Envisioning the Earth: Exploring Eco-Criticism and Environmental Relations

LCTSU Journal 2022

Envisioning the Earth Exploring Eco-Criticism and Environmental Relations

Literature and Critical Theory Students’ Union Journal 2022

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LCTSU Journal 2022

Letter from the Editor In the face of climate change and the impending ecological collapse, the literary community has struggled to define its place. What are the roles of literature and criticism in the understanding, preservation, and distruction of the environment? How do stories help us understand our relationship with the Earth? Can eco-criticism change the way we interact with nature?

These are a few of the questions that the research articles and poems being to address in this journal. Wenying Wu wittily outlines an eco-poetics of waste in her article. Seavey van Walsum investigates the role of geology in the poetry written about the Boreal Shield Zone. Ben Murphy explores the nature’s cyclicality in his poem “Take a Moment.” Together, the entries in this journal encourage reflection on our interactions with natural spaces and the ways we choose to depict them.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with these contributors and the rest of the LCTSU for a second time in the preparation of this journal. I would like to extend a thank you to Professor Shaun Ross for his unwavering support of the Union.

I would also like to congratulate the members of the literature and critical theory program, whose resilience after yet another challenging year has been remarkable.

Sincerely, Rion Levy Editor-in-Chief

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Journal Team Editor-in-Chief Rion Levy Design Editor Rion Levy Associate Editors Mikayla Oliver Cover Illustrator Seavey van Walsum

Contributors Isidora Cortes-Monroy Gazitua, Palvasha Khan, Rion Levy, Victoria McIntyre, Ben Murphy, Seavey van Walsum, Adele Wechsler, Wenying Wu

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Table of Contents Margo Langan: An Ecosophical Storyteller Victoria McIntyre

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Land Grief Stone Eggs Seavey van Walsum

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The ‘State’ of Nature in Tess of the D’Urbervilles Adele Wechsler

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Nursery Rhymes for Desertification and Adults Seavey van Walsum

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The Global Water Crisis: Inaction and Inequality Ben Murphy

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Taking Up the Trash: An Eco-Critical Poetics of Waste Wenying Wu

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History Abridged: Modernity and the Romantic Mode of Poetics Palvasha Khan

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Rhizomatic Landscape and Memory in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la Luz Isodora Cortes-Monroy Gazitua

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The Erzberg Mine Seavey van Walsum

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What Makes a Place: Interaction of Geology and Place in the Poetry of the Boreal Shied Zone Seavey van Walsum

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Take a Moment Ben Murphy

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On the Presence of Civilization in F.R. Scott’s Nature Poetry Rion Levy

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Margo Langan

An Ecosophical Storyteller Victoria McIntyre

Storytelling is an important, connective art form. Throughout hu-

man history, stories have been used to explain the mysteries of the world, teach moral lessons, and entertain people. In a sense, selkie stories accomplish all of these goals. The selkie folktale is about seals who can shed their sealskins and turn into humans. Authors and theorists have pondered how storytelling can be used to both educate us and emotionally bond people to nonhuman life forms. The climate crisis is a global issue that is talked about in many different corners of public discourse: amongst scientists, politicians, and on social media. One of those issues is the way in which the climate crisis has affected the earth’s marine life. The World Wildlife Fund states that the ringed seal pup mortality rate has risen due to loss of ice in the Arctic, making it impossible for the seals to build their dens. The seal population has also been diminished by human hunting.

Selkie stories can be employed in a mode of environmental activism referred to by Heli Aaltonen as “ecosophical storytelling” (156). Ecosophical storytelling is based on Arne Naess’s concept of ecosophy or deep ecology. Naess describes ecosophy as “a philosophical worldview or system inspired by the conditions of life in the ecosphere” (Naess 38). Naess believes that biocentric egalitarianism can be achieved if humans reframe their ecological viewpoint on the metaphysical level. Instead of seeing people as the centre of the world, Naess suggests that we consider all life on earth as interrelated and interdependent.

Although, Aaltonen emphasizes that, today, most people still Page 5

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feel distant from the natural world. She believes that telling stories can “change humans’ relational separation from other life forms” (Aaltonen 155). In this essay, I analyze the practice of ecosophical storytelling through the case study of the selkie story, The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan. I assess how effective Lanagan’s story is at inciting curiosity and sympathy for a fictional creature, selkies, to inspire a genuine interest in a real one, seals, by means of emotional and subtle scientific persuasion. I contend that Lanagan’s story exemplifies how the folktale is an important philosophical bridge to understanding and appreciating the natural world.

Lanagan engages in ecosophical storytelling by encouraging readers to adopt a nonanthropocentric worldview. She does so by revealing the consequences of allowing a humancentric perspective to run society. According to Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa’s chapter in Rethinking Nature, the three prominent environmental philosophies are the European approach, the Anglo-Saxon’s environmental ethics, and ecosophy (Afeissa 27-28). Lanagan’s work can be analyzed for examples of each approach. By doing so, one might expose the faults in the earlier models and assert the power of ecosophical storytelling.

The men of Rollrock Island are physical manifestations of the European approach to environmentalism. According to this outlook, people should only be held responsible for meeting the needs of human beings and for the dangers of technology (29). Afeissa criticizes this perspective: such an approach exclusively focuses on interhuman relationships and on the consequences of people’s actions for themselves or for future generations and never asks whether we do not have other types of duties or whether the binary opposition between humanity and nature should not be reconsidered.

