by Lynn Keller
Problematics of scale remain evident in chapters 2 and 3, the former treating a material issue—the vast accumulation of plastics as ineradicable toxic “hyperobjects” (Morton’s term)—and the latter the conceptual and rhetorical dilemmas shaping apocalyptic discourse in a time of continual crisis and diminished individual agency. Chapter 2 examines Reilly’s Styrofoam and Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers (2013), volumes that engage with the wonders and the environmental horrors of plastic. Plastics, which do not biodegrade and are leaching endocrine-disrupting chemicals into the biosphere, exist on a temporal scale virtually beyond human conception with distributions that challenge conventional understandings of space. Plastics also point to the Anthropocene’s dissolution of the division between the natural and the artificial or manufactured, and to the dissolution of the boundaries between inside and outside, particularly those of the human body. These are crucial issues in both volumes, where playful procedures delighting in the plasticity of the artistic imagination and in the inexhaustible plenitude of plastic polymers—what Dickinson calls “the chemical language of polymers”—coexist with grim awareness of plastic’s inescapable toxicity.
While Lawrence Buell, in the mid-1990s, identified apocalyptic rhetoric as “the single most powerful metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal,” twenty years later people are experiencing “apocalypse fatigue” even as environmental apocalypse looms as an all too likely nonmetaphoric reality. Chapter 3 draws on Frederick Buell’s thinking about “dwelling in crisis” and about awareness of being embedded and embodied in damaged ecosystems in considering how two poets with very different aesthetics—Jorie Graham in Sea Change (2008) and Evelyn Reilly in Apocalypso (2012)—use differing modes of poetic pleasure to renew the force of apocalyptic writing and render apocalyptic awareness more bearable.46
The next two chapters examine how poets of the self-conscious Anthropocene are reenvisioning topics that have been central to ecocriticism since its beginnings in the early 1980s: human–animal relations and a sense of place. Chapter 4 explores poetic attempts to better understand nonhuman modes of intelligence, perception, and communication, so as to correct anthropocentric biases and better reflect the interdependence of human and nonhuman species. In visually and aurally inventive work, a.rawlings, Jody Gladding, and Jonathan Skinner employ varied “grammars of animacy” (a term adopted from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ruminations on her people’s Anishanaabe language) to imaginatively transcribe, translate, and transmute animal languages into human tongue. In so doing, they modify the English language in ways that undermine the divide on which human exceptionalism depends. These poets focus their curiosity about animal expression, interspecies communication, and the possibility for intersubjectivity between humans and animals on nonmammalian species: butterflies, birds, and beetles. In so doing they minimize risks of anthropomorphizing while they explore a more mutualistic understanding of the human being as, in Val Plumwood’s terms, a “self-in-relationship with nature.” Their poetry, which exemplifies what Gander calls “a reorientation from objectivity toward intersubjectivity,” heightens readers’ awareness of the potential agency and intentionality of earth-others.47
Chapter 5 explores the globalized sense of place evident in twenty-first-century ecopoetics, demonstrating the relevance to ecocriticism of geographical theory, especially Doreen Massey’s call for a more socially contextualized understanding of space, in which any locality can be understood in terms of its dynamic links to a wider world. I examine several of Juliana Spahr’s poems from Well Then There Now that, sometimes by putting text through multiple translation machines, explore the complex interactions in Hawai‘i of multiple cultures and species from different ecosystems, as well as the dependency of one’s sense of place on one’s cultural positioning. Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World (2012) reconsiders what is meant by “the foreign” and “the foreigner” in a time when global travel is commonplace and environmental degradation is homogenizing landscapes. The chapter concludes with analysis of Jena Osman’s “Mercury Rising” from The Network (2011), which intermingles imagination of the planet Mercury with considerations of mercury poisoning and of the town Mercury in the Nevada Test Site. Osman’s powerful revelation of environmental toxicity rests on a keen sense of interacting imaginary, locally specific, and planetary places.
The final chapter, on environmental justice poetry, comes full circle to show how writing that pushes “beyond” nature poetry need not be severed from it. Ed Roberson’s City Eclogue, Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, and Myung Mi Kim’s Penury bring together, as Nixon has urged, consideration of the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene with the Great Divide between the world’s wealthy and poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised. Although the discourses of urbanism and environmental justice have often been at odds with those of nature and conservation, they, too, are brought together in these volumes. While this work rejects traditional visions of nature as something apart from human habitation and use, and while it critiques hierarchies that value wild and rural over urban or industrial environments, it nonetheless incorporates into its exposure of the human costs of environmental disruption a concern for the nonhuman, nonbuilt nature that is valued by conservationists. Roberson’s syntactically complex representations of the racialization of space, Nowak’s documentary “remix poetry” depicting coal mining disasters across the globe, and Kim’s minimalist space-filled representations of the experience of refugees fleeing from war all capitalize on and modify the resources of traditional discourses of nature, particularly the pastoral, in drawing attention to environmental justice issues. In bringing together the discourses of nature and environmental justice, these poets enhance the reach and power of both.
