Recomposing Ecopoetics

by Lynn Keller

  Nature

  life and limb gone through divestiture

  of place from point

  reads to the lie

  of open

  breasts of field Elysian,

  nor the narrow badge number of the gun. (CE 88)

  What might seem evidently true for white Americans proves a stark lie for Americans of color because of the historical and continuing vulnerability of black bodies. The threat to life and limb African Americans experience in open spaces—an issue of environmental justice—has invalidated for them the “Elysian” meaning of the open.

  Although Roberson’s multiple books of poetry demonstrate extensive knowledge of and loving attention to nonbuilt nature, in City Eclogue he warns that bounded and aestheticizing perspectives on the natural world can too easily overlook social and economic realities. As one poem puts it, “Watching too much sunrise warms the breast / but often clouds the hands’ / emptiness and the [nearly empty] pocket you’re not facing // up to” (CE 33). It’s the phrase “too much” that is key, for ultimately Roberson’s thinking about nature is not dichotomous; he’s not suggesting that one need give up sunrise appreciation (or the hope it symbolizes) altogether. Rather, he consistently emphasizes that, like the damaging division of black from white or past from present, thinking that divides urban and built nature from nonbuilt nature, or separates environmental damage from harm to human communities, results in a false positioning of humankind in relation to the planetary systems that sustain us.

  While he clearly sees consequential distinctions between the powerful and the disempowered, and while City Eclogue starkly exposes violent oppression of African Americans, Roberson refuses to think of the human as divided in separatist terms. That this refusal is rooted in his response to America’s awful history of racial division is evident in “Sit In What City We’re In,” which depicts the black civil rights activists of the 1960s and the white segregationists who viciously opposed them as ultimately mirrored versions of each other—“our one // long likeness” endlessly reflected in the lunch counter mirrors of the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworths. In one passage he imagines the barriers of difference dematerializing as those mirrors transmute to transparent glass and then “thin air”:

  finally, us with no you nor I

  but being

  —with all our world— inside the other;

  but there only in our each part yet having

  no displacement of the other,

  just as each wishes the self not lost, shared

  being in common in each other being

  as different as

  night and day still of one spin. (CE 31)

  The difference between night and day suggests dark and light skin, but in this vision of what’s possible, they coexist in all their fullness while occupying the same place in the natural order and following the same natural laws. Roberson’s analogous vision of the oneness of urban and non-urban nature emerges in the close of the poem’s first section, which extends the lunch-counter mirroring into all of the built and nonbuilt natural world of which humans are part:

  The oceans, themselves one, catch their image

  hosed by riot cops down the gutter into

  The sphere surface

  river

  looked into reflects

  one face. (CE 27–28)

  The political challenge we face, at once social and environmental, is to honor that oneness and seek the equity and justice that is its ethical demand.

  “LESSON[S] PAID FOR IN BLOOD”: MARK NOWAK’S COAL MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY

  While Ed Roberson’s vision ultimately reaches the global scale where humankind, like the planet’s oceans, is a single entity transcending the divisions culture imposes, the environmental justice issues that concern him in City Eclogue are firmly centered in the United States and its racial fractures. In contrast, poet-activist Mark Nowak is among the North American poets whose environmental justice concerns take an international perspective. Nowak, who is the founder and director of the Worker Writers institute, has led poetry workshops for workers and trade unions in several European countries and in South Africa. His blog continually updates notices of mining disasters around the globe.20 Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary exposes the workplace hazards of coal mining along with some of its costs to the natural environment by bringing together documentation on American and Chinese mining disasters. The volume contains no original text; instead its “remix poetry” (Nowak’s term) interweaves five sets of documents: (1) verbatim statements, set in boldface, that Nowak culled from 6,300 pages of transcribed testimony by rescue workers and miners who survived the mine explosion in January 2006 in Sago, West Virginia, that for two days trapped thirteen miners, twelve of whom died; (2) Nowak’s color photographs of West Virginia mining towns, including Sago, mostly in winter; (3) chronologically arranged passages from English-language newspaper reporting on mining disasters in China over the two-and-a-half-year period between mid-February 2005 and late August 2007, printed in italics; (4) alternating with Nowak’s photos, color photographs of Chinese miners and mining towns taken by the Malaysian-born British photojournalist Ian Teh; and (5) excerpts, which Nowak lineates as poetry, from three of the coal mining–related lessons for school children that appear on the American Coal Foundation website. When listing that last source in the volume’s “Works Cited,” Nowak quotes from the website: “The American Coal Foundation (ACF) was created in 1981 as a 501(c)(3) organization to develop, produce and disseminate, via the web, coal-related educational materials and programs designed for teachers and students. The ACF does not engage in lobbying.”21 A visit to the site casts doubt on that statement’s suggestion of a distance from politics. The home page I encountered in May of 2014 announces in bold colorful lettering, “America has the world’s largest coal supply—enough coal to power us for 200 more years,” setting those words next to a photo of upscale apartments at dusk, with warm light glowing from cozily lit interiors.22 The site’s page where Nowak found the information about the 501(c)(3) organization (indicating it’s officially a charitable organization to which donations are tax deductible) announces the foundation’s links to the coal industry: “Support for the ACF is provided by coal producers and manufacturers of mining equipment and supplies. In addition, electric utilities, railroads, and organized labor have supported the work of the Foundation over the years. The ACF Board of Directors, comprised of industry executives, manages the operation of the Foundation.” That same page goes on to explain that “ACF staff members work closely with outside educational partners to develop credible and effective educational materials for distribution to teachers.”23 Of course, although coal has the highest carbon content of all fossil fuels, this website makes no mention of the tremendous contribution coal burning makes to global warming. In fact, in 2012 CO2 emissions from coal were responsible for 24.5 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.24 As of 2014, although U.S. dependence on coal has been declining with the increased use of natural gas, coal-fired power plants were producing about 30 percent of the total fossil fuel–related emissions in the United States. The nation with the largest CO2 emissions is China, producing 30 percent of all global emissions in 2014—the United States is second, at 15 percent—and in 2014 coal consumption was responsible for about 83 percent of China’s CO2 emissions.25 Nor does the ACF website acknowledge that burning coal is a leading cause of smog, acid rain, and multiple kinds of toxic air pollution. It does not mention that coal mines are associated with a host of public health problems because they are a huge source of mercury pollution, they introduce multiple carcinogens into regional drinking water, and their sludge and slurry ponds contaminate groundwater. And there is no mention of lives lost in mining.26