More serious still, there is no examination of the true nature of the current ecological crisis within this framework. (29)

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In the novel, the men of the island use selkies to serve their own interests. They keep their wives’ seal coats hidden, trapping the women ashore. When Able Marten hires Misskaela to turn a seal into a woman, he is the first to request she use her powers for his personal gain, showing that the men are only loyal to themselves. Misskaela is a destructive force representative of the power of technology. The destructive nature of her power is carried in Langan’s diction. As Misskaela begins the process of transforming the seal, she “tangle[s] the seal’s gaze with [hers]” (Langan 96). Already, the imagery suggests that the seal is being caught in some kind of net or web. She releases the girl from the animal’s skin by “cl[ea]v[ing] the sealskin top to bottom” (96). Instead of being disturbed by this dangerous use of technology, “Able’s face blossom[s]” (96) at the sight of the girl torn from the seal. He feels no sense of guilt or duty towards the animal life he and Misskaela have destroyed. Neither character reacts at all when the selkie woman asks: “What have you done to me?” (97).

Immediately, Able focuses on his responsibility to interhuman relations by imploring the selkie woman to put on clothes and “‘get [her] self modest’” (97). She replies by inquiring, “‘What is modest, Able Marten?’” (97). This exchange exemplifies the moral issues within the European approach. Able expresses no remorse for his actions; the only code of conduct that concerns him is social acceptability.

He tells her she will need to learn to live by the rules of his world, without considering if the “binary opposition between humanity and nature” (Afeissa 29) really exists, or pondering how seeing the world through this lens has led him to harmful behaviours.

After establishing the European approach to environmentalism, Lanagan explores its self-interested perspective on consequences. Specifically, she follows the points of view of multiple generations of Rollrock residents, showing the long-term impact of the men’s actions. Years after Misskaela transforms her first selkie woman, the entire island is crawling with them. All of the human women flee to the mainland. The men only keep their children when their wives bear sons; they throw the daughters into the sea. The “whole island’s agreement” (Lanagan 234), disregards the lifestyles of the selkies. All the women want to do is return to being seals, but the men keep Page 7

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them ashore by force. One of the selkie’s sons, Daniel Mallett, reflects on how the men of Rollrock Island “may have thought this would gain them their own happiness, but they might as well have vowed, Let us all stay miserable together-- dads, mams and lads alike-- to the end of our days” (234). After the selkie women escape with their sons back to the sea, the men of Rollrock grow more miserable. Here, the consequences for future generations are revealed, still with a focus on humans. Langan evinces the shortcomings of this perspective through the reactions of the men. Instead of demonstrating regret for or pondering the ethical impact of their actions they simply repeat them. The men tear their sons out of the sea. Lanagan shows that the European approach to environmental ethics is not strong enough to create any real change. When humans only consider themselves as having a duty to each other, their scope of understanding is too narrow. The immediate wants and needs of people may not reflect what is best for nature as a whole, as seen in the Rollrock Island men.

The danger of technology is dismissed until it impacts the men personally. They do not express concern for their reckless consumption pattern. The European approach does not include morality because if all life must be seen as valuable, then “the life of a baby seal will be thought to have the same worth as that of a human being” (Afeissa 28). If this statement is true, then humans could not solely focus on humancentric relations, as the men in the story do.

The aim of many Anglo-Saxon environmental ethicists is to endow nonhuman life with intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is a term that is discussed in comparison with instrumental value. Instrumental value is derived from Plato’s Republic, where he suggests that something might be valuable as a means to an end, and other things are valuable enough in themselves to be an end worth seeking. When we view nature as a means to an end, as is the case with the European approach, then we fail to see the value nature holds outside of human activities. If, however, we see objects of the natural world as intrinsically valuable, then our actions become ethically culpable. If a seal has intrinsic value, then we are obligated to care about how our actions depreciate their resources. They do not just exist as “a mere natural resource for human exploitation” (Afeissa 32). As Aldo Page 8

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Leopold says in A Sand Country Almanac, “men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution” (Leopold 109). These concepts do not come forth in the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and actions in Lanagan’s novel until we return to Daniel Mallett’s perspective later on.

Misskaela’s point of view does not demonstrate biocentric egalitarianism; the sea witch expresses no concern for the selkie women. Instead, she sees them as only carrying instrumental value. In a moment of anti-ecofeminism, Lanagan writes of Misskaela’s relief at the prospect of ripping away the seal’s life. She is happy to do so in order to avoid worrying about having a husband “for [her] meat and bread, for the shoes on [her] feet and the coat on [her] back” (Lanagan 89). Many ecofeminists believe that the climate crisis is a direct result of our patriarchal societal structure, and that, if women were in charge, the crisis would be mitigated (Gaard 20). Lanagan shows how inherited patriarchal values still haunt women by encouraging them to think of natural resources just as economically as men, making women man’s equal. Subsequently, the sections following Bet Winch’s and Dominic Mallett’s points of view also adopt an anthropocentric perspective. In Bet Winch’s section, the selkie woman’s utility is only seen through how she fulfills Bet’s father’s desires (Lanagan 125). Similarly, Dominic views the selkies, and, by extension, the seals from which they came, as carrying instrumental value. At the end of his final chapter in the book, he ponders his selkie wife’s value, and decides that he needed to own her because doing so made him feel “complete, and steady in himself, and clear as to what he was” (181), a human being who is entitled to all of the earth’s resources.

Later, Lanagan explores the power of morality through the character Daniel Mallett, who practices Anglo-Saxon’s environmental ethics without ever having access to the terminology. Afeissa outlines that one way of making nonhuman life worthy of “moral consideration is either to reveal that they have previously unnoticed intrinsic value or to confer intrinsic value on them as we might confer the right to vote on previously disenfranchised citizens” (Afeissa 32).

