6. See also my “Sixteenth-Century Artisanal Practices and Baconian Prose” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, ed. Michael Denbo (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 2014). 47 Bacon, who has since been christened the “father of modern science,” was and still is a hero to this group On the frontispiece of their History of the Royal Society of London (written by Thomas Sprat in 1667), which outlined the ideals of the nascent organization, Bacon’s image, one of three depicted, looms larger than the King and the Society’s president. 47 the child’s characteristic of being all too ready to talk, but too weak and immature to produce anything Francis Bacon, The New Organon. Ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6. 48 the sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” lines 3–4. 48 since Miss Carson’s book Reprinted in The American Presidency Project. Kennedy, The President’s News Conference, 352, August 29, 1962.

Notes

159

49 also authorizing research into ways of minimizing air pollution United States Department of Environmental Protection website, “History of the Clean Air Act” (http://epa.gov/oar/caa/caa_history.html).

3 Forward to nature, away from nature 50 simplify, simplify Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York, Dover, 1995), 60. 50 which could be purchased at the time for a dollar Ibid., 18. 50 being discarded as unfashionable when it was still quite usable Ibid., 16. 50 beware of all enterprises that require new clothes Ibid., 14. 50 to leave off eating animals Ibid., 140. 51 he also rejected imported foodstuffs, like coffee and tea Ibid., 139. 51 that were being shipped into U.S. ports (like nearby Boston) by way of sailing ships “What are all the oranges imported into England to the hips and haws in her hedges?” Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 4. 51 to encourage micro-apartments by fostering a competition for real-estate developers www.nyc.gov: PR- 257-12, July 9, 2012. 51 other cities are adapting zoning for apartments as small as 220 square feet each See “Housing-starved Cities Seek Relief in Microapartments” by Casey Ross in The Boston Globe (March 26, 2013). 51 somewhere between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion gallons of water to produce Elizabeth Cline, www.overdressedthebook.com/fashion-fast-facts / (April 2012). 52 that woodchucks and birds were equally deserving of the harvest, his garden ultimately failed “His romance of wild nature left him feeling guilty about discriminating against weeds (he rails against the need for such ‘invidious distinctions’) and he couldn’t see why he was any more entitled to the harvest of his garden than the resident woodchucks and birds. Badly tangled up in contradictions between his needs and nature’s prerogatives, Thoreau had to forsake the bean field.” Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 4. 52 by his own admission, as “a child of Thoreau” he largely shifted his attention and concern Ibid., 3. 52 no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no buying anything new Colin Beavan, No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process (New York: Picador, 2009), 4. 53 which were already becoming a feature of the landscape in Shakespeare’s England See my What Else Is Pastoral? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 53 Their vast desires, but make their wants the more Sir John Denham, Cooper’s Hill is quoted from Brendan O’Hehir’s Expans’d Hieroglyphicks:

160

Notes

A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), lines 29–32. I have modernized the spelling. 53 drawing attention to the deep significance, environmental and otherwise, of everyday practices There has been a powerful strand of Western thinking, beginning at least as early as Plato, gravitating toward the highest preoccupations of mind: ideals like truth, justice, and beauty. Conversely, the body and its wants and needs have often been marginalized and denigrated in this view, sometimes even being seen as an earthly source of evil. Thoreau, however, rejects this dichotomy, instead arguing that being thoroughly rooted in the earth and the earthly aspect of our existence is prerequisite for spiritual growth: “Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?” (Walden, 9). In short, Thoreau argues that our most basic bodily needs for shelter, clothing, and food have profound significance, both personally and environmentally. 53 trying to satisfy all those “imaginary wants” that Denham railed against Ibid., 4. 53 and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived Ibid., 59. 54 it is important to realize that forest and mountains were not always so favorably imagined The following few pages were derived from material that I first published in Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). 55 he described them in all earnestness as “strange, horrid, and fearful crags” Diary and correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S.: To which is subjoined the private correspondence … Volume 1 (London: H. G. Bohn, 1859), 239. 55 are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life John Muir, Our National Parks (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1901), 1. 55 Thoreau in a variety of texts There are so many passages from Thoreau celebrating mountains that there is a book collecting them: J. Parker Huber’s Elevating Ourselves: Thoreau on Mountains (Boston, MA: Mariner and the Thoreau Society, 1999). 55 mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life John Muir, Our National Parks, 15. 56 I explored this idea (the European emergence of environmental consciousness) in some detail in a book on pastoral literature See my What Else Is Pastoral? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 58 writers like John Milton and Andrew Marvell began celebrating nature in ways that anticipated the Romantic poets See my Milton and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 58 all sensible men gladly escape, earlier or later, and partially or wholly, from the turmoil of the cities Andrew Jackson Downing, The

Notes

161

Horticulturist, III (1948), 10. Quoted in Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 64. 58 which Vaux later directly helped develop on the outskirts of New York, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere In Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson notes that Downing, Vaux, and Catharine Beecher were “the most important voices in shaping new American attitudes toward” emerging suburbia between 1840 and 1875 (61). However, as Beecher did not, as Jackson notes, “specifically refer to suburbia” (62), but rather laid out moral arguments for domestic bliss, which she imagined in a semi-rural setting, she did not have quite the same impact, and certainly not the same direct influence, as did Downing and Vaux on the creation of the American suburbs. 59 the old notions of time and space being half annihilated Andrew Jackson Downing, The Horticulturist, and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, Volume 3 (Albany, NY: Luther Tucker, 1849), 10. 59 most influential single individual in translating the rural ideal into a suburban ideal Crabgrass Frontier, 63. 59 and his successors reduced them even further As Jackson notes, as “Downing’s ideal suburb would feature single-family cottages on lots with street frontages of at least one hundred feet, or about four times the width of the average plot in nearby New York” City. Ibid., 65. 59 that challenges comparison with the Duke of Devonshire’s Theodore Tilton is quoted in Dolores Hayden’s Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (New York: Vintage, 2004), 59. 59 a vision that gives zest to the labors of industrious thousands Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 2011), 27. 59 imagining a distinctly American house that would respond to the needs of its climate, soil, and people Ibid., 43–44. 59 the stage was set for the planning of the suburb as a unit, as a romantic community in harmony with nature Crabgrass Frontier, 73. 60 the area surrounding the city was developing into what seemed like one big “continual building” John Stow, A Survey of London, intro. and notes by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1908), I, 98 and 127. I have modernized spelling. 61 In the parks of London, you may imagine yourself in the depths of the country Andrew Jackson Downing, The Horticulturist, Vol. V, No. 4, October 1850. 62 increases the subsequent capacity for happiness and the means of securing happiness Frederick Olmsted, “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report” (1865), 20. Olmsted is here talking about the Yosemite Valley. 62 they trampled crops and left behind “filth” and “rubbish” John Stow, A Survey of London, II, 77. 62 a riot broke out among the day-trippers Ibid.

