by Lynn Keller
“Mercury Rising” concludes Osman’s volume The Network (2010), a collection much concerned with place that elsewhere shows little concern with what we readily recognize as environmental issues. The book, which the back cover blurb situates “at the intersection of conceptual and documentary poetics,” offers fascinatingly woven explorations of etymological and American history exploring such subjects as the sugar industry, the Franklin party, and, in the longest poem, the history of New York’s financial district. “Mercury Rising” is parenthetically labeled “a visualization,” and at multiple points it presents breathing instructions like those of a meditation technique meant to direct and calm one’s mind. The poem is staged as a three-part visualization, in which each part has three sections. These shift between physical locations—in particular, between the closed town of Mercury, Nevada—which is located in an area where mercury was formerly mined and situated within the Nevada Test Site (now more euphemistically designated the Nevada National Security Site)—and the imagined planet Mercury.38 The town was constructed by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to house personnel during the period when A-bombs and their effects were tested in the Nevada desert—above ground between 1951 and 1963, underground until 1992 (with, Osman informs us, some “subcritical” testing since). After that, most of the facilities in Mercury were abandoned. The poem shifts, too, among different versions of mercury: the town built by the government in the 1950s; the closest planet to our sun; the highly toxic, silvery heavy metal; the Roman god of travelers, thieves, messengers, and poetry; and the comic book figures for which the god is prototype. Here, to demonstrate how the text moves in space, time, and reference, is the opening of part 1B:
there will be three parts that lead to others. pay attention to your breath. breathe deeply, in through your nose, out through your mouth. hold it. then release. you are northwest of las vegas. when you breathe out, your breath is like a vapor that lifts back up and you inhale it through your nose like a circle. you are 36 million miles from the sun, small and singular. study the explosion clouds of bombs in the height of the cold war. this place is not really a place, just housing. you are on an empty street and the light is bright and hot. no atmosphere to ward off or soften impact. you pass a movie theater, a bowling alley, both now closed. you notice that one side of the street is unbearably hot and the other side has ice in its corners. the eccentric orbit rotates three times for every two revolutions. twenty newspaper boxes. you stop for a moment and listen to the air and it streams around the debris. dust carried by solar wind. hot enough to melt lead. there are voices in the distance and you walk toward them and the fluorescent lights above. a group of VIPs sit on bleachers. they watch the desert floor crater like the moon in the wake of over 900 explosions. where the surface is fractured is called “weird terrain.”39
As details shift from abandoned town to lifeless planet, it’s hard to tell which one is being described; elements of fantasy blend them, as sides of a street, for instance, take on the traits of sides of the planet. Sometimes particular details might describe both locales—dust, for instance, or (seemingly or literally) unbearable heat. The absence of capitalization allows sentence demarcations to blur and makes the distinctions even harder to sustain. This seems to me precisely the point: when we subject an area to nuclear blasts, we turn that part of earth into a cratered wasteland hardly distinguishable from the surface of the planet Mercury. The solar wind “hot enough to melt lead” would be experienced on the planet Mercury, which on its day side has temperatures up to 801 degrees Fahrenheit, while lead melts at 621 degrees. Far higher heat occurs in nuclear explosions; the surface temperature of the Hiroshima fireball was 10,830 degrees Fahrenheit. The poem may implicitly situate us in the places of those lead-melting events as well. Neither the uninhabitable planet nor the guarded, empty town “is really a place” in that neither is a site of human place-attachments, but at the same time the two nonplaces are truly one in the all too real Nevada testing grounds.
Buell has emphasized that fantasy, as a form of place imagination, is one resource for putting people in touch with place, and Osman’s piece is partly mytho-fantastic.40 It begins with a journey reminiscent of crossing the mythic river Styx; its journeying “you” walking on forest trails speaks with oracle-like animals and magically locates a key that unlocks “your” dream house, your most secure place; at times the world “you” walks is that of Marvel comics, where there are “crystal shards of terrigen mist,” and so forth. And of course, Hermes or Mercury, the messenger god, god of “boundaries, travelers, shepherds, poets, commerce, etc.” and “the intermediary for any kind of exchange, transition, or crossing over” including the crossing of dead souls to the underworld, is also a mythic creation.