If it rarely provides the uplift that many people since Keats have sought in poetry, the work examined in this book offers its own kinds of aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional pleasures. These include the comfort of implied hope—a hope that need not seem entirely delusional. That these poets believe it’s worth using the time of their precious lives to produce this environmentally engaged work in which they seek to give linguistic form to constructive ways of interacting with the rest of the biosphere in itself conveys a heartening belief in the real-world importance of language in all its amazing flexibility. It conveys, moreover, faith in the potentially formative power of the malleable ways of thinking language can encourage or encode. In a 2005 article Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Paul J. Crutzen, William C. Clark, and Julian Hunt wryly define the Anthropocene as “a new geological epoch in which humankind has emerged as a globally significant (and potentially intelligent) force capable of reshaping the face of the Earth past all recognition.”48 These American and Canadian poets are doing what they can to cultivate that intelligence, with hope that their visions can help us use our collective capabilities to make scientifically governed choices that are ethical in relation to humans and nonhumans across the globe and that hold in view the systems that have sustained myriad species as well as the qualities that have given human lives value.
CHAPTER 1
“In Deep Time into Deepsong”
Writing the Scalar Challenges of the Anthropocene
Early in 2014 I attended a talk by the noted American environmental historian Donald Worster, titled “Second Earth: Thinking about Environmental History on a Planetary Scale,” in which Worster considered the implications of several chronologically distinct maps of the globe. He identified a 1587 Mercator map of what he called “Second Earth” as the founding document of an era in which Europeans, inhabiting a world where many of the natural resources were depleted, turned to pursuing the seemingly infinite abundance of the New World. That age of abundance, he observed, is now coming to an end. Resource depletion is undermining the foundations for manufactured abundance. The Second Earth is shrinking, and we humans are entering “the age of limits,” in which we face unprecedented resource constraints. At the end of the talk, Wo
rster introduced photos of the earth taken from space—going from the iconic “blue marble” image taken from a distance of forty-five thousand kilometers from the earth by the crew of Apollo 17 on their way to the moon in 1972, to the “pale blue dot,” taken less than twenty years later, in 1990, by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it exited the solar system, at about 6 billion kilometers from the earth. In these representations, the earth’s size diminishes dramatically as advancing space exploration enables views from increasingly vast distances. Worster used these images to demonstrate both that our conception of the earth, which expanded with the discovery of “Second Earth,” is now contracting, and also that our understanding of the earth’s boundaries now comes not from cartographers but from scientists. The sciences tell us not just of the depletion of specific resources but of the perturbation of whole systems on which human survival and the survival of myriad other life forms depend. Following a rhetorical pattern common in recent environmental writing, he turned from describing recent changes to calling for corresponding changes in thinking and behavior that might enable human survival. We need, he proposed, a post-Mercator revolution of the mind to deal with the perceptual, moral, and economic transformation that is under way.1
Worster’s presentation exemplifies an emergent environmental discourse that emphasizes currently changing or divergent scales of phenomena and of perception, and that stresses the importance of learning to think across multiple scales. Although Worster didn’t mention the Anthropocene, he was participating in the current discourse of Anthropocene scales and the challenges they pose. For fundamental to the concept of the Anthropocene is its bringing together—and even into collision—vastly discrepant scales, especially of time and space, but also of technology. The scales involved are at once material and conceptual, including concepts of the human and of human agency. Multiple types of scales are often intertwined. The very rapidity of current environmental alterations, evident, for instance, in a rate of extinction known to have precedent only five times in planetary history, suggests that environmental change itself is occurring on scales that are, for humans, unprecedented and verging on unimaginable.
In the poems to be examined here, Juliana Spahr, Forrest Gander, and Ed Roberson grapple with the challenges of thinking in scalar terms appropriate to the Anthropocene as they attempt to help readers grasp what is happening to nonhuman nature and to planetary systems on nearly unimaginable scales, both vast and minute. Their different strategies imply differing visions of poetry’s role in fostering conceptual and cultural change, while the poetry of all three reveals an instability, a dance between the desire to locate in poetry useful resources for changing perception and understanding, and a counter-recognition of the limited powers of both language and the human mind, particularly in the face of environmental disruption of a scale and complexity previously unknown.