162

Notes

62 Ben Jonson argued those that stayed and built homes did more and lasting damage See my reading of Jonson’s “To Penshurst” in What Else Is Pastoral? 63 teaching them to look at and dwell in the natural world Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991), 4. 63 step right in and wander around (try that with a Hudson River painting!) Olmsted, incidentally, was the first person to claim for himself the title of “Landscape Architect.” 64 Urban planners, like the late Jane Jacobs, have been drawing attention to them for decades now Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1961), 351 and elsewhere.

4 Places, natural and otherwise 65 It was once thought that Thoreau coined the word The OED entry on “ecology” notes that “[a] supposed use of ecology in a letter by Thoreau dated 1858 represents a misreading of “geology:” see Science (1965) 13 Aug. 707 and Bulletin of the Thoreau Society (1973) No. 123. 6.” For this definition of “biology,” see OED II.2. 66 A few years ago I was asked to write an encyclopedia entry for “Nature” See my entry on “nature” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 66 “‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word,” signaling one of the most difficult concepts, in the English language Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 186. 66 Other scholars have argued that there are over 60 distinct categories of meaning for the word A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935). 66 These, in turn, give us a host of English words including physical, physics … innate, nation, and many others including, of course, “nature” See my What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011) Ch. 1, n.14. 67 the phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations OED, “nature” I.11a. The OED notes that this meaning was hinted at in medieval literature, including by Chaucer. However, I would argue that it emerges full-fledged in our modern sense with Milton. 67 the phrase “nature lover” was first used to describe Thoreau; “nature poetry” and “nature worship” first in connection with Wordsworth OED, “nature” compounds: Thoreau C3, Wordsworth C4.b. 67 But we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us—the separation from human society Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 55.

Notes

163

68 consolidate in one agency a variety of federal research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities” that could deal with these and other environmental issues Quoted from the EPA’s website, May 14, 2013 (www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/epa-history). 68 the EPA sees to the environmental wellbeing of cities, suburbs, forests, and everything else, including but not limited to “nature” In January 2010, the EPA’s administrator at the time, Lisa P. Jackson, clarify the ongoing mission of the agency by setting out “Seven Priorities for EPA’s Future”: “Taking Action on Climate Change, Improving Air Quality, Assuring the Safety of Chemicals, Cleaning Up Our Communities, Protecting America’s Waters, Expanding the Conversation on Environmentalism and Working for Environmental Justice, Building Strong State and Tribal Partnerships.” Ibid., www2.epa.gov/node/19701/. 68 the “leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people” Quoted from The Nature Conservancy website, March 9, 2018 (https://www. nature.org/about-us/index.htm). 69 The Nature Conservancy has a history of success in protecting nature to preserve life for future generations Ibid., www.nature.org/ourini tiatives/regions/index.htm. 69 those “Last Great Places” where nature, largely separate from human beings, is still alive, if not entirely well In 1991 The Nature Conservancy launched its “Last Great Places: An Alliance for People and the Environment initiative, a multinational, $300 million effort to protect large-scale ecosystems by making people part of the solution. The initiative emphasizes core reserve areas surrounded by buffer zones, where appropriate human uses are encouraged.” Ibid., www.nature.org/about-us/vision-mission/history/index.htm. 69 only recently have they given a good deal of attention to urban areas As they note on their website, The Nature Conservancy in 2013 “began work on a science-based natural infrastructure assessment tool to help cities understand and evaluate the many ways in which natural infrastructure contributes to sustainability and resilience.” www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/ northamerica/unitedstates/urban-strategies.xml. 69 Abraham Lincoln signed a Bill protecting the Yosemite Valley … “for public use, resort and recreation” Jeffrey P. Schaffer, Yosemite National Park: A Natural History Guide to Yosemite and Its Trails (Berkeley, CA: Wilderness Press, 1999), 48. 69 They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 189. 70 a vast protected wilderness, one where people live in and among the rest of creation The End of Nature, xxii. 70 drive away the feeling that you are in another, separate, timeless, wild sphere Ibid., 40.