While some characters consider half-selkie half-human children

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to have intrinsic value, Daniel is the only perspective given in the novel of someone who sees animal life as being inherently important. Since local society on Rollrock Island does not view the seals as having intrinsic value, I believe that Daniel confers intrinsic value upon them. In this way, his character exemplifies the importance of environmental ethics. Daniel makes a pivotal decision. He decides to turn the selkie women, who he refers to as “mams” (Lanagan 334), back into seals. The events that lead up to this decision are carefully laid out before the reader. First, Daniel learns the truth about the mams’ origins. Here, Lanagan begins to build the moral bridge between humans and animals. Daniel does not yet see the seals’ intrinsic value, but an initial connection has been formed between humans, the only creature currently considered to possess this kind of value, and animals.

Later, one of the selkie women ends her life, hanging “herself from a kitchen beam” (218). After this incident, Daniel begins to reflect on the mams’ collective sorrow. Following the first selkie’s death, a second one takes her own life by throwing herself into the unruly waves. Both of these deaths incite grief and sympathy in Daniel, but mainly they help him to realize that the mams are deeply unhappy and that they will only be happy if they are turned back into seals.

This realization causes him to go to his mam with a “plan” to send her back “to sea” (241, 243). Here, Lanagan reveals that humans can see animal life as intrinsically valuable if exterior circumstances force us into this realization. Daniel feels that the mams’ overwhelming sorrow gives him no choice but to help them return to their natural form. Lanagan proves Aaltonen’s argument regarding ecosophical storytelling’s ability to “connect us to other living species” by humanizing the seals (Aaltonen 157). Once the seals are connected to the human-like selkie women, they are no longer just thoughtless, blubbery creatures. The seals have inherent worth because the boys and the mams decide that they do. Only when they work together to send all of the mams and their sons back to sea are the seals treated as more than a means to an end but instead as an end goal. Humanizing these animals gives them intrinsic value.

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Ecosophical folktales show readers how to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview by presenting animal life as uniquely significant, apart from any human life. Arne Naess held the belief that our concept of human nature had to be remade. Instead of seeing ourselves as separate entities from nature, who exist at the center of ecosystems and should be served by them, we should each tap into our ecological self. This version of the self is one that does not see any separation between one’s existence and nature. We are all equal, and all part of the same self. Ecology activist John Seed notes that this identity goes beyond just how we imagine we exist in the world.

He expands on Naess’s concept, stating that “ideas only engage one part of our mind in cognition. We also need ecological feelings and actions as well as ideas to nurture a maturing ecological identity” (Seed 98). If we are able to achieve this self-realized state, then, Arne Naess believes that “our behaviour [will] naturally and beautifully follow… norms of strict environmental ethics” (qtd. in Seed 99). Lanagan creates a nonhuman example of the ecological self through her selkie characters.

The selkies embody the key ideas of ecosophy, which share some traits with environmental ethics, but move past this philosophy to achieve what should be the ultimate goal of ecosophical storytelling. Lanagan presents a group of characters who do not have an anthropocentric worldview. The selkie women are examples of self-realized, ecological selves. Their physical bodies, a merging of human and marine animal, are a metaphor for their conscious state of being. They do not prioritize the interests of human beings over those of animals nor do they need to humanize seals. Instead, they believe that all beings are of equal value and should be left in their natural states.

This philosophy is illustrated when each mam sews their son into a suit of seaweed and animal skin, which magically transforms into sealskin in the water. Through the selkies’ disposition and their teachings, Lanagan shows how those who are aligned with their ecological self can inspire others around them to adopt the same practice. The process that Lanagan describes is comparable to Seed’s personal journey, described in his essay, “Beyond Anthropocentrism.”

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In this paper, Seed recounts his time as a protestor in New South Wales. As he reflects in a later essay, the key shift in his perspective can be encapsulated in the movement from: ‘“I am protecting the rainforest” …into “I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking” (Seed 101). The selkie women always knew that they were a part of the ocean, of marine life, that had “emerged into thinking,” as humans think (101). Their sons experienced this epiphany, just as Seed did, by immersing themselves in nature.

Lanagan weaves scientific knowledge into her exploration of the ecological self once the selkies and their sons have transformed into seals. When Daniel follows after his mam, he seeks “the bubbling trail of her with his whiskers and [goes] after it” (253). The Natural History of Seals states that “[w]hiskers are important tactile receptors” for seals (Bonner 19). The seal behaviour Daniel exhibits in this scene matches the findings of Deane Renouf ’s observational research, which shows that “[a] seal pushes its whiskers forward when chasing fish…and they [can] detect water displacements created by swimming movements,” which would explain Lanagan’s emphasis of the mam seal’s “bubbling trail” (Bonner 19, Lanagan 253). In addition, Lanagan describes the seals swimming as “twist[ing] through the home depths…lovely in their solidity and their speed” (Lanagan 255). The accuracy of this twisting motion is seen in Bonner’s description of a swimming seal. He states the “movements of the flippers are accompanied by lateral swinging of the hinder third of the body” (Bonner 7). While The Brides of Rollrock Island is certainly not an in-depth portrait of a seal’s biology, when Lanagan does dabble in life underwater, she does so with scientific accuracy. Lanagan’s folktale demonstrates that mythical stories need not abandon biological precision just because they are fantastical. This notion is especially important to remember if the story revolves around real animals because you might be influencing the reader’s understanding of a living being. The narratives we tell shape our emotional responses to our environment. Lanagan does not forget this fact as she tells her tale.

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Ecosophical storytelling encourages readers to tap into their ecological selves and to imagine wildlife as complexly as we imagine other people. Lanagan explores, critiques, and builds upon the three major philosophical environmental perspectives by embedding their characteristics into her own characters. All of Lanagan’s work to establish complex environmental discourse within folktales prepares the reader for the introduction of sealing into the narrative.

