by Lynn Keller
The responsibility for officially naming geological epochs and setting their boundaries lies with committees of geologists, and geological classifications have depended upon stratal evidence involving distinctive fossil layers. Evidence exactly comparable to that used in delineating earlier periods will not currently be available for our present moment, and consequently the interdisciplinary Anthropocene Working Group preparing a proposal to formalize the Anthropocene for submission to the International Commission on Stratigraphy is unlikely to base that proposal on exclusively stratigraphic grounds. This troubles some geologists, who want to follow prior methodologies and would require a “continuous, preferably marine sedimentation record” that separates the Anthropocene from underlying geological units. Whether the Anthropocene will become an official geological category in the near future remains unclear. Yet even the geologists opposed to its formalization acknowledge the value of the term’s popularization, as it “creates public awareness and formalizes the concept of human-induced environmental change.”9 It has value, moreover, because it “encapsulates—indeed integrates—the many and diverse kinds of environmental change that have taken place.”10 Many geologists and other scientists think that even the efforts to define this epoch and find the “Anthropocene Series”—a geological series being the particular subdivision of the stratigraphic scale deposited during an epoch, usually identified by typical fossil flora and fauna—“would prove useful to constraining rates and scales of anthropogenic change to the Earth system.”11
Scientists differ about when the Anthropocene would properly begin, since many of the proposed times may not be sufficiently synchronized globally to serve as boundaries. Challenging the view that the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with its accelerating use of fossil fuel should be the divide, some have argued that humankind’s planetary impact dates from the beginnings of agriculture, registered in the fossil pollen record and changed soils. Others point to the moment about five thousand years ago when the methane level, registered in the ice core, began to rise, though there is debate about whether that rise was anthropogenic. Still others suggest the arrival of Europeans in the New World and the global trade networks of the end of the fifteenth century as the proper boundary—they emphasize that the meeting of Old and New World human populations introduced the globalization of human food crops as well as the cross-continental movement of other animal and plant species, and generated a dramatic decline in human population in the Americas that produced a “near-cessation of farming and reduction in fire use [that] resulted in the regeneration of over 50 million hectares of forest, woody savanna and grassland” with significant effects in carbon sequestration.12 The post–World War II Great Acceleration has also been proposed as the true beginning of the Anthropocene, due to the radioactivity recorded globally in glacial ice, tree rings, and lake sediment; the changed pollen record from genetically modified crops; and the introduction of other novel materials, including plastics.
Where one locates the Anthropocene’s beginnings has, as Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin note, wider implications, particularly as the concept is taken up by multiple disciplines and the public at large. Pointing to 1610—the beginnings of colonialism and global trade—highlights social developments, while the choice of 1964 emphasizes technology and points to “the more general problem of ‘progress traps.’ ” The term repositions the human. On the one hand, its placement of humans within geological time is humbling: we have been on the planet for such a tiny fraction of the earth’s existence and we are only one species, yet we will use up in perhaps 350 years the oil produced by decaying life forms over the 60 million years of the Carboniferous Period. Humans are having an impact on the biosphere that may be as deadly and dramatic as that of the asteroid thought responsible for the extermination of the dinosaurs. Seen in such a perspective, the Anthropocene is reason for great caution and for efforts to reduce human impact so that it aligns more with our minuteness in planetary history.
On the other hand, the Anthropocene prompts a sense of hubris: look at how powerful we are and at what our technology can do! Such hubris may lead to a focus on geoengineering as sufficient for coping with the challenges posed by changes in global conditions, anthropogenic and otherwise. Rob Nixon has spoken of the threat of “species narcissism,” noting, “It’s one thing to recognize that Homo sapiens has accrued massive bio-and geomorphic powers. But it’s another thing altogether to fixate on human agency to a degree that downplays the imperfectly understood, infinitely elaborate webs of nonhuman agency, from the microbiome to the movement of tectonic plates, that continue to shape earth’s life systems. To be sure, humans—especially the wealthiest of us—possess planet-altering powers, but we do not exercise those powers in isolation from other forces.” A further complication, as Nixon and others have noted, is that while humankind may appropriately be viewed as a single entity when considered through the lens of geological time, when seen at smaller scales, human societies vary greatly in how and how much they contribute to anthropogenic environmental change, as well as in the nature and degree of environmental degradation they immediately face. There’s consequent concern that focus on the Anthropocene may obscure pressing issues of environmental justice. As Nixon sees it, the challenge is to tell two stories at once, one a convergent narrative that treats the species as a single power, the other a divergent story that recognizes “We may all be in the Anthropocene but we’re not all in it in the same way.”13
The term Anthropocene generates as much wariness among ecocritics as among geologists. Having worked over recent decades to make people’s thinking and reading practices less anthropocentric, some ecocritics worry that the term recenters the human and that it separates the human from the environment, as if humans were having an impact from outside. Some prefer nomenclature that does not call attention to humankind. Donna Haraway, for instance, argues that the Anthropocene is too tied up in “efforts to find ways of thinking about, theorizing, modeling, and managing a Big Thing called Globalization,” too focused on “Species Man,” too little focused on ongoingness, and insufficiently attentive to thinking with other planetary organisms. Wanting to convey the tentacular interconnectedness of our multispecies landscapes, she has proposed the term Chthulucene as a forward-looking alternative to Anthropocene. Others have proposed as more appropriate labels the Plantationocene, to link mass extinction of non-human species to the killing off of indigenous peoples that resulted from colonialism, or the Capitalocene, to stress the role capitalism has played in resource extraction, energy consumption, and development that have damaged the planet.14 Ecocritics worry, too, about cooptation of the term Anthropocene, whereby what was originally intended as a wake-up call and a plea for difficult but urgently needed collaboration becomes just another piece of trendy and vague green-speech—as arguably has happened with sustainability.