While Spahr in “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” approaches Anthropocene awareness as a largely emotional challenge, one that produces an affective confounding that is also an ethical, conceptual, and political quandary, the works I will consider by Gander and Roberson treat the challenges of scale as more perceptual than emotional. Perhaps because their early training in the natural sciences makes imagination at extreme scales come more easily, they find scalar dissonance less problematic, and their poems model possible strategies for apprehending processes and phenomena at suprahuman scales. Both imply that poetry’s ability to help us grasp the colliding scales of the Anthropocene could prove a crucial resource for humans now, although even with that resource in place, hopes for meaningful change remain tentative. Being able to grasp scalar challenges—something that Gander guides his readers to do and that Roberson presents as already among their perceptual resources—lays the groundwork for the complex processes of identifying and instituting changes that would be effective in responding to the planet’s energy needs and in minimizing global warming.
THE COLLIDING SCALES OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS ANTHROPOCENE
In the self-conscious Anthropocene, Homo sapiens not only emerges as the planet’s dominant species, but also acquires the status of an immensely powerful geological force. The very name Anthropocene points to how very big humans have come to seem, as our vastly expanded population transforms earth’s surfaces through agriculture, mining, and urbanization, as we take control of the global nitrogen cycle through manufactured fertilizers, as we alter the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and acidify the oceans by burning fossil fuels. Our impact and technological powers seem immense. But humankind also appears very small, as humans do not control the effects of anthropogenic changes, many of which have been unintentional. Ultimately, human powers are dwarfed by the nonhuman laws and powers of nature, whose inexorable effects could, at elusive but perhaps imminent tipping points, emerge in full force, perhaps eliminating the human species and many other species that humans have not already managed to destroy.
Just as humans now seem at once vastly more significant and more insignificant than ever before,2 we are now challenged to understand the world at both much larger and much smaller scales than before. Recognizing the significance of current planetary changes requires us to extend our restricted anthropocentric vision to think in scales of deep time and space. Simultaneously, we must shrink our gaze to attend to the surprisingly grand significance of microbes and microfauna and small pollinating or disease-carrying insects, of energy released by subatomic particles, of the health effects of minute amounts of toxic chemicals, or the vast significance of what might seem small changes in the composition of the earth’s atmosphere. Moreover, we feel called upon somehow to address as individual consumers and private citizens of distinct nations complex global problems that can be solved only by political, scientific, and corporate collaboration on an international scale.
Different scalar perspectives often exist in tension or conflict with one another. Thus, while we may regard the time period since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as a substantial one, and the period since humans began killing nonhuman animals as very long indeed, in the scale of geological time human habitation of the planet occupies a tiny blip. Thinking in terms of geological time encourages us to acknowledge the planet’s indifference to the survival of Homo sapiens and to the maintenance of the atmospheric conditions on which the survival of many Holocene species depends. As such, it may encourage species humility (though perhaps not for those who place all their faith in our technological powers). Yet humankind’s impact on the planet, however carelessly enacted, promises to extend into the vast temporal distance of the planetary future. Our minds, moreover, have difficulty grasping either that vast future our behavior is altering or the past of deep time before we evolved, let alone thinking those together with our familiarly scaled present. Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, who speaks of the “poignant contrast between time as we experience it in our everyday lives and the incomprehensibly greater scale of Deep Time,” describes the latter as “like an endless, dark corridor, with no landmarks to give it scale.”3
Thinking about the Anthropocene with an eye to addressing its problems demands that we bring these discrepant time scales together—or that we focus clearly on their discrepancies and the impact of those discrepancies. Among those concerned that our thinking take into account the Anthropocene challenges of scale, I discern two positions: the first, an aspirational one, calls for us to somehow think through the incomprehensible and bring the varied scales together; the other, a skeptical position, emphasizes scale variants and scale effects to suggest that we cannot meet current environmental challenges simply by trying to scale up or scale down our thinking, just as we cannot scale up many of what we might want to regard as problem-solving technologies.
The aspirational camp, with which I suspect Worster aligns, calls for extending our thinking to include scales beyond those of everyday human experience in order to conceptualize “human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.”4 The quoted words
are Derek Woods’s characterization of the position of historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose influential article “The Climate of History: Four Theses” advances this way of thinking with the aim of bringing reason fully to bear in responding to climate change. Chakrabarty proposes that “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” Historians have previously assumed that, beyond its repetitive changes associated with cycles like the seasons, the natural environment changed so slowly “as to make the history of man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all.” This would correspond with the sense of timeless nature that I noted in poems by Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver in my introduction. Even environmental historians, Chakrabarty claims, “looked upon human beings as biological agents,” a very different kind of agency from the geological agency proposed by climate scientists. “To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human,” he observes: “There was no point in human history when humans were not biological agents. But we can become geological agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself.” He claims that historical understanding of the crisis of climate change “requires us to bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital.”5