  I don’t want to give the impression, however, that Nowak has simply provided a crudely ironic, easy contrast in setting educational materials designed by a pro-coal organization beside evidence of the terrible danger coal mining poses to miners, their families
and communities, and the natural environments where mines are situated. The juxtaposed materials speak to each other in a variety of ways so that he creates something that is clear in its politics yet also rewardingly complex.

  The book’s bold-faced pages take the reader through the excruciating tale of a single American disaster in minute detail via the painstaking testimony of those who were there and most closely involved, including men in a second cart who experienced the blast but were able to escape from the tunnel, a dispatcher, and rescue workers who found the victims and retrieved their bodies. The story slowly unfolds over the entire 176-page volume, its pieces separated by the other documentary threads; the vivid and peculiarly selective details of personal memory force the reader to participate in the horrors and suspense of this experience through a close-up, almost slow-motion, perspective. The use of multiple first-person speakers recreates the immediate uncertainty, confusion, and desperation of the men at the scene. The narrative also traces an excruciating error that the reader unfamiliar with the story of the Sago disaster only gradually discerns: a false report of twelve survivors circulated to the mining families three hours before the accurate report of twelve deaths reached them, so that they were wrenched from fear to ecstatic hope and then to doubly agonizing loss. This polyphony of male voices ends with the attempts to remove the body bags from the scene in a respectful way. The points at which the retrospective speakers stumble or fail to complete their sentences eloquently convey the ongoing trauma of the experience.

  In contrast to the slow unfolding of a few hours’ events at Sago, the italicized pages of reporting from China provide an almost panoramic overview, as one disaster follows another—60 dead here, 21 there, 122 dead another place, 148 in another, at least 62 somewhere else—without let-up, despite government officials repeatedly proclaiming the need for greater safety in the mines, even as descriptions of desperate and grieving widows left without means to support themselves and their children recur again and again. Here the book’s length has a different impact, producing not a sense of moving along a course with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, but of stagnation in a hellish realm where bodies just keep accumulating and the multiple mine explosions or mine floods become virtually indistinguishable from one another. Because the two narratives are juxtaposed, the reader is always aware that behind the generalized reporting from China lie suffering individuals like those whose first-person voices bring us close to Sago, and that those who keep on mining may be victims of future accidents.

  A third kind of time is evoked in the lessons, where activities are imagined by the ACF as readily circumscribed into neat units; an exercise might be specified to take two one-hour periods, for instance. This vision of time that is easily divided and controlled is undercut by both the Chinese and American mining narratives, where orderly schedules and lives have been completely and irreparably disrupted.

  Some significant differences between mining conditions in the two countries are discernable. In Sago, for instance, the miners know procedures to follow underground in emergencies, and each carries oxygen—neither of which is true in the Chinese disasters, where the miners seem often to be peasant farmers who enter the mines without training in order to supplement their inadequate agricultural incomes. Additionally, mining disasters are far more frequent and tend to involve far more deaths in China, where corruption is also more blatant (e.g., mining companies send bodies elsewhere in order to reduce accident body counts or bribe bereaved families hoping to suppress news of disasters). But in many ways the two kinds of text present the same story told in different time frames. Presenting the photos without captions yields a similar sense of sameness; a scene might be from Sago or from another American mining town, and sometimes—particularly because in Teh’s pictures coal dust and smoke or miners’ lights and movements partly obscure the figures, while Nowak’s photos often show rusty mining structures—it’s not obvious whether an image is from China or the United States. Extending this impression, a journalistic piece in which a massive open-pit mine in China is identified as founded by an American industrialist signals that the two threads are part of the same system of multinational corporations (CME 136).

  What’s clear is that both nations’ narratives and the accompanying images reflect major violations of the fundamental environmental justice principles originally affirmed at the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, most notably “the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment, without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment,” but also: “the right to be free from ecological destruction,” “the right to ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living things,” and the call for “universal protection from . . . extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons . . . that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.”27 In an interview, Nowak approvingly repeats the following statement from Maurice Manning’s review of Coal Mountain Elementary that brings together environmental and economic concerns: “Coal mining is the same everywhere. Most mines are located in remote places with little economic diversity, leaving local workers and their families vulnerable to the only game in town. Despite being tucked away in rural areas, however, many mining operations function on an unimaginable scale: The combined area of mountaintop-removal sites in West Virginia and Kentucky, for example, will be as big as Delaware by the end of the decade; an open-pit mine in Wyoming is visible from space.”28 The capitalist system underlying this sameness is exposed in the second of the three ACF curricular units that structure the book (all of which are still among the lessons on the website in May of 2016)—and this is where the book’s juxtapositions are most heavily ironic. In an exercise using cookies from which chocolate chips are mined, elementary school students are supposed to simulate “the costs associated with the mining of coal.” These costs are exclusively financial and include the purchase of property, tools, and labor, and also the price of environmental remediation. Nowak’s context for these excerpts calls attention to the ACF’s failure to include loss of human lives among the costs.

  Figure 12. Billboard image of green mountains in front of barren brown landscape of Chinese mining region, in Mark Nowak and Ian Teh, Coal Mountain Elementary, 79. (Photograph by Ian Teh; courtesy of Ian Teh)

  ACF does consider environmental costs—as the industry is mandated to do—but not, Nowak suggests, with sufficient integrity. The notion of environmental remediation is introduced just after a page on a disaster that killed at least 138 people, which “came as the nearby city of Harbin was struggling to recover from a toxic spill [of benzene] in a river that forced the government to cut off water supplies for five days” (CME 73). That is, it enters the text alongside evidence of aspects of industrial development besides coal extraction that similarly damage the environment and human health. A forceful display of the impossibility of true remediation is provided a few pages later by Teh’s photograph that shows a huge billboard set up in front of a line of low brick-and-stone buildings on a bleak brown hillside scarred with what appear to be open-pit mines; the billboard depicts bucolic farm fields and graceful mountains that perhaps approximate what one used to see at this spot (fig. 12; CME 79). The image creates an effect that eerily evokes a few of Magritte’s surrealist paintings such as Call of the Peaks or The Human Condition, in which an easel supports a painting of exactly the scene behind it; there, the landscape and the representation are distinguishable only because of the easel. In Teh’s photo the contrast between the representation and the landscape could hardly be more stark.

  The fields in the billboard are bright green and yellow, the sky blue with white puffy clouds; it’s a scene of perfect pastoral fertility and freshness that contrasts painfully with the local reality. Text from the elementary school lesson subsequently explains that:

  Coal companies

  are
required by federal law

  to return the land they mine

  to its original, or an improved, condition.

  This process, known as reclamation,

  is a significant expense for the industry. (CME 94)

  Teh’s photo makes obvious the impossibility of such a return. Its difficulty is perhaps implied in the ACF instructions for the students doing reclamation with cookies, but their pretense is that there need be no residual damage to the environment. (I suspect, however, that no child would mistake his or her chip-less reformed cookie for an undamaged original):

  have students

  restore their property

  to its original condition,

  within the drawn circle

  on the grid paper.

  This “reclamation”

  should also be timed

  (no more than three minutes)

  and students may only use

  their tools, not fingers.

  After time is up,

  collect additional

  reclamation costs

  ($) for each square covered

  outside the original outline. (CME 118)

  As this school lesson about making a profit unfolds, the juxtaposed Sago narrative follows first the false news of rescue and then the discovery of a dozen dead miners. Nowak’s juxtapositions point to analogies between the industry’s overlooking of environmental costs and its discounting of human ones. The ACF materials teach children how to cover up environmental damage and how to treat that damage as merely a “($)” cost, not a tragedy; at the same time, those materials fail to acknowledge human costs and tragedies. It could hardly be clearer that both tolls are being obscenely underestimated.