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Recomposing Ecopoetics

Page 7

by Lynn Keller


  In the present time of “Unnamed Dragonfly Species,” however, “they” have been drawn into an obsessive quest for more information, drawing the reader, too, into more engagement. The next section begins, “After the piece of the Antarctic Pine Island glacier broke off, they could not stop thinking about glaciers and the way they thought about glaciers the most was by reading about them on the internet late at night, their eyes blurring and their shoulders tight” (WTTN 82). Now Spahr recounts not just the facts but the shifting responses “they” have to the accumulating data and the scale of change it cumulatively suggests. At one point, “they” try to take comfort in a statistic “liked by oil drillers” that the melting away of the entire Antarctic Pine Island Glacier wouldn’t “matter much because it would only raise sea levels by a quarter of an inch.” But questions that “surface through this blurry comfort of small amounts of rising ocean” make them relinquish such false reassurance. They can’t avoid seeing that the oil drillers haven’t grasped how scale works in this scenario: the statistics offered for one melting glacier have to be added to the many others, so the amount of sea-level rise won’t be limited to a quarter inch. Moreover, a quarter inch of water in the ocean is not like a quarter inch of oil in a can with vertical sides; a rise of one foot of ocean level, they learn, “typically means that shorelines end up one hundred feet or more inland.” So much for attempts to minimize the hard-to-grasp scale of the ongoing changes. The section ends by identifying four island nations that, because of rising seas, “will most certainly be entirely displaced in the next thirty years,” a clear dismissal of the oil drillers’ perspective. The next begins with “they” recognizing themselves as island dwellers (on Long Island, presumably) for whom what’s happening to Pine Island Glacier has a “scary relevance.” Despite desires to minimize worry, the collapse of spatial or temporal distances taking place in the self-conscious Anthropocene undermines attempts to consider environmental changes associated with global warming as insignificantly small or “far away.”

  The remaining sections of “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” offer a compelling portrayal of the psychology of “they,” with whose mental states Spahr’s readers are likely to identify. By matter-of-factly recording their thoughts and behaviors, Spahr effectively registers the difficulties most Americans are apt to face in trying to maintain awareness of alterations that are overwhelmingly vast, complexly interrelated, and dire but as yet, they tell themselves, “far away from them.” Hypocrisy, inconsistency, and self-deluding fantasy are all part of the picture. Still seeking some mode of comfort, “they” try out positive ways of viewing these incipient transformations: trying “to see climate change as just one more tendency of life towards change” (WTTN 84–85); trying to look forward to having more fjords to visit or to new plants evolving; or latching onto theories about anthropogenic warming counteracting the earth’s movement into an already overdue ice age. Although more reading only increases their confusion, they continue to seek out more information, even while trying to insure that neither excessive information nor guilt will paralyze them.

  Profound contradictions emerge in their sense of agency with the disjunction between their negligible impact as individuals who would like to reduce their carbon footprint and their unavoidable participation in the immensely consequential energy and resource consumption of global capitalism:

  they knew that they were in part responsible for it, whatever it was that was causing this, because they lived in the place that used the largest amount of the stuff most likely to cause this warming. Northern Wild Monk’s-hood They lived among those who used the most stuff up, who burned the most stuff, who produced the most stuff, and other things like that. Olympia Marble And even if they tried to live their lives with less stuff than others, they still benefited and were a part of the system that produced all this stuff and because of this they had a hard time figuring out how to move beyond their own personal renewed commitment to denial of stuff and yet their awareness of how they benefited daily from being a part of the system that used up the most stuff. Osprey (WTTN 86–87)

  The passage reflects exactly the conflicting scales and the scale effects emphasized by Clark, who observes that “the greater the number of people engaged in modern forms of consumption then the less the relative influence or responsibility of each but the worse the cumulative impact of their insignificance.”20 In addition to being unable to reconcile the scale of individual action with that of collective impact, “they” are struggling to alter their sense of the interrelations between the human and nonhuman realms as they gain a clearer sense of the consequences of species agency. In the time before they had begun to “enter the word ‘glacier’ into Google over and over,” they had not “thought about their relationship with things big and cold and full of fresh water” with which they had no “actual contact” (WTTN 88–89).

  All the unsettling insight they gain into the enormous and rapid scale of anthropogenic environmental change and the inconsequence of individual ethical choice produces huge anxiety. So “they tried to balance out all their anxiety with loud attempts at celebrations of life” (WTTN 92). The work’s longest sentence lists some of those attempts, all of which aimed at convincing themselves that their lives were good enough that the melting didn’t matter. In this final section, their—and our—dissonant fix emerges starkly: it seems impossible to sustain such self-delusion and equally impossible to face reality in the full scale of its terrifying transformation—the rapidity and vastness of the changes taking place; their cascading and inconceivably varied, frightening consequences; and “their” (our) complicity in it all. After the fifteen-line sentence cataloging the various ways in which they try loudly to savor the social, intellectual, and sensual pleasures in their lives, Spahr concludes the poem with the following scale-conscious passage:

  Unnamed Dragonfly Species They were anxious and they were paralyzed by the largeness and the connectedness of systems, a largeness of relation that they liked to think about and often celebrated but now seemed unbearably tragic. Upland Sandpiper The connected relationship between water and land seemed deeply damaged, perhaps beyond repair in numerous places. Vesper Sparrow The systems of relation between living things of all sorts seemed to have become in recent centuries so hierarchically human that things not human were dying at an unprecedented rate. Wavyrayed Lampmussel And the systems of human governments and corporations felt so large and unchangeable and so distant from them yet the effects of their actions felt so connected and so immediate to what was happening. Whip-poor-will They knew this but didn’t know what else to do. Wood Turtle And so they just went on living while talking loudly. Worm Snake Living and watching on a screen things far away from them melting. Yellow-breasted Chat (WTTN 92–3)

  The work ends there, with Spahr having recreated the agonizing dynamics of scalar dissonance and exposed problematic scale effects but offering no program or model for “what else to do.” On the contrary, she has presented the reader with a further challenge, explicitly identified only here at the work’s end with the line “things not human were dying at an unprecedented rate.” She adds to the challenge of facing global warming the challenge of thinking about mass extinction, a key aspect of the Anthropocene.

  The title phrase, “Unnamed Dragonfly Species,” highlights the limits of human knowledge in this context. The other species on the New York State list have names, often carefully descriptive ones like “Leatherback Sea Turtle” or “Brook Floater Buffalo Pebble Snail.” However, this one species that is disappearing or has disappeared before it has even been named signals that we are losing life forms in our immediate environments before we even recognize them—or in this case, after we learn to recognize them, but before we can add them to our taxonomies. Science has identified about 1.2 million species on earth, but that is thought to be only about 15 percent of the life forms in existence; a major study published in 2011 estimated a total of 8.7 million species on the planet. Many of the yet-to-be-identified
are smaller creatures such as beetles or the microfauna (bacteria, fungi, viruses) so crucial to soil and plant life; many others are plants and animals whose habitats in the tropics are now under extreme threat. It’s no wonder people find it difficult to know “what else to do”: as we go on living in ways that are unintentionally destroying habitats and blindly eliminating species, as well as melting the planet’s glaciers, it seems we don’t know in the most literal ways what we are doing. Our impact is huge, but while we may imagine our knowledge and our control to be large, they appear in fact small and extremely partial.21

  The primary aim of “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” seems to be to expose and explore the stymying dilemmas of Anthropocene scalar dissonance. Yet I detect a countercurrent, generated by the species list, that may point readers in a particular direction of political engagement as an alternative. Admittedly, there are multiple ways to interpret those names that relentlessly interrupt the narrative. They might be heard as a grimly memorializing gesture, like reading the names of the war dead at an antiwar rally. Or this list might be solely an elegiac gesture.22 But these creatures are endangered or threatened as well as extinct, and those still extant survive in a specific place that is not distant and not in the cloud: the state of New York, where Spahr was writing and where “they” were living their embodied lives. (In addition, not all the species listed as threatened or endangered in New York are so on a broader geographic scale.) The list, then, brings to a local level a global problem that is often connected to global warming and that is certainly part of the Anthropocene. By not putting punctuation between each species name and the sentence that follows, Spahr invites readers to think of the two strands of the work as part of one thing. Maybe a reader in New York can barely imagine what it means “that Kilimanjaro in East Africa has lost eighty-two percent of its area in eighty-eight years” and has no idea what she might do about it, but perhaps she can imagine what her world would be without whippoorwills, peregrine falcons, or red-headed woodpeckers, and perhaps there is something she could do to help prevent that. It’s true, of course, that readers would be unfamiliar with many of the species listed, but at least some, such as the cougar or the nation’s emblem, the bald eagle, are guaranteed to be recognizable. So it may be that Spahr, by interweaving the two threads of this work, directs her reader to the possibilities of local action when globally effective action is beyond conception.

  Spahr’s thinking might be fruitfully linked to Jonathan Franzen’s controversial essay “Carbon Capture,” which warns that awareness of global warming as the supreme environmental issue of our time is short-circuiting other, still valuable environmental projects. (I am not suggesting that Spahr propounds what Franzen’s critics see as a false dichotomy emerging from his essay, setting concern about climate change and big energy issues against conservation and concern with biodiversity. Rather, she shares his recognition that awareness of climate change can generate paralyzing guilt and that climate change is easy to deplore but difficult to respond to. She may well share his counterbalancing sense of the importance of “an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats.”) Considering birds and their future adaptation to a warmer world, Franzen notes that “the larger and healthier and more diverse our bird populations are, the greater the chances that many species will survive, even thrive. To prevent extinctions in the future, it’s not enough to curb our carbon emissions. We also have to keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right now.” Drawing on the philosopher Dale Jamieson, Franzen invokes the discourse of Anthropocene scales:

  Jamieson’s larger contention is that climate change is different in category from any other problem the world has ever faced. For one thing, it deeply confuses the human brain, which evolved to focus on the present, not the far future, and on readily perceivable movement, not slow and probabilistic developments. . . . The great hope of the Enlightenment—that human rationality would enable us to transcend our evolutionary limitations—has taken a beating from wars and genocides, but only now, on the problem of climate change, has it foundered altogether.23

  That sense of foundering, evident in how stuck Spahr’s “they” seem, brings to mind Clark’s perspective. Just as Franzen turns to the impressive example of what a small institution, the Amazon Conservation Association, has been able to accomplish on behalf of local human and nonhuman communities, it seems to me that Spahr points to a focus on local habitat preservation and local activism more generally as “what else to do.” The poem’s unrelenting tolling of one endangered species after another casts a shadow of self-indulgence on the emotional struggles of “they.” Clearly, it’s delusory to imagine that the “things far away from them melting” will have no impact close at hand, but as Spahr encourages readers to examine their own perhaps near-paralyzing dilemmas in the presence of dramatically discrepant scales of global events and personal comprehension or agency, her interweaving of two (not unrelated) threads within this work suggests that potentially more manageable issues may be addressed nearby.

  IMAGINING DEEP TIME IN FORREST GANDER’S “THE CARBONIFEROUS AND ECOPOETICS”

  Gander’s poetic prose in “The Carboniferous and Ecopoetics” (2012) deploys the observational skills and knowledge that he cultivated partly through undergraduate training in geology, along with the expressive resources of a sensuous lyricism, to draw readers imaginatively into a non-anthropocentrically scaled understanding of planetary history. “The Carboniferous and Ecopoetics” is collected in Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, which Gander wrote with Australian poet John Kinsella; part I of “The Carboniferous and Ecopoetics” seems to be “The Carboniferous,” and I will refer to it as such. This section makes deep evolutionary time imaginable to the nonscientist without trivializing or shrinking it—without making it fit accustomed scales. Inviting readers into the distant past in ways that draw on familiar references and literary conventions without rendering the scene itself familiar, he translates scientific understandings so that his readers will grasp the brevity of human planetary habitation as well as the limits of the planet’s current carbon resources. (Gander is an accomplished translator of poetry from foreign languages, especially Spanish. I use the word “translation” with that achievement in mind, since he similarly translates into compelling lyricism scientific languages nonscientists find hard to process.) Only after that is accomplished does he introduce more straightforward data, like that Spahr provided, to convey a collision of scales currently occurring as human habitation, which occupies a miniscule segment of geological time, suddenly overwhelms planetary space, consuming resources whose effectively imagined history makes evident that they cannot be replaced in a time scale relevant to the human species. The extremity of Worster’s “age of limits” gains vivid immediacy.

  “The Carboniferous” begins by echoing the opening of countless origin stories, though here instead of “in the beginning” we have a phrase that suggests an extended historical awareness of cycles or of endings followed by new developments: “In one of the beginnings.” Having drawn in readers with a version of one of the most familiar and inviting narrative devices, Gander then tells his story in the present tense, with each paragraph making a colossal leap forward in time, so that the reader is immersed in an always changing now that traverses hundreds of millions of years. The first two paragraphs are representative:

  In one of the beginnings, below the fluff-and leaf-encrusted surface of a wide, shallow body of water, microscopic spores swirl with bat-winged algae. A cloudy soup of exertions and excretions, the sea drizzles its grit into rich mud.

  Trilobites are dying off. (Miles Davis could have been quoting nature when he said, “I listen to what I can leave out.”) Brachiopods, mollusks, and corals cluster in wide, shallow seas riven by sharks. Thick fish with lungs and lobes are giving way to a new species, the lung reconfigured as a swim bladder. Like surreal, underwater candelabra, crinoids effloresce; on long branching stems they stretch up toward the waves, each arm filtering
small animals and plants through the calyx where a mouth is hidden.24

  The alien richness of this temporally removed world is conveyed as much by an aural density of thickly alliterating consonants and echoing vowels (“drizzles its grit into rich mud,” “thick fish with lungs and lobes,” “shallow seas riven by sharks”) and by a striking, sometimes scientific vocabulary (riven, effloresce, calyx, crinoids) as it is by the strange visual phenomena depicted (surreally waving underwater candelabra). Yet as he makes the alien geological past vivid to the senses, Gander’s interjection of a reference to a celebrated musician—one of several references to artists in “The Carboniferous”—acknowledges that one inevitably brings one’s mediating cultural perspective to one’s understanding of nature. Additionally, Miles Davis’s intuition of nature’s principles indicates that artists’ insights may have transtemporal relevance adequate even to prehuman worlds.

  Frequently, Gander draws on familiar perspectives to assist his readers’ process of imagining: carboniferous bugs “hover over bouquet-size spiders and a sort of millipede that grows five feet long.” Yet the scale of what’s described is decidedly not that of our familiar world, unless in its horror movies. Sometimes his technique is cinematic, zooming in for a close-up and a moment suspended in time before drawing back for more panoramic vistas, while descriptions insistently involve senses of smell and touch, as well as sound and sight:

 

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