Despite such risks, I employ the term because it is drawing the environmental humanities and the sciences together in conversations of broad social, ethical, and political importance. Science and technology cannot address the environmental challenges of our era alone; effective responses will require action by citizens and governments or the work of psychologists, urban planners, ethicists, historians, economists, sociologists, and many others, including the artists and writers who prompt the human heart and imagination and the critics who illuminate their work. At the same time, environmental literary criticism, if it is going to be socially and politically relevant, needs to be genuinely interdisciplinary; the current scientific debates around the environmental issues of the Anthropocene, including those around the so-called “good Anthropocene” (a view of the epoch as an opportunity for humans to use technology to develop less destructive ways of living on the planet) are crucial ones for contemporary creative writers and ecocritics alike to register and address. By using the Anthropocene as a conceptual framework, I show how contemporary ecopoetics can contribute to important exchanges in and among a number of fields both within
and beyond the environmental humanities.
At least since the Industrial Revolution, some segment of the population has been conscious that humankind was transforming the earth’s atmosphere, bodies of water, ecosystems, and landscapes; nonetheless, a truly pervasive (and often anxious) consciousness of really radical anthropogenic planetary change is a recent phenomenon. Perhaps it began with the explosion of the first atom bomb; J. Robert Oppenheimer’s pronouncement at the Alamogordo test site, “now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” spoke for humanity, not just one brilliant physicist. Or perhaps this widespread awareness might be tied to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, revealing to the public that the new synthetic chemicals coming into widespread use threatened to eradicate multiple species. Or perhaps one might point to 1988, when James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress about anthropogenic climate change. However, each of those landmarks involves a particular form of planetary modification by humans; in contrast, Crutzen and Stoermer’s announcement of the Anthropocene in 2000 stands out in its deliberate inclusiveness, encompassing the addition of radioactivity to the earth’s surface, the increasing numbers of toxic chemicals being released into the environment, the warming of the atmosphere and of the oceans, the runaway rates of extinction, the vast alteration of planetary surfaces (and of water quality) by resource extraction, and more. I therefore date the pervasive cultural awareness of anthropogenic planetary transformation that distinguishes the self-conscious Anthropocene from 2000.
NATURE POETRY AND EVOLVING ECOPOETICS
The writing of the self-conscious Anthropocene examined in this study is not traditional nature poetry, although that genre has been the focus of most ecocritical work on anglophone poetry, from John Elder’s Imagining the Earth (1985)—which treats poetry by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, A. R. Ammons, Denise Levertov, William Everson, and, in a later edition, Mary Oliver—through Leonard M. Scigaj’s Sustainable Poetry (1999)—on Snyder, Berry, Ammons, and W. S. Merwin—to Jonathan Bate’s brilliant study of the British Romantics, The Song of the Earth (2000), and beyond. Poetry had a place in early ecocritical conversations because of the distinguished Romantic tradition developed by writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, and, across the Atlantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Transcendentalist circle—which included Henry David Thoreau, whose prose was central to early ecocriticism in the United States.15 The preeminence of this material for environmental critics makes sense in view of the correspondence of the Romantic period with the rise of industrialism and the beginning of such distinctively Anthropocene problems as severe urban air pollution. Raymond Williams, when tracing the history of Western “Ideas of Nature,” observed that industrialization changed not just the conditions of the natural environment but people’s ways of thinking about and interacting with it: “it is just at this time . . . that nature is decisively seen as separate from men. . . . [N]ow nature, increasingly, was ‘out there’ and it was natural to reshape it to a dominant need. . . . Nature in any other sense than that of the improvers [the industrial entrepreneurs and the philosophers whose ideas supported their exploitations of the environment] indeed fled to the margins: to the remote, the inaccessible, the relatively barren areas. Nature was where industry was not.” New feelings for landscape emerged in Romantic art, expressing a growing sense of “nature as a refuge, a refuge from man; a place of healing, a solace, a retreat.” Williams notes, too, that unequal distributions of costs and benefits to different social groups were immediately evident: “As the exploitation of nature continued, on a vast scale, and especially in the new extractive and industrial processes, the people who drew most profit from it went back, where they could find it . . . to an unspoilt nature, to the purchased estates and the country retreats.” He points to the irony that these very industrialists who “invest[ed] in the smoke and the spoil” but could afford to enjoy their weekends where the air was clear and the hillsides green were often champions of conservation of this now removed nature and of nature reserves.16 That the cultural and ideological contexts of Romanticism are the contexts of the early Anthropocene readily explains the attention environmental critics have given to its versions of nature writing.