164

Notes

71 At least three-fourths of our planet, having clearly been modified by human action, is no longer wilderness E. C. Ellis and N. Ramankutty, “Putting People in the Map: Anthropogenic Biomes of the World,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6 (2008), 439–447. 71 The utopian community was Manhattan David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 1–2. 71 In parts of Manhattan, over a third of the population still get to their jobs this way www.wnyc.org/blogs/transportation-nation/2011/sep/22/ new-census-data-how-the-nation-gets-to-work-how-nyc-is-different. 71 By contrast, only 3 percent of people commute by foot in Los Angeles www.governing.com/gov-data/walk-to-work-popularity-data-foramerican-cities.html. 72 New Yorkers are eleven times more likely than the average American to take mass transit to work www.wnyc.org/blogs/transportation-nation/2011/ sep/22/new-census-data-how-the-nation-gets-to-work-how-nyc-is-different. 72 Owen and his wife went from walking and using mass transit in Manhattan to driving over 20,000 miles a year when they moved to suburban Connecticut Green Metropolis, 15. 72 On average, each man, woman, and child in Vermont annually uses five times as much gasoline as a Manhattan resident Green Metropolis, 14. 72 Mount Laurel, New Jersey … has a population of approximately 41,000 Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010 for Mount Laurel township, Burlington County, New Jersey, United States Census Bureau, 2010. 72 Manhattan has over 35 times the population density “New York County, New York.” Quickfacts.census.gov.com 2010. 72 with less than 4 percent of the planet’s population, the U.S. nonetheless has a quarter of its cars According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Passenger_ vehicles_in_the_United_States) United States has approximately 250 million cars. According to the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/ 08/23/car-population_n_934291.html) the world now has a billion. 72 the average car trip has a carbon footprint that is ten times the average trip via the New York City Transit system Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2012), 207–208. 72 Hybrid cars … are nowhere near as good as mass transit, as they are only 1.6 times more efficient than the average car These calculations are derived from numbers provided by David MacKay, who is a Cambridge professor and former chief scientific adviser to the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change, in his excellent 2009 book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air (Cambridge: UIT Cambridge, 2009), 126. 73 a typical apartment in downtown San Francisco used 80 percent less fuel for heat than nearby suburban tract houses Green Metropolis, 206–207.

Notes

165

73 the size of the average new house in the U.S. has increased by 50 percent since the early 1970s NBC News (www.nbcnews.com/business/ushomes-actually-got-bigger-during-ugly-2011-815930?streamSlug=businessmain). 73 the hidden cost of a car’s manufacture can double its overall energy use and carbon footprint These figures are derived from MacKay’s (see page 90). However, MacKay is basing his on purchasing a new car once every 15 years. For reasons of argument, I have recalculated based on the purchase of a new car every 5 years. 74 Maybe someday we’ll be able to drive and cool our homes with almost no carbon emissions, but until then, there is nothing greener than blacktop Triumph of the City, 222. 74 no expenditure in ornamental gardening is, to our mind, productive of so much beauty as that incurred in producing a well-kept lawn Andrew Jackson Downing, The Horticulturist, and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, Volume 1 (1847), 204. 74 Such lawns were in part made possible by … relatively inexpensive mechanical lawnmowers light enough to be pushed by a single person See Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier (60–61) for more on the introduction of the mechanical lawnmower to America. 74 the idealization of the house as a kind of Edenic retreat … led naturally to an emphasis on the garden and lawn Crabgrass Frontier, 59. 74 Michael Pollan revealed to a shocked America the degree to which corn dominates our lives and farmland Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin, 2007), Section I, 1–122. 74 homeowners annually use over a 100 million pounds of pesticides on our lawns, which we apply more liberally than farmers do to their crops Green Metropolis, 191. 74 With respect to fertilizers, some estimates put the amount used on lawns at nearly six times greater than pesticides From Paul Robbins’s Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007), 63. 74 consumers are dosing their lawns with twice as much fertilizer as experts recommend Ibid., 64–65. 74 it cost as much to transport goods 30 miles overland in the U.S. as it did to send them across the Atlantic by ship Cited by Glaeser in Triumph of the City, 44. 76 When raising poultry, for example, Varro recommends housing them in buildings that hold 5000 birds each Marcus Terentius Varro, Cato and Varro: On Agriculture (Loeb Classical Library No. 283), 463. 76 the Georgics focused on farming as important and necessary work, indeed a patriotic duty, for the good of the Empire Hence, one of the work’s most famous lines is labor omnia vincit, “work conquers all.” Virgil, Georgics, Book I, lines 145–146: The exact quote is labor omnia vincit improbus (“hard work overcame all

166

Notes

things”). Virgil was, I imagine with tongue firmly in cheek, riffing on his own phrase from Eclogues X: omnia vincit amor (“love conquers all”), line 69. 77 When London’s population soared in Shakespeare’s era, a flurry of farming manuals soon appeared See Lord Ernle’s “Obstacles to Progress,” in Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1650–1815, ed. E. L. Jones (London: Methuen, 1967), 49–65. 77 Interest in Cato’s and Varro’s books, along with Virgil’s Georgics, also soared at the time Cato’s and Varro’s books On Agriculture were brought together in a 1533 Latin edition published in Paris: Libri de re rustica, M. Catonis, Marci Terentii Varronis, L. Iunii Moderati Columellae, Palladii Rutilii, quorum pagina seque[n]ti reperies. 77 Agricultural historians have argued that the first truly modern market gardens … began emerging around 17th-century London See Joan Thirsk’s Alternative Agriculture: A History: From the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 184–185 and Malcolm Thick’s The Neat House Gardens: Early Market Gardening around London (London: Prospect Books, 1998). 77 a new generation of local, market, and urban farmers in the U.S. began looking carefully at French intensive gardening from more than a century before See, for example, Eliot Coleman’s The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-round Vegetable Production Using Deep-organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009), 13–24. 77 This auspicious event occurred right about when Walden was published U.S. census figures note a NYC population of 696,115 in 1850 and 1,174,779 in 1860. Source: Wikipedia. 77 its population in 1860 was less than 1 percent of Manhattan’s, in spite of the fact that industry was already beginning to settle there Yonkers is 20.3 square miles compared to Manhattan at 22.9. Yonkers’ population is quoted from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonkers,_New_York). 78 by the 1870s refrigerated meat was being transported across the country From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_car). 78 Prior to this time, most food was local food and “suburb” (like the original Roman suburbium) usually meant farmland Food was also transported by boat and ship in significant amounts; however, most of a city’s food still came from its suburbs. 78 transportation from farm to point of sale may account for as little as 4 or 5 percent of a foodstuff’s carbon footprint Sarah DeWeerdt, World Watch Magazine, May/June, Vol. 22, No. 3. 78 In general … the environmental implications of eating locally are complicated James E. McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010). 78 Regarding those 32 million acres of suburban lawn in the 21st century Elizabeth Kolbert, “Turf War,” The New Yorker, July 21, 2008.