Seal hunting is not mentioned until later in the book, where it is presented as an issue that has not been solved. Lanagan does not provide a solution to the issue of seal hunting, but she does make the reader aware of it, and subliminally asks what they might do to help improve the situation. In her brief references to seal hunting, Lagan conveys the thoughtless attitude of European seal hunters. Daniel’s father claims that “[they] could as well stop the seal-trade as hold the sun down in the morning” (Lanagan 259). Reframe your worldview, Lanagan asks, so that you develop an ecological self. How does this statement read under that lens? Is it impossible to act to save the seals? Just as the seal enjoys swimming “high in the sea…where there is light” (269), may the ecological reader swim towards an enlightened perspective, with the guidance of the ecosophical storyteller.

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Works Cited Aaltonen, Heli. “Selkie Stories as an Example of Ecosophical Story telling.” Key Concepts in Theatre/Drama Education, Sense Publishers, pp. 153–58, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-94-6091-332-7_25.

Afeissa, Hicham-Stéphane. “Ecosophy: ‘How Deep Is Your Ecology’?” Rethinking Nature, 1st \ ed., Routledge, 2017, pp.

27–37, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315444765-4. https://www-taylorfrancis-com.myaccess.library.uto ronto.ca/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315444765-4/ecoso phy-hicham-st%C3%A9phane-afeissa.

Bonner, W. Nigel. The Natural History of Seals. Facts on File, 1990.

Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism and Climate Change.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 49, Elsevier Ltd, 2015, pp. 20–33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2015.02.004.

“Harbor Seal.” NOAA Fisheries, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/har bor-seal.

Lanagan, Margo. The Brides of Rollrock Island. New York, Ember, 2013.

Langer, S. Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of reason, rite and art. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Madsen, Peter. “Deep Ecology.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/topic/ deep-ecology#ref1192852.

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Naess, Arne. 2005. “The Basics of Deep Ecology.” The Trumpeter, Vol. 21, No. 1.

Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, edited and translated by D. Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Naess, Arne, et. al. Self Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World. Thinking Like a Mountain—Towards a Council of All Beings, New Society Publishers, 1988.

Seed, John. “The Ecological Self.” The Trumpeter, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2006, pp. 96–102., http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index. php/trumpet/article/view/909/1341.

World Wildlife Fund. “Seals.” WWF, World Wildlife Fund, 2021, https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/seals.

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Land Grief and Stone Eggs Seavey van Walsum

cadmium lightning incises a gray cloud piled up on the northwest horizon, a nearby heart clenches over a memory that’s not yours and can’t be asked about it’s too heavy to hold for strangers and too old for this moment: now thunder rolls back and forth across the sky like a stone egg in a bowl. a hand is taken a fresh sigh is let out

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The “State” of Nature in Tess D’urbervilles Adele Wecsker

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is deeply engaged with cap-

ital-N Nature, managing to become thoroughly knotted in every one of its social, political, literary, and theological entanglements. Tess’s rural background and feminine connection to the natural world is essential to her role as the titular “pure woman.” However, her engagement with Nature serves at times to highlight a contradiction between the social and the natural, enabling Hardy’s critique of the purity standard. At other times it endorses the very social conventions that Hardy appears to critique, punishing Tess with omens of her impurity–such as the crowing of a cock at her wedding in Chapter XXXIII. The issue is further complicated by Hardy’s depiction of the landscape of Wessex, which is highly engaged with the social and political issues of the era, but also informed by literary and theological traditions of the past. Nature in the novel is at once a romantic recourse to a purer state, a harsh working-class reality, and the source of a natural law that sometimes celebrates Tess, and sometimes condemns her. Much critical ink has been spilled over these contradictions. As Lynn Parker summarizes, “a conflict exists between Hardy’s claims as narrator, and the power of his natural imagery” (277); Wickens similarly attributes the “lack of thematic unity” (184) to an era-specific literary discourse between Wordsworthian Romanticism and the “amoral nature of late Victorian science” (187). Indeed, the problem of Nature in Tess is inextricable from the rapid industrialization and technological advancements of the late 19th Century which were creating new attitudes and behaviors towards Nature and complicating the very idea of the ‘natural.’ On a physical level, these Page 17

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developments were also ‘complicating’ landscapes themselves, as modern machinery and railroads began to blur the boundaries between the rural and the urban. This essay will draw out the contradictory ways that Nature is depicted in Tess D’Urbervilles and discuss how these complexities are engaged with the literary, social, and political discourse around Nature in the late Victorian period. The primary means through which the novel engages with this discourse is its setting–Hardy’s imaginary county of Wessex–and its metaphorically rich descriptions of the rural places the characters navigate.

Thus, this essay will focus first and foremost on Nature as space: the different ways in which natural spaces feature in the narrative, and how the characters use and inhabit them. Through an analysis of passages which prominently feature natural spaces, I will identify and discuss the five contrasting ‘states’ of Nature in the text: Nature as a touristic, commodified space, Nature as pure, moral and feminine, Nature as lawless, amoral and primal, Nature as the political and social ‘rural’, and finally, Nature as a mythic, historically cognizant entity. Finally, I will discuss what these contradictory and coexisting ‘states’ of Nature mean for Tess’s role as “a pure woman.”

Firstly, the text treats Natural space as a tourist destination, implying that conceptions of Nature’s ‘purity’ are constructed, commodified, and falsely idealized by the touristic gaze of the privileged class. This is emphasized at the outset of the novel in the description of Blackmoor in Phase the First. The reader is positioned as a visitor reading a guidebook entry, which views the Tess’s village from the surrounding hills, situating it as a convenient “four hours’ journey from London”: an ideal destination for artists. Notably, this beauty is best viewed from a distance. Here, Hardy’s description of the state of Nature is engaged with Victorian-era discourse around tourism and commodification of Nature. The 1840s saw the advent of commercial tourism in Victorian England, as railroads and industrialization facilitated national travel, and companies such as “Thomas Cook” created the first travel agencies - these would have been rampant by the time Hardy was writing in the later half of the century (Cooke).