The tenacity of Romantic perspectives on nature and the human relation to it fostered an ongoing sympathy among early ecocritics for the ideas and feelings expressed in poetry from that tradition. Environmental critics writing in the late decades of the twentieth century responded to what was perceived as the continually increasing separation of industrialized humanity from nature much as the Romantic poets themselves did nearly two centuries earlier: by lamenting that split and by treating poetry as a means of transcending it. They saw poems about nature as returning readers to a sense of being at home on earth, sometimes conceived in terms of Heideggerian dwelling, and as allowing at least momentary solace and escape from what Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” (1798) called “the din / Of towns and cities.”17 Thus, the first sustained work of environmental criticism on Romantic poetry (along with some twentieth-century works), Bate’s The Song of the Earth, explores a tradition that, in the face of “a severance of mankind from nature,” “declares allegiance to what Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads called ‘the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.’ ” Romanticism as an ecopoetic, Bate says, “proposes that when we commune with those forms we live with a particular intensity, and conversely that our lives are diminished when technology and industrialization alienate us from those forms. It regards poetic language as a special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and nature, though it also has a melancholy awareness of the illusoriness of its own utopian vision.” In sympathy, Bate characterizes his own study as an “experiment in ecopoetics” (the first use of that term I know of) in which the experiment is “to see what happens when we regard poems as imaginary parks in which we may breathe an air that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated.” Avoiding dominant critical paradigms of skepticism and constructivism, his version of ecopoetics affirms “the sacredness . . . of the things-of-nature-in-themselves.”18
This study’s focal poets, in contrast, create poems that are more analogous to landfills scavenged by gulls or city boulevards awash in diesel fumes. Their poetry resists being approached as an escape from the problems of a warming, toxified world. Even their often fractured or partially asyntactic forms do not offer a restful parklike experience. The differences between my aims and those of Bate and other early ecocritics, and between the poems he treats and those I examine, reflect changes that have taken place in at least two intellectual realms. First, ecocriticism has been evolving in its response to debates among literary critics and in poetry circles concerning language, referentiality, accessibility, and poetic form. Secondly, ecocriticism has responded to further changes in views of nature itself. To contextualize the poetry on which this book focuses and the growing interest it holds for environmental scholars, I’ll briefly review both these developments.
When ecocriticism was first developing in the late decades of the twentieth century, environmental critics sought to be scientifically informed and tended to be wary of poststructuralist thought. Then, as now, ecocriticism was a politically charged discourse; for its practitioners, environmental issues possessed political urgency, and acknowledging the phenomenological reality of the environment consequently seemed crucial. During what Lawrence Buell has labeled the “first wave” of environmental criticism, this orientation generated resistance or outright hostility toward the constructionist thinking evident in poststructuralist theory. Scigaj, for instance, in Sustainable Poetry, depicted poststructuralism as another mode of anthropocentric domination of nature and complained that contemporary poetry criticism is “moving far away from a poet’s originary experience in nature and in real communities struggling to survive.” Such attitudes determined not just what critical lenses ecocritics employed but also w
hich recent poets and what kind of poetics gained ecocritical attention. North American experimental poets of the late twentieth century, most notably the Language writers, were not merely extending the experimental impulses and techniques of high modernism; they were also developing their poetics in explicit conversation with poststructuralist theory. Their postmodern forms of contemporary poetic experimentalism were widely (and, to my mind, mistakenly) seen as occupying what Scigaj called a “hermetically sealed textuality” that runs counter to environmentalist engagement.19