Notes

167

5 Writing a new environmental era 83 the Tesla is in many respects a rather conventional automobile See the Harvard Business Review, “Tesla’s Not as Disruptive as You Might Think.” May 2015. https://hbr.org/product/tesla-s-not-as-disruptive-as-you-might-think/F1505A-HCB -ENG?referral=03069 83 When compared to a 25-mpg car with a single occupant, a bus is 14 times more efficient … Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, 126. 84 cities are thus far more efficient than suburbs and rural locales See Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2012) and David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009). 84 Placed end to end, they would circle the earth—31 times I derived this figure from 254 million automobiles at an average length of 16.25 feet each. 84 A typical car in the U.S. is responsible for emitting about 4.7 metric tons of CO2 per year https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/green house-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle 84 the average American’s total CO2 emissions are currently around 16.5 metric tons annually https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC? view=map 85 the WHO has declared traffic injuries a worldwide epidemic See the World Health Organization’s 2017 “Road Traffic Injuries,” www.who.int /mediacentre/factsheets/fs358/en/and M. Peden, R. Scurfield, D. Sleet, D. Mohan, A. Hyder, E. Jarawan, and C. Mathers et al., World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention (Geneva: WHO, 2004). 85 The average cost of owning, insuring, maintaining, and fueling a car in the U.S. is around $9000 a year http://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/ 04/annual-cost-operate-vehicle-falls-8698-finds-aaa-archive/ 85 Industrial output during World War II was staggering … https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Naval_forces 86 India is currently the fifth largest car market in the world and growing rapidly www.financialexpress.com/auto/car-news/india-becomes-fifth -largest-passenger-vehicle-market-in-the-world-as-sales-cross-3-million/650878/ 86 car ownership alone had soared to 172 million https://pdfs. semanticscholar.org/39fd/4e7e44e2bd27a3de1a1a7bdbbe16b8576fc7.pdf and www. chinadaily.com.cn/business/motoring/2016-01/26/content_23253925.htm 86 There are currently just over a billion cars on the planet … that number is expected to double by 2040 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/ 2016/04/the-number-of-cars-worldwide-is-set-to-double-by-2040 86 Some luxury SUVs have a carbon footprint double that at 35 metric tons https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog /2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car

168

Notes

87 that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/ what-elon-musk-doesnt-get-about-urban-transit/548843/ 92 This report not only calculated the carbon footprint for the immediate campus www.sustainability.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/CAP_2014_F inal21.pdf 93 When Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, did the math https://grist.org/climate-energy/a-climate-scientistwho-decided-not-to-fly/ 94 In early 2016, United Airlines introduced a limited number of commercial flights burning 30 percent biofuel https://www.united.com /web/enUS/content/company/globalcitizenship/environment/alternativefuels.aspx 94 Paul Crutzen, the chemist and Nobel laureate who coined the term “anthropocene,” has argued that the production of biofuels contributes more to climate change https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/389/ 2008/acp-8-389-2008.pdf 94 Since an average of 4 percent of the fuel expended during a flight is for taxiing, this could result in real, if modest, savings. https://www.theguardian. com/travel/2016/feb/02/easyjet-plans-cut-carbon-emissions-hydrogen-fuel-cell-trial 94 The Airbus A350XWB … promises to be 25 percent more fuel efficient www.airbus.com/aircraft/passenger-aircraft/a350xwb-family.html 94 This is in fact the most optimistic scenario that has been entertained by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/spm/av-en.pdf 94 The International Air Transport Association (IATA) notes that worldwide there were 3.3 billion airline passengers in 2014 www.iata.org /pressroom/pr/Pages/2014-10-16-01.aspx

6 Confronting denial 99 something like 88 percent of the earth’s coal reserves, 35 percent of its oil, and 52 percent of its natural gas must remain in the ground, unextracted https://www.carbonbrief.org/meeting-two-degreeclimate-target-means-80-per-cent-of-worlds-coal-is-unburnable-study-says 99 In 2014, five of the seven wealthiest companies (in terms of revenues) on the planet were in the fossil fuel business This is in terms of total revenue. See http://fortune.com/global500/2014/ 100 97 percent of these scientists concluded that it is real, underway, and is principally anthropogenic https://www.skepticalscience.com/globalwarming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm. 100 Unfortunately, many Americans question whether anthropogenic climate change is real http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication /files/Climate-Change-American-Mind-April-2014.pdf

Notes

169

100 Consequently, when ranking the policy priorities that Americans believe their leaders should be addressing, climate change is not even in the top 20 … www.people-press.org/2015/01/15/publics-policy-prioritiesreflect-changing-conditions-at-home-and-abroad/ 100 Even in terms of environmental problems, concern over climate change and global warming rank surprisingly low in the minds of the American public Ibid. 100 40 percent of adults worldwide have never even heard of climate change https://www.futurity.org/climate-change-poll-967722/ 100 the defenders of “America’s heritage of individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government” www.cato.org/sup port?gclid=CMTp_ufDg8cCFQ-PaQodiAsPrQ 101 With respect to climate change, a 2013 study by Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques, which looked at 108 English-language books denying anthropogenic climate change … www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3787818/ 101 We breathe it out. Plants breath it in … They call it pollution. We call it life www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/cei.asp many more trillions of pounds of fossil fuels will annually be extracted and burned while we wait www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/brief_ coal.html#.VcD81xNVhBc 103 As far as I know, this was the first course of its type offered in a U.S. university UCSB Current, “Case Closed? Depends on Who You Ask,” March 24, 2016, Shelly Leachman. www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/ 016588/case-closed-depends-who-you-ask 103 Examples include characterizing the development of alternate energy as, to quote our President, “a big mistake” …Trump called the “push to develop alternative forms of energy—so-called green energy—from renewable sources … a big mistake … [and] just an expensive way of making the tree-huggers feel good about themselves” in his 2015 book Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (New York: Threshold Editions). 108 as it happens, I authored that essay Timothy Clark, Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 10. 108 Given that the first denial book, Sherwood Idso’s Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe was published in 1982 Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe was identified as a denial book by Dunlap and Jacques: www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2013/ 06/manufacturing-uncertainty-conservative-think-tanks-and-climate-change-denial -books/ 108 in a milestone “Global Warming Special Issue” of ISLE in 2014, editors Scott Slovic and Kathleen Dean Moore ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 21, Issue 1, Winter 2014. 110 agreement with the statements “Global warming will never happen” and “Global warming is caused by natural causes” jumped roughly 12 percent for the college-educated www.gallup.com/poll/

170

Notes

182159/college-educated-republicans-skeptical-global-warming.aspx?utm_ source=CATEGORY_CLIMATE_CHANGE&utm_medium=topic&utm_ campaign=tiles 110 “Republicans are actually more likely than college graduates who are Democrats to say they understand a great deal about the issue” of climate change Ibid.

Epilogue: about this book 124 When the late Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad with much fanfare Jobs is quoted from Apple Press Info, “Apple Launches iPad,” February 27, 2010 (www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/27Apple-Launches-iPad.html).

Appendix: writing a new practice, details, details 131 by 2020 “80 percent of the entire world’s Internet consumption will be dominated by video” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/ 2015/05/27/in-5-years-80-percent-of-the-whole-internet-will-be-online-video 131 Netflix already accounts for “36.5 percent of all bandwidth consumed by North American Web users” https://www.washingtonpost.com /news/the-switch/wp/2015/05/28/netflix-now-accounts-for-almost-37-percentof-our-internet-traffic 131 7.9 megajoules (MJ) of energy per hour http://newscenter.lbl.gov /2014/06/02/berkeley-lab-study-highlights-growing-energy-impact-of-internetvideo-streaming 140 Surprisingly, even though nearly half of Facebook friends live within 25 miles of their online friends http://blog.bozuko.com/2012/01/25/new-data -more-than-45-of-your-customers-facebook-friends-live-within-shopping-distance -of-your-business/ 141 Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal recipient, did something unusual in January 2009 http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/ 01/27/is-massively-collaborative-mathematics-possible/ 142 Gowers’s experiment is just one of many that have suggested to some thinkers, such as Michael Nielsen, that a paradigm shift in human intelligence is presently underway See Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–11, 209–213. 143 Think of criticism of English literature. Critics are not going to one day put down their quills and arrive at a common understanding of Shakespeare. Ibid, 76. 147 The long-term goal is 50 percent by 2030 www.energy.ca.gov /renewables/tracking_progress/documents/renewable.pdf 147 Currently, roughly 75 percent of the UC’s power supply comes from natural gas http://ucop.edu/sustainability/_files/carbon-neutrality2025.pdf

Notes

171

147 the majority of natural gas in the U.S. is obtained from the environmentally disastrous practice of hydraulic fracturing http://blogs .wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2015/04/01/how-much-u-s-oil-and-gas-comes -from-fracking 147 The UC hopes to both become more efficient in its natural gas use and to replace it with biogas http://ucop.edu/sustainability/_files/ carbon-neutrality2025.pdf 149 The Chronicle of Higher Education published an opinion piece with the pithy title “Academic Travel Causes Global Warming” http://chron icle.com/article/Academic-Travel…/45937

INDEX

academia/universities: climate change literature course 103–108; conferences and lectures 92–93; early adopters 124–125; greenhouse gas emissions 92–93, 112, 126–127; promotion reviews and 135–136 “Academic Travel Causes Global Warming” (Pedelty) 149–150 accessibility: of conferences 96, 114, 117, 119; of ideas 124–126 Adam and Eve (biblical story) 12, 155–156 adAPT NYC pilot housing program 51 advertising 88–89 agribusiness 1, 32, 76 agriculture 25, 33; family farms, loss of 1, 6–8, 28; genetically engineered crops 29–31, 35, 39, 45–46, 70; market gardens 6, 77; Roman 75–78, 166; suburban farming trends 42 Airbus 94 air pollution 22, 33–35, 146–147 Air Transport Association (IATA) 94 air travel 168; cost of 93–94; cultural practices analysis 94–95; GHG emissions from 92, 146–147 Alexandria (ancient city) 25, 26 Amazonian rainforest, indigenous people of 31–32 “anthropocene” 94, 168 anthropogenic biomes 71 Apple 124 applied-humanities approaches 5, 98, 112–113, 115, 153

applied-science approaches 3, 5, 49, 82, 98, 112–113 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment 108 A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (Downing) 58 audience 105 Austen, Jane 104 authors 104–105; strategies used by 105–106 authorship, issue of 142 automobiles: carbon footprint of 72–74, 84, 86–87; as cool 83–86; energy efficient 5–6, 83; epidemic of accidents 85; as a form of mass transit 72–73; global increase in 86, 168; inefficiency of 5–6, 83–84; societal impact of 4–5, 85–87; Tesla 82–83, 86–87, 95 back-to-nature thinking 3, 28–29, 39–47, 49, 78, 102, 152; beginning of 58–60, 62–64; challenge of uprooting 41; Milton’s impact on 12; Rousseau’s views 37, 39; Thoreau’s impact on 2–3, 14–15, 17–18, 39–40, 42, 55–64; voluntary human extinction 44. See also edenic past (lost paradise); harmony with nature, idea of Bacon, Francis (scientist) 33–34, 46–48, 158 Bailenson, Jeremy 128 Bate, Jonathan 63 batteries, lithium 85 Beavan, Colin 52