While being widely enjoyed by the Bourgeois class, the advent of tourism naturally produced anxieties about the increased Page 18

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commodification of previously uncommodified areas, such as “untrodden” villages like Tess’s. Thus, in engaging with this discourse on tourism and commodification of Nature spaces, Hardy treats the idea of a ‘pure’ Nature with skepticism. In this Natural space, Tess’s rural purity is the product of a touristic gaze; a position emphasized by her first appearance in the novel as part of a semi-erotic May-Day custom which is described as for the benefit of a voyeuristic outsider. Essential to the treatment of Natural Spaces as touristic is Angel Clare’s role as a tourist, one which is made explicit in Chapter II when he first visits Blackmoor on a “walking tour” (16). It is notable that Angel never quite relinquishes this role: he is also a tourist–albeit a more immersed tourist–to the pastoral paradise of Talbothay’s dairy. As the narrative progresses, Angel’s touristic idealization of Tess as an “unsullied country maid” (264) becomes central to Tess’s undoing, and the text reiterates that Tess is subject to the same gaze as was the landscape of Blackmoor. After Tess’s confession, the narrator notes that Angel too, wishes to view Tess from a distance, concluding Volume II with the warning “vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains” (265). Angel’s artistic idealization of Tess and of the pastoral atmosphere of the dairy as a source of personal spiritual wealth positions him as a Romantic figure; to him, Tess “lives what paper-poets only write” (164). Wickens argues that Angel is a stand-in for Wordsworth, although I believe his working-class origins and name liken him to Wordsworth’s Romantic contemporary, John Clare. In any case, the space of Nature, and with it, the idyllic pastoralism that Tess embodies, is treated critically by the text as an artistic construct of purity, commodified by Angel’s touristic gaze.

However, in the novel’s treatment of Natural space, the touristic eye is not consistently present so as to render this interpretation valuable on its own. Tess inhabits a state of Nature that is different from Angel’s artistically informed gaze; at times the novel appears to genuinely uphold Natural spaces as feminine, pure, and the site of a ‘Natural’ moral law that supersedes social constructs. Tess is repeatedly portrayed as being in communion with a ‘pure’ nature. This is in part illustrative of her feminitiy, as the novel depicts women as being Page 19

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more akin to nature than men: “a field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding” (88). Further, Tess’s beauty and purity are depicted as being intrinsic to her anatomy as the “genuine daughter of Nature” (120)–while this is Angel’s phrase, the narrative does seem to uphold it even in Angel’s absence.

Even scenes where Tess herself is the voyeur, such as the one in Chapter XIX when she watches Angel in the garden, retain a distinct sensuality produced in the way Tess is “imbibed” with Nature; “gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights” (122). The landscapes, too, are described using distinctly feminine metaphors, for example, “the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization… The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings” (149). In both scenes, emphasis on fluids, nakedness and fertility do actually evince a ‘pure’ and ‘feminine’ Nature that was regarded skeptically under the touristic gaze, complicating the novel’s critical position.

In line with themes of femininity and purity, spaces of Nature are depicted as possessing an intrinsic Natural law that sometimes supersedes the social law, and at other times enforces it. Places such as Tabolthay’s dairy, and the Village of Trantridge are sites of pagan beliefs and alternative moralities which supersede societal constraints, allowing Hardy to critique the social purity standards of the time as being ‘unnatural.’ For example, it is repeatedly emphasized that while Tess may be impure in the eyes of society, in the eyes of Nature she remains uncontaminated: “she had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment” (86), and she is condemned “under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature” (279). Notably, these assurances of Tess’s purity are dependent on her being present in a natural space, when she is “walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges… or standing under a pheasant-laden bough” (85). However, the paganism of the Natural lanscape simultaneously condemns Tess as impure, Page 20

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punishing her with omens of her ‘crime’ and demonstrating an awareness of her ‘guilt’ that is unquestionably real. For example, Tess’s love for Angel causes the butter at Tabolthay’s to cease churning, “paralyzing” (133) the economic activities of the dairy, and the crowing of the cock three times at her wedding signals the cuckolding of her husband according to the village lore. In fact, by the very end of the novel, Tess’s purity is but a ‘trick’ of a malevolent Nature: the narrator declares that “Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess’s countenance” (237) as to make Angel attracted to her. Nature still serves as a pure, moral recourse, the adjudicator of an environmental law, though Tess’s own purity as a “daughter of Nature” becomes complicated and ambiguous.

Thus far, Hardy’s depictions of the Natural world have been grounded in a dichotomy between the social and the Natural, whether through the touristic social fetishization of Nature, or the non-compatibility of social morality with Nature’s laws. However, it is also necessary to note the instances in the text when Nature is depicted as hostile, primal and invasive; thus viewing more favorably the division between the urban, social world and the untouched, natural landscapes of Wessex. The most striking example of this is the setting of the forest where Tess is raped by Alec, which is necessarily entirely secluded from the “not very distant cottages” (73) which house Tess’s would-be rescuers. The clearing is populated with “gentle roosting birds” and “hopping rabbits” (74); elements of Nature that are sharply juxtaposed to Alec’s crime, and yet coolly indifferent to it. Shortly after the rape takes place, the Natural landscape itself metaphorically emulates the rape, with the sun “demanding the masculine pronoun” (86): Nature becomes a site of invasive intercourse, as the sun is “gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon [the] earth” (73). Here, and in the gloomy, gothic mansions at the end of the novel, Nature is a place where the protectors of society turn a blind eye, allowing Tess to be violated and her tragedy to unfold. This more pessimistic, anti-Romantic treatment of Nature is in line with the shift in artistic representations of Nature that took place in the late Victorian period, which moved away from the pastoral idealizations of the Romantics to take on a more skeptical, nihilistic Page 21