But the transformation of “you” into a quicksilver-contaminated being—someone with “silver skin” and mercury-impregnated breath who experiences what the reader may recognize as symptoms of mercury poisoning such as tremors, sleep disturbance, and memory loss—is not so fantastic. Thus, the final sections of Osman’s poem, again suggesting documentary poetics, offer more and more straightforward factual information about mercury. Readers learn that while half the mercury in our atmosphere comes from volcanic eruptions, the other half is produced “primarily by power plants (particularly those that combust coal), hazardous waste incineration, and gold mining” (TN 114). Osman provides information about the heavy metal’s movement up the food chain from spiders and small fish, accumulating “greater power” as it goes. A primary way in which mercury is absorbed into the body, however, is through the respiratory tract and from there into the circulatory system. Knowing this gives a gradually accumulating resonance—and horror—to the visualization’s emphasis on the breath. Breathing should bring vitalizing oxygen to blood and, in exhalation, cleanse the body of waste and toxins, but by the end of “Mercury Rising” it is mercury that “goes in through the nose and out the mouth in a circle” (TN 114). The piece closes with a journey back across the river: “When you reach the other side you get out of the boat. You close your eyes and take a deep silver breath. You very slowly open your eyes and you are here, in this room, with the light as it is” (TN 115). That light, of course, exposes real-world mercury pollution and other forms of environmental degradation.
I find this a powerful piece of toxic discourse, and its power rests on a keen sense of interacting imaginary, locally specific, global, and interplanetary places. It’s a commonplace that forms of environmental pollution don’t respect the boundaries humans impose on place; it’s also evident that particular places and their inhabitants (such as the Chilean gold miners Gander observes) inequitably bear the brunt of the worst forms of environmental contamination. But those discomforting realities are ones from which we often turn away. By prompting the imagination of the planet Mercury alongside that of a specific closed town in a toxified area of the United States, Osman draws readers into both an overview and a particularized perspective on the vulnerable, changing spaces of our miraculously and precariously habitable earth.
Several decades ago Buell observed: “Seeing things new, seeing new things, expanding the notion of community so that it becomes situated within the ecological community—these are some ways in which environmental writing can reperceive the familiar in the interest of deepening the sense of place.”41 Osman’s piece that combines documentary information with sci-fi fantasy and pastoral nostalgia (in the visualized walk through the forest) manages—like the other, very different works I’ve introduced here—to perform such re-perceptions in ways that enhance a sense of space whose multidimensional interactivity is crucial to the environmental dynamics of the self-conscious Anthropocene. “Mercury Rising” invites us to “see” often invisible toxins and register how their translocal dispersal alters the places and bodies we inhabit; it prompts us to understand ourselves as members of ecological and toxicological communities at once local and global. Like the perspectives of Spahr and Gander, Osman’s is sensitive to the comple
xly mobile social constructions of contemporary places and to their startling ecological instabilities.
CHAPTER 6
Environmental Justice Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene
The dramatic environmental changes of the post–World War II “Great Acceleration” have not been produced by a monolithic humankind, as the term Anthropocene might seem to suggest. Consequently, although the concept of the Anthropocene has great potential value in bringing together various kinds of environmental change so that their interrelations can be considered and their collective impact addressed, not all environmental scholars embrace it. Anthropologist Anna Tsing, for instance, observes: “This ‘anthropo’ blocks attention to patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and non-humans: the very stuff of collaborative survival.”1 A more common complaint is that summarized by Jennifer Wenzel: “To many ears, Anthropocene species talk is a troubling new universalism that disregards the highly uneven roles that different groups of humans have played in the transformation of the planet, and the uneven distribution of risk and resilience in confronting this human-made world. Newfound interest in geological stratification threatens to displace attention to social stratification.”2 Rob Nixon rightly describes the Anthropocene as “a shared geomorphic story about increasingly unshared resources.”3 Recent changes to the global environment have been disproportionately produced by the industrialized nations where lifestyles have a particularly large carbon footprint and by the transnational corporations that enable and profit from those lifestyles. Numerous communities, micro-minorities, and even nations (if one leaves aside their ruling elites) in the less developed parts of the world live in ways that have contributed relatively little to planetary changes arising from fossil fuel consumption.4 Impoverished populations outside the global North who contribute to global environmental change as laborers in resource extraction involving mines or oil fields, or in sweat shops and factories, do so largely without experiencing the improved standards of living—including, for example, ready access to electricity, clean running water, or modern medical care—that industrial development can make possible. Instead, they suffer disproportionately the effects of water and air pollution, soil erosion and degradation, and health problems caused by environmental toxins. Much of the highly toxic e-waste of the developed nations is dumped in the developing world. Within the developed nations, too, the costs and benefits of industrialization are unevenly borne: in the United States, for instance, dumps, dirty factories, and power plants tend to be located near minority and working-class neighborhoods; minority and impoverished populations are significantly more likely than the white middle class to live in areas where air and water are less clean and where there are more environmentally linked health hazards; in the workplace as well, disadvantaged populations are often exposed to toxic substances that pose health risks. Brought to wide public attention by Pope Francis’s encyclical from 2015, “Laudato Si’,” these are issues of what in the United States is widely termed environmental justice and also referred to, usually in a more global context, as the environmentalism of the poor.5 This chapter examines poems by Ed Roberson, Mark Nowak, and Myung Mi Kim that address current issues of environmental justice linked, respectively, to urban redevelopment in the United States, coal mining in the United States and China, and displaced or refugee populations of Korea and other countries.6
The seventeen Principles of Environmental Justice were drawn up in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Communities of environmental justice activists adopted as their accessible definition of the environment: “where we live, work, play, and pray.”7 The social focus of the environmental justice movement evident in that definition did not coordinate comfortably with the nature-focused protectionist and conservation concerns of mainstream (largely white) environmentalism, or of ecocriticism as it had been developed (almost entirely by white scholars) into the 1990s.8 After decades of concerted efforts to move beyond anthropocentrism to ecocentrism, some environmentalists and ecocritics alike were reluctant to embrace visions of environmentalism that foreground among their concerns issues of human workplace health and safety, human access to clean air and water or healthy food, and human freedom from various kinds of environmental toxins including lead paint in homes or mercury in edible fish. As recently as 2005 Lawrence Buell observed that despite their shared vision of personhood being defined by environmental entanglement, “It remains to be seen just how far the discourses of urbanism and environmental justice can be coordinated with the discourses of nature and the protectionist agendas they tend to imply.”9
More than a decade later, however, as the rift between rich and poor across the globe widens while changes to the earth’s waters, surfaces, and atmosphere intensify, increasing numbers of scholars in the environmental humanities are recognizing an urgent need to bring together our perceptions of the crisis posed by “the Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene with the current crisis of human inequality for which Nixon, an eloquent spokesperson for this perspective, adopts Timothy Noah’s term “the Great Divergence.”10 Recognizing the extraordinary earth-altering power of a very few and the radically inequitable distribution of the benefits and harms generated by those alterations, Nixon and others like him call for responses to our environmental problems that also address the associated social problems and don’t amount to “adaptation by the rich for the rich.”11
The poetry to be discussed here attends to social justice issues that have foundations in Anthropocene changes to the earth’s surface arising from urbanization, resource extraction, and military conflict. Notably, its social focus does not entail leaving aside attention to traditional nature. This work does reject aestheticized visions of nature as something apart from human habitation and use, and it critiques hierarchies that value wild and rural over urban or industrial environments. But these poets demonstrate concern for the nonhuman, nonbuilt nature that is valued by conservationists. As they bring the discourses of nature and conservation together with the discourses of environmental justice, Roberson, Nowak, and Kim expand the scope, power, and relevance of both. Roberson’s insistence that nothing exists outside of nature, communicated partly by figuring human culture and the built environment in terms of nonhuman nature, functions also as a critique of social forms of exclusion and racial segregation. In Nowak’s volume, photos of mining country and rare glimpses of landscapes undamaged by extraction speak especially clearly to the entwining of environmental degradation with wretched human impoverishment, adding important dimensions to the tragedy of mining accidents and mining company negligence the text exposes. In Kim’s Penury, the inseparability of political and environmental sources of the suffering and displacement of human populations is clear in her disjunctive spare writing’s refusal to distinguish the consequences of military oppression from the results of mining and industrial processing or the impact of natural disasters including anthropogenic climate change. All three poets respond to the damaging, if not the decimation, of human communities, and each understands human communities as themselves relational ecosystems that are woven into the battered natural ecosystems of their locales.
The poetry considered in this chapter enacts a distinctive take on environmental justice in that the poets don’t approach the environment as being only where we live and work, though that is crucially important. They are also thinking of natural ecosystems and nonhuman beings—of nature, which humans are part of and in which human communities are embedded. Here, for instance, is Ed Roberson’s characterization of the importance of nature to his urban poetics: “In my own poems I try to show our social nature in and as the growth of our cities and city culture. Our technology, however, is more likely to conserve, regenerate, and nourish the limiting and exclusive resource base of capitalism than our larger human or Earth/Nature. Restoring this larger Earth to urban poetry, embedding city life within a living Nature focuses on an interrelation that
should keep us sensitized to exploitative relationships which could cut us off, cut us out of life.”12 Because of their interest in keeping “this larger Earth” in view in their environmental justice writing, these poets do not discard the pastoral tradition, despite its association with some of the dichotomies they reject. Instead, they redeploy its resources. Refusing the split Buell observed between environmental justice and conservation discourses, Roberson, Nowak, and Kim both modify and capitalize upon inherited discourses of nature and wilderness, marshaling the resources of the pastoral among the rhetorical strategies available to promote their inclusive visions of environmental concerns.