Index

beef consumption 82, 89, 95, 147 Beef Industry Council 89 bicycle use 87, 89 biocides 28, 30, 35, 48 biofuels 94, 147 biomes 71 Black Krim tomato 30–31 Blascovich, Jim 128 British Royal Society 46 California 147 Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment 108 Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe (Idso) 108, 169 carbon footprint 6; of air travel 92–93, 95–96, 116, 147–149; of automobiles 84, 86–87; climate footprint 147; of food 72–74, 78; of non-carbon conferences 130–133, 147–149; of smartphones and tablets 116; United States 84; of universities 92–93 Carson, Rachel 7, 22, 27–28, 35–36, 54–56, 63; DDT concerns 45–46, 48–49, 54–55; on ecology 66, 69 Cato, Marcus Porcius 75–77 Cato Institute 100 Central Park (New York City) 62, 64 China 86 Chronicle of Higher Education 149–150 cities: flight from 2–3, 25–26; fuel efficiency of 71–72, 84; Rome, ancient 34, 75–77, 166; urban greening 41–45, 60–64, 78; urban simplicity, life of 51–53 Civil War 90 Clark, Timothy 108 The Clean Air Act 49 Climate Action Plan (UCSB) 92 climate change 6, 30–31, 54, 66, 72–74; 2013 study 100, 169; as anthropogenic (human-caused) 3, 83–84, 95, 100–102, 110; limits on temperature rise 93, 99–100; literature course 103–104. See also CO2 emissions; greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions climate change denial 4, 90–91, 95, 99–111, 168; battle of words 99–102, 169; “climate change alarmists” in literature of 110; reading, importance of 102–103 Climate Change Reconsidered trilogy (Heartland Institute) 101 Cline, Elizabeth 51–54 closed captioning 97, 117 clothing industry 29, 50–52, 54, 89

173

CO2 emissions 3, 6, 33, 73, 82, 84, 86–87, 101; nearly non-carbon conferences and 112, 116, 131–132; universities and 92–93, 126–127. See also greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions coal industry 103, 107 collective intelligence 141–144 common sense, appeals to 106 Competitive Enterprise Institute 100, 101 conferences and lectures 111; cultural importance of 95; developing world and exclusion 93–94, 97, 113, 118–119, 121, 130, 135; face-to-face interactions 114, 115, 128–129; greenhouse gases emitted by 92–93, 146–147; importance of 92–93; limitations of traditional 93–94, 97–98, 112; nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference model 6, 95, 112–123; real-time video conferencing 114. See also nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference model conservative think tanks (CTTs) 100–101 consumers 46, 53; writing into being 88–89 Conway, Erik 108 Cornell University 7 corporations 29; agribusiness 1, 32, 76; writing and 88–89 credible sources 106–107 Crutzen, Paul 94, 168 culturally influenced ideas 5–6, 15, 56, 85–90, 154; air travel 94–95; automobile use and 85–88; influence of advertisements 88–89; nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conferences 112–113, 118, 120, 127, 148–149 David, Joshua 44–45 DDT 28, 35, 46–48, 55 De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture) (Cato) 75–76 The Death of Nature (Merchant) 33 Denham, John 53 density Hales-Jewett theorem experiment 142 Diamond, Jared 47 Dickens, Charles 2 Douglass, Frederick 14–15, 88, 90, 91 Downing, Andrew Jackson 58–62, 64, 71–74, 77–78, 161 Dunlap, Riley E. 101, 108 early adopters 124–125 Earth First! (environmental group) 43 Easy Jet 94

174

Index

Eclogues (Virgil) 76 ecocriticism 10–11, 108–110 eco-cultures, urban 87 ecology, defined 65–69 eco-sabotage 43–44 Eden 23, 25–26, 36–37, 47; Adam and Eve story 12, 155–156 edenic past (lost paradise) 12, 23–24, 27–31, 36, 40, 74, 156–157. See also back-to-nature thinking; harmony with nature, idea of Einstein, Albert 92, 142, 156 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 86 electric cars 82–83, 86–87, 95 emotion, appeals to 106 The End of Nature (McKibben) 67–68 English gardens 61, 74 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Pinker) 25 environment, defined 65–68 environmental crisis, current 39 environmental destruction 2, 41, 66, 78 environmental humanities 2 environmentalism: forward-to-nature 50; modern 8–10, 17, 39, 41, 46, 56–57, 63 environmental justice 109 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 68–69 environmental terminology 65–70; confusion of different terms 65; differences between similar terms 68–70; ecology 65–69; ecosystems 65–69; environment 65–68; nature 66–68; wilderness 70–71 The Epic of Gilgamesh 24 Europe, medieval, worrisome environments in 54–55 European gardens 61 Evelyn, John 55, 62 evolution vs creationism debate 36–37, 47, 156–157 extinction 24–25, 34, 44, 99, 100 facts, analyzing statements of 106 “fake news” 107 family farms, loss of 1, 6–8, 28 farmers’ markets 77 feminist scholars 91–92 food pyramid 89 Foran, John 113 Foreman, David 43–44 fossil fuels 4, 28, 33–35, 72, 82, 84, 99–100 Foucault, Michel 15, 152, 154

fracking (hydraulic fracturing) 147, 171 future technologies 81 Gangnam Style (Psy) video 132 gardens: English 61, 74; European 61; market 6, 77 genetically engineered crops 29–31, 35, 39, 45–46, 70 Georgics (Virgil) 76–77, 165–166 Glaeser, Edward 43, 71–72, 74, 84 Gore, Al 27–28, 66, 149 .gov websites 107 Gowers, Tim 116, 141–143, 170 Graunt, James 34 Great Depression 85 Great Smoke (London, 1952) 22, 33 Greece, Ancient 22–24 Greeks, ancient 22, 46–47 Greenblatt, Stephen 15–17, 155 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 3–4, 33, 36, 73–74; due to automobiles 82, 84–87; methane 54, 147; nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conferences and 112; oxides of nitrogen (NOx) 146–147; recommended annual emissions allowance per person 83, 93; by universities 92–93, 112, 127; University of California goals 118, 147 greening, urban 41–45, 60–64; greenways 42, 44–45; intra-urban parks 60–62, 64, 78 Green Metropolis (Owen) 71 Grossmann, Marcel 142 Guide to the Lakes (Wordsworth) 57 Gutenberg’s printing press 47 Haeckel, Ernst 65 Hammond, Robert 44–45 Hard Times (Dickens) 2 harmony with nature, idea of 2, 18, 29–33, 36–37, 39–41; moving forward to nature 40–41, 81, 91, 102–104; origins of 21–25, 27–28; Romantic 59–60; Rousseau’s view 12, 28, 37; in Silent Spring 27. See also edenic past (lost paradise) Heartland Institute 100–101 Heidegger, Martin 15, 87–88, 154 heirloom fruits 29–31, 39, 46 High Line greenway (New York City) 42, 44–45 Highway Act of 1956 86 Hudson River School of painting 62 human encroachment 7, 43, 68

Index

humanities, the 2–6, 17, 81–84, 109; applied-humanities approaches 5, 98, 112–113, 115, 153; environmental 2, 90; scholar-activists 91–92; understanding human practices 83–84 hybrid crops 29–31, 46 Hyde Park (London, England) 60–61 hydraulic fracturing (fracking) 147, 171 hydrogen fuel 94 iclicker 132 Idso, Sherwood 108, 169 An Inconvenient Truth (film) 27, 66 indexing, by search engine crawlers 137 India 86, 167 Indians: First Americans, First ecologists (Udall) 32 industrial revolution 34 Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution (Blascovich and Bailenson) 128 Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE) journal 108–109 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 94, 99, 103 iPad 124 Jacques, Peter J. 101, 108 Jobs, Steve 124 Jonson, Ben 53, 56, 62, 162 journals, as exclusionary 121 Kaczynski, Ted (“Unabomber”) 101 Kalmus, Peter 93, 148 Kamo no Chōmei (poet) 53 Kennedy, John F. 32, 48–49 Klein, Naomi 108 Kolbert, Elizabeth 75 Lake District (England) 57 Late Pleistocene extinction event 24 Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (Robbins) 75 lawns 74–75, 78, 165 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) 131 Leopold, Aldo 14, 39 life expectancy, human 24, 33 literature 15, 23; climate change denial 4; climate change literature course 103–108; as a cultural and historical

175

insight 13–16; ecocriticism 10–11, 108–110; “How do we know what we know?” question 107; natural 42–43, 67; pastoral 27, 30, 56, 76 lithium batteries 85 logical fallacies 106 London, England 22, 33–34, 60–61, 166; population growth 60, 75, 77 lost paradise. see edenic past (lost paradise) Lowell, Massachusetts 2, 42 MacKay, David 73 mainstay environmental concerns, shift away from 42–43 Make America Great Again (presidential campaign slogan) 26–27 Manchester, England 2 Manhattan (New York) 43–45, 61, 62, 71–73, 77, 84, 166 Marx, Leo 157 mass transit. see public transportation McColley, Diane 10 McKibben, Bill 67–68, 70, 149 Merchant, Carolyn 33 Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway) 108 methane 54, 147 Mills, Jon 129 Milton, John 10–15, 67, 70 Minimalism, A Documentary 52 minimalist lifestyle 52 MLA International Bibliography 135 modern environmental thinking 8–10, 17, 39, 41–42, 46, 56–57, 63 modernity 31–37, 45–48, 54–57, 155; early modern period 16, 34–35, 47, 56, 61, 153; technological 33–37, 48, 57 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention 93 Moore, Kathleen Dean 108–109 mountains 55–56, 160 Mount Whitney 55 moving forward to nature 2–5, 18, 37–38, 78, 81, 83, 90–92, 97–98, 102–104, 110, 125–126; activism 43–45; attention to inhabited places 40–44; origins of thinking in Renaissance 46–48; student viewpoints 42. See also writing Muir, John 11–12, 14, 39, 55, 62, 153 Musk, Elon 82, 87 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 14–15, 154

176

Index

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 93 National Livestock and Meat Board 89 Native Americans 24–25, 32, 157 natural gas 147, 171 Nature (journal) 7 nature, defined 66–68, 162 Nature Conservancy 68–70, 163 nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference model 6, 95–97, 112–123; academic rank and 145; accessibility 96, 114, 117, 119; archived presentations 134–135; asynchronous components 114, 116–117, 130, 136, 139–140, 144; avatars and virtual reality 113, 120, 139; breakout sessions 133–134; carbon footprint of 130–132; closed captioning 97, 117; cost savings 122; cultural advantages 129; discussion, improvement in 119–120; dissemination of ideas 121; efficient time use 122–123; environmental impact of devices used 132–133; features of 96–97, 113–114; “flash conferences” 138–139; formality required 120; form of talks 138; global and regional conferences 140–141; institutional parity 121–122; keynote speakers 130; little done to address problem 149–150; PowerPoint presentations 113, 119, 137, 138, 146; proof-of-concept 112–113; Q&A sessions 96–97, 112–122, 128–139, 141, 143, 145–146; Q&A sessions as collective intelligence 141–144; Q&A sessions as text-based 136; questions about 127–151; real-time interaction as supplement 144–145; reasons for 147–149; reasons for not implementing 150–151; “selling points” 118–123; SnapChat approach 134–135; as social media 139–140; speakers 129–130; for talks and roundtables 133; as timely 148–149; time zone considerations 116–117; transcripts 137–138; unabridged transcripts of talks 122; university support for 146. See also conferences and lectures Netflix 131 New Criticism (literary study approach) 13–15 New Historicism (literary study approach) 13–16, 90 New York City 51, 52, 71; Central Park 62, 64; High Line greenway 42, 44–45. See also Manhattan (New York) Nielsen, Michael 142–143, 170

Nixon, Rob 109 “No Impact Man” (Beavan) 52 nostalgia 1, 23, 40 object-oriented ontology 88 Oelschlaeger, Max 31 Olmsted, Frederick 60–64, 74 The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan) 30, 52, 74 online services 115 open-access journals 96, 121 open-source software 113, 116 Oreskes, Naomi 108 Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (Cline) 51–54 Owen, David 43, 71–73, 84 Oxford English Dictionary 67 oxides of nitrogen (NOx) 146–147 Paradise Lost (Milton) 11–12, 67 Paris, France 77 Paris Agreement 102, 113, 149 parks 55, 60–62, 64, 78 pastoral genre 27, 30, 56, 76 pastoral life 23, 25–28, 30, 35–36, 48, 157 Pedelty, Mark 149–150 Pinker, Steven 25, 33, 124 Plato 88, 154 Pollan, Michael 28–30, 52, 74 Polymath Project 116 population growth 32, 34, 56, 75–77, 86 postcolonial concerns 109 post-war US industrial and economic boom 85 power plants 21–22, 33 The Prelude (Wordsworth) 55 preservation projects 8, 35, 40, 55, 63, 68–70, 163 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 104 public transportation 58–59, 62–64, 71–73, 78, 164; efficiency compared to personal automobiles 83–84, 167; purposefully left underdeveloped 85–86 reading skills 102–105; credibility of sources 106–107; questions to consider 105–106 Reagan, Ronald 25–26 Renaissance 16, 22, 26–27, 46–47, 55, 61, 70, 153 Republicans, climate change denial literature and 110, 169–170 road construction industry 86 Robbins, Paul 75 Robinson, Kim Stanley 130 Romans 22, 46–47

Index

Romantic Ecology (Bate) 63 Romantic poets 54–59, 61, 152 Rome (Roman Empire) 34, 75–77, 166 Ronald, Pamela 45–46 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (philosopher) 12, 28, 37, 39 Ryan, John 130 Schiller, Friedrich 26 scholar-activists 91–92 sciences 12, 48, 81–82; applied-science approaches 3, 5, 49, 82, 98, 112–113 scientific revolution 46–47 search engine crawlers 137 Second Nature: A Gardeners Education (Pollan) 52 Shakespeare, William 13–14, 26, 46, 60, 143 Silent Spring (Carson) 7, 22, 27–28, 35–36; DDT concern in 45–46, 48–49, 54–55; on ecology 66, 69; success dependent on Thoreau and Romantics 54–57; timing of 149, 154 Singer, Peter 130 slavery 15, 90, 110 Slovic, Scott 108–109 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Nixon) 109 smartphones and tablets 113, 115–116, 128, 138–139, 149 Snow, C. P. 97 social networking 115, 129; nearly carbon-neutral conferences as 139–140 social sciences 83–84, 113 solar energy 82, 103, 107 Spivak, Gayatri 109 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields 5, 81 Stow, John 60, 62 suburbium 76 suburbs 23, 42–43, 56, 64, 71–74, 161; energy footprint of 73–74; lawns and the environmental problems they pose 74–75, 78, 165; origins of American suburbia 3–4, 58–60, 77 supermarket pastoral (literary form) 30 Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air (MacKay) 73 techno-approaches 95 technological modernity 33–37, 48, 57 technology 81, 153, 157; for nearly carbon-neutral conferences 114–116; smartphones and tablets 113, 115–116,

177

128, 138–139, 149; STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields 5, 81 The Ten Foot Square Hut (Kamo no Chōmei) 53 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 17 terminology. see environmental terminology Tesla automobile 82–83, 86–87, 95 The Horticulturist (magazine) 58–59 Theocritus (Greek poet) 23, 25–26 The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies (Diamond) 47 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Klein) 108 Thoreau, Henry David 2–3, 12, 37, 78, 88–89, 152, 159, 160; back-to-nature thinking, impact on 2–3, 14–15, 18, 39–40, 42, 55–64; on clothing 29, 89; influence on modern environmentalism 50–54; mountains, view of 55; as “nature lover” 67; Silent Spring’s success dependent on 54–57. See also Walden (Thoreau) tomato, Black Krim 30–31 transcendentalist movement 58, 61 Trump, Donald 26–27, 102, 103, 107, 138–139, 169 Turf War (2008 New Yorker article) 75 “two-culture” projects 97 Udall, Steward 32, 157 United Airlines 94 University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB): Climate Action Plan 92, 127; LEED rating 147–148; nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference 6, 95, 112–123 University of California (UC) system 118, 147–148 urban fuel efficiency 71–72 urban simplicity, life of 51–53 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 89 Varro, Marcus Terentius 75–77 Vaux, Calvert 58–64, 74 video, streaming 130–132; real-time interaction as supplement (“NCN Salons”) 144–145 Villas and Cottages (Vaux) 59 Virgil (Roman poet) 22, 26–27, 76–77, 165–166

178

Index

Walden (Thoreau) 2–3, 8, 12, 14, 18, 29, 50, 53, 58–59, 63, 77, 91; increased interest in 102, 153; loss of interest in 42. See also Thoreau, Henry David Walden Pond 2, 40, 42, 50, 52, 57–58, 152 Watt, James 34 Weisman, Alan 44 Western thought toward nature 8–9, 11, 18, 23–25, 27 White Jr., Lynn 33 wilderness, defined 70–71 wilderness preservation 6–8, 40, 42, 63 Williams, Raymond 66 Wilson, E. O. 124 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 26 WordPress 116, 143 Wordsworth, William 55, 57–58, 63–64, 152

World Health Organization (WHO) 85 World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (Diamond) 47 World War II 85 The World Without Us (Weisman) 44 writing: audience for 105; battle of words on climate change 99–102; into being 3–6, 14, 88–92, 98, 102–104, 126; corporations and advertising 88–89; credibility of 106–107; language as standard-bearer of ideas 88; reading and 103–107; reception of ideas 102; references in 105. See also moving forward to nature Yosemite Valley 12, 40, 69 YouTube 132, 138