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view of the environment. As Conan Doyle said in Sherlock Holmes, a work that was contemporary to Tess: “the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” This anti-Romantic attitude, common among late-Victorian writers, is attributed in part to the advent of Darwinism and the erosion of religious faith (LaLuna), but also to the industrialization that was visibly effecting humanity’s domination of nature, and disrupting natural landscapes. A more fatalistic view of Nature is evident in the scene of Tess’s rape and the ones shortly thereafter; Hardy tempts, but simultaneously complicates the Romantic idea of a ‘pure’ nature by introducing a typical late-Victorian “uncertainty” (LaLuna) concerning a faithless natural world.

The Natural space of the novel is also the site of political and social discourse surrounding rural and urban divisions–a discourse in which Hardy was continuously engaged throughout his life (Fincham). Scenes of pastoral bliss are jarringly punctuated with the ominous portents of modernity: machines, railroads, and supply chains. The most striking example of this juxtaposition is the appearance of the train in Chapter XXX, through which “[m]odern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, [and] touched the native existences” (186). The interaction between Tess and the train is moralized by the narrator, as the train “quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial” (186): the urban people with whom the dairy supplies milk look disrespectfully upon Tess and her rural work. This scene is indicative of the novel’s broader agenda of representing the realities of the rural poor, and the havoc that urbanization and industrialization were wreaking on rural communities. However, mythologically and artistically informed, the catalyst for Tess’s tragedy is her family’s economic need, and through the D’Urbeyfields’ poverty the novel again challenges any idealization of ‘pure’ Natural spaces. The Natural landscape of Blackmoor is the site of economic labor, and the land is a means of survival for the D’Urbeyfields, whose living conditions are very nearly squalid. Thus, as in the novel’s description of the May-Day Dancers, “[i]deal and real clashed” (13): while sometimes Page 22

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appealing to an ‘ideal’ and ‘pure’ nature as the basis for a moral law and for Tess’s own purity, the novel’s political engagement simultaneously rejects it as a construction that oppresses the rural poor.

Finally, Natural spaces in the novel are represented as historically cognizant entities, imbued with mythologies from the pagan and medieval pasts of Tess’s lineage. This temporal ‘state’ of Nature is separate from a touristic, artistically informed gaze such as Angel’s; it lives in country people like Tess. As Tess walks to Tabolthay’s, her feeling of unity with the landscape around her is described as “a Fetishistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting” as “women… retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at later date” (102). The novel upholds Tess’s connection with nature as her link to an ‘original’, pagan past, and the landscape of Blackmoor in particular is representative of the ancient purity of Tess’s bloodline: “having once been forest, at this shadowy time [Blackmoor] seemed to assert something of its old character… The harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had been pricked and ducked” (348). These mythologies are not uniform, but multi-layered in the landscape: just as the forest of the “Chase” is populated with Tess’s knightly ancestors, to Alec it is the biblical garden where Eve is violated. He later says to Tess “How much this seems like Paradise…You are Eve, and I am the old Other One” (349). The history of the Natural landscape is essential to Tess’s role as the tragic heroine: it ties her up in an ageold narrative that removes her control over the events of her tragedy.

Thus Nature is also represented as a historically constant entity that ties Tess to her historical roots and her tragic narrative.

To conclude, Nature in Tess of the D’Urbervilles is polysemous, and I have identified how the ‘states’ of Nature–sometimes political, sometimes mythic, sometimes pure and moral, at other times amoral and invasive–contradict each other in Hardy’s narrative. ‘Nature’ has proven to be less than pure, at least ideologically: it is the site of artistic extraction, of fetishistic gazes, of political and social conflict, and of historical and mythic intertextuality. What does this mean for Tess, as a “pure woman,” if her purity is inextricable from her connection with Nature and her role as rural maiden? Just as Nature Page 23

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in the novel is the site of multiple, conflicting discourses, so is Tess’s purity, which is at once political, social, mythic, and moral. Like Nature in the text, the ‘laws’ of Tess’s purity both celebrate and condemn her. Thus, from an analysis of Nature in the novel, we can conclude that Tess is, as Hardy’s note insists, pure, but it is an ‘impure’ purity–one that is the site of a multitude of conflicting dialogues. In his complex and conflicting descriptions of Nature, Hardy has engaged with every side of the Victorian purity discourse and brought them together in debate with each other–contradictory representations of Nature thus do not negate Tess’s titular purity so much as engage the narrative surrounding ‘purity’ itself. Hardy’s debate is responding to the developments and politics of the late Victorian era, but it is fertile soil for modern eco-critical and feminist discourse–particularly considering the resurgence of “the pure woman” as “the natural woman” in today’s commercial environment. The ‘Nature’ debate rages on, having become no less complicated than Hardy’s presentation of it in Tess D’Urbervilles.

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Works Cited Conan-Doyle, Arthur. “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”

Adventure 12: “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, https://etc.usf.edu/ lit2go/32/the-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes/363/adven ture-12-the-adventure-of-the-copper-beeches/.

Cooke, Simon. “The Mistake of Going on Holiday: Travel, Tour ism and Leisure in Early and Mid-Victorian Illustration.”

The Victorian Web, May 2019, https://victorianweb.org/ art/illustration/socialrealism/6.html.

Fincham, Tony. “Life of Thomas Hardy.” The Thomas Hardy Society: Life, 2019, https://www.hardysociety.org/life/.

LaLuna, Greg. “Nature in the Late-Victorian Imagination.”

British Literature Wiki, https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/ nature-in-the-late-victorian-imagination/.

Parker, Lynn. “‘Pure Woman’ and Tragic Heroine? Conflicting Myths in Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ .” Studies in the Novel, vol. 24, no. 3, 1992, pp. 273–281., http://www. jstor.org/stable/29532872.

Wickens, G. Glen. “‘Sermons in Stones’: The Return to Nature in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” ESC: English Studies in Can ada, vol.

14, no. 2, 1988, pp. 184–203., https://doi.org/10.1353/ esc.1988.0033.

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Nursery Rhymes for Desertification and Adults Seavey van Walsum

cruel hearts cultivate a shadeless hue when it could have been a shady green that grew! on piss-dry flesh rolling over in its grave we take the chance to misbehave (>:D) dried-up flowers skirt the abrasive sun: (the world is) burning like a cigarette and stinking like one.

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The Global Water Crisis Innaction and Inequality Ben Murphy

Across cultures and continents, humans have one thing in com-

mon: a reliance on water. Freshwater is the most important natural resource that the Earth has to offer, and the world is running out of it (Jury & Vaux, 2007). Currently, 3.6 billion people do not have reliable access to clean drinking water (World Meteorological Organization, 2021), making water-related deaths the leading global cause (Jury & Vaux, 2007). This crisis is only set to get worse as the human population continues its rise toward 10 billion. The time to act is now; some morbid projections state that by as early as 2050 the globe will reach water levels insufficient for sustaining the population (Refsgaard, 2020). The impending depletion of the world’s water poses an extinction-level threat to humanity, and I believe this issue has surfaced because of the unequivocally unfair misuse of water from nations with the resource. Consumerism, ignorance, industrialization, and general apathy have brewed this mounting water scarcity crisis and will continue to do so into the future until it boils over. If humans wish to remain on this planet, they will work in unison to preserve the elixir of life, or they will perish.

For the first time in its history, the Colorado River has been declared a point of water stress (Fountain, 2021). The once plentiful river and its surrounding basin have been run dry due to unsustainable agricultural practices and the growing surrounding population (Fountain, 2021). First-world countries cannot seem to grasp that their water sources are finite. The average North American uses 350 litres of water per day; about 23x more than the 10-20 litres a person uses per day in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Wildlife Fund & Dickie, Page 27

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2016). That total does not include the trillions of cubic metres of water that countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan use for agriculture and industry (Ritchie & Roser, 2017). The USA leads the pack on industrial water allocation (Ritchie & Roser, 2017), using enough water daily to drown Rhode Island in 2 feet of water (Heggie, 2021). This level of mass consumption, this standard of living, is set to place heavy water stress on the US by 2071 (Heggie, 2021), or 2040 (Plumer, 2019). States already facing water stress like California, Florida, and Nevada, have begun to tap into underground aquifers for all their water needs, (Nuccitelli, 2021) aquifers which are extremely hard to quantify (Felter & Robinson, 2021). This, coupled with the agriculture heavy economies of the Great Plains who have been using these groundwater sources for years (Plumer, 2019), make threat levels ambiguous and hard to motivate action against.

Evident from the years of shotty climate policy in the US (Climate Action Tracker, 2021), unless their economy or population is under direct danger, they are unlikely to act. Water policies in the United States are constantly struggling to catch up with evolving problems (Reimer, 2013), and while current infrastructure is adequate, there is no plan for when the well runs dry, and farms that feed the country stop producing food (Plumer, 2019). The US is hurdling towards an unprecedented water crisis.

A likewise combination of ignorance and consumption has put other water-plentiful countries in similar situations, yet it is not the only perpetrator of the issue. A failure to properly sanitize water haunts countries like Brazil and China, which have the world’s most, and 5th most freshwater respectively (Hutchings, 2015). China, in particular, struggles to get clean water to its citizens (Leung, 2021), despite boasting the world’s second-largest economy (ResearchFDI, 2021). Yet their economy is the problem. Rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country have not only placed China atop global greenhouse emission charts (Tollefson, 2019), but it has vandalized the clean water stores that the country once had (Wu et al., 1999).

Industrial and agricultural waste total 86% over international health recommendations in some rivers in China, while, on average, water in cities such as Beijing or Shanghai in 28% more polluted than Page 28

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recommended (Wu et al., 1999). 70% of Chinese citizens are worried about their country’s ability to provide them with safe water (Wang & Yang, 2016) and for good reason. Most water in China is full of harmful chemicals such as DDTs or HCHs and diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, dysentery, or typhoid (Wang & Yang, 2016). China simply failed to prioritize water hygiene in their quest for economic success; they were Icarus, and they are now burning in the sun.

Economic powerhouses are sowing the seeds of their destruction while some countries cannot afford to get water to their citizens. The world has plenty of water, but 97% of it is saltwater (Levy & Sidel, 2011). Only 0.01% of the Earth’s water is freshwater flowing on the surface of the planet (Levy & Sidel), meaning that water scarcity, at least historically, has been defined by the inability to capitalize on this water or extract it from other sources (Felter & Robinson, 2021). The sheer volume of water is available, it is just a matter of having the infrastructure, and the capital, to obtain and distribute it (Felter & Robinson). This is typified by the contrast of countries like Omen and the D.R. Congo. Omen has the infrastructure to desalinate ocean water (DiamHaya, 2020), and subsequently, they use over 100% of their internal water sources (Ritchie & Roser, 2017), while facing minimal water stress (Felter & Robinson, 2021).

Contrarily, the D.R. Congo has the most water in Africa and uses only 0.8% of their total water (Ritchie & Roser, 2017) because they cannot clean or distribute it properly. Consequently, they face high stress (Felter & Robinson, 2021). It is this stark divide between rich and poor that makes water scarcity the face of inequality on the planet. For as long as we’ve been counting, economic success has directly correlated with water availability (Oki & Quiocho, 2020).

Yet as outlined, even that is set to change as countries with water and economic prowess squander their liquid gold.

The act of watching these privileged countries waste 7000 litres of water on a pair of jeans (Maiti, 2021) will spark a visceral reaction from less fortunate nations. Often, they need water more than the country that is wasting it. India requires 650 billion m3 of water yearly while Canada only requires 36 billion m3. It is demonstrably unfair that Canada has and uses the water it does while India cannot, Page 29

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and this will cause tensions between the two countries as well as between two similar ones. The world is on the precipice of World War Three and this war will be fought over water (Levy & Sidel, 2011).

It may not be a violent war, but it will be a war nonetheless (Levy & Sidel, 2011). It is a simple problem of supply and demand, if countries continue to use water at their current rates, and populations continue to grow, water will become more valuable as its availability becomes lessened. Mutual dependency on rivers like the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Amazon, and Mekong already are causing political turbulence between sparring nations (Zarza, 2019). The Nile is split between 11 war-prone nations (Levy & Sidel, 2011), the Mesopotamian valley between 3 (Zarza, 2019), and the Mekong is controlled

by China but supplies much of South-East Asia with water (Leung, 2021). Surely, if fears manifest, and China clamps down on their control of this river, the less privileged nations of Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam will revolt in some sense of the word. Economic boycotts, heightened nationalism, national isolation, and overall deglobalization can be expected if water scarcity issues continue (Levy & Sidel, 2011), not to mention the death that dehydration or disease will bring to nations with low quantities or qualities of water.

Something must change. This crash course with death and war is easily foreseeable and it is up to the nations with water and influence to change their habits. The easiest, most naïve, solution is to use less water. This means changing habits on a mass scale (Zetland, 2011). Foods that use mass amounts of water such as beef, pork, and nuts (Ritchie & Roser, 2017) must be cut out of the diet of the future.

Cultural wastefulness such as fast fashion or aesthetic gardens must be eliminated (Maiti, 2021). People must be willing to change for the literal betterment of humankind, but they are not (Zetland, 2011).

Governing bodies have tried this in the past, in 2009, amid a climate change exacerbated drought, San Diego demanded their citizens cut water usage by 20% and they were met with outcry (Zetland, 2011).

In 2021, when Republican news outlets misread Biden’s Green New Deal, they were outraged at the fact of losing their meat (McCarthy, 2021). People’s natural stubbornness and unwillingness to cooperate makes, unfortunately, mitigation a less reliable option.

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This paves the way for innovation and adaptation to take the spotlight. There are numerous technological and political solutions to the water crisis. Technological advancements have allowed for higher efficiency in seawater desalinization, lowering the energy costs and hazardous brine output of the machines (Simon, 2019).

Groundwater exploitation has become more affordable and reliable in megacities, solving the problems of countries without direct access to saltwater (He et al., 2021). A further emphasis on water cleanliness and implementation of new sanitation processes in countries like India and China would be all it takes to solve many of their problems (He et al., 2021). However, this infrastructure costs money; money nations simply do not currently have (He et al., 2021). Yet, with economic support from more powerful countries, nations in dire need could perhaps get the water that is their inalienable human right (United Nations, 2006) (United Nations, 2010). This is privileged nations’ chance to right their wrongs when it comes to water, saving lives and the global economy.

The solution to the water crisis requires nations to be rational, empathic, or, best of all, both, but this appears unrealistic. I believe that, in the face of adversity, countries and the humans that run those countries will hold onto their precious water, and the money they have sacrificed water to generate. Industrialization, consumerism, greed, ignorance, and arrogance will continue to rear their ugly heads while water scarcity continues to be the face of inequality. The truth is, to wake up the privileged nations abusing their water supply, some threat greater than death needs to loom on the horizon. And that threat is a war over water and internal water scarcity. The solutions are on the table. The Earth may remain the Blue Planet long into the future, but it is up to the privileged nations of the world if humans will remain with it.

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Works Cited

Barlow, M. (2009). Blue Covenant: The global water crisis and the coming battle for the right to water. The New Press.

Climate Action Tracker. (2021). Global update: Climate target updates slow as science demands action. Climate Action Tracker. Retrieved November 25, 2021, from https:// climateactiontracker.org/publications/global-update-sep tember-2021/.

DiamHaya. (2020). Supply drinking water in the Sultanate of Oman. Oman Water & wastewater services company . Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://owwsc.nama.om/Ourrole-in-Oman/Supply-drinking-water-in-Oman.

Felter, C., & Robinson, K. (2021, April 22). Water stress: A global problem that’s getting worse. Council on Foreign Relations. Re trieved November 23, 2021, from https://www.cfr.org/ backgrounder/water-stress-global-problem-thats-getting- worse.

Fountain, H. (2021, August 16). In a first, U.S. declares shortage on Colorado River, forcing water cuts. The New York Times.

Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://www.nytimes. com/2021/08/16/climate/colorado-river-water-cuts.html.

He, C., Liu, Z., Wu, J., Pan, X., Fang, Z., Li, J., & Bryan, B. A. (2021). Future global urban water scarcity and potentia solutions. Nature Communications, 12(1). https://doi. org/10.1038/s41467-021-25026-3

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Heggie, J. (2021, May 3). Why is America running out of water?

Science. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https://www. nationalgeographic.com/science/article/partner-con tent-americas-looming-water-crisis.

Hutchings, O. (2015, September 4). Which country has the most fresh water? you may be surprised. Global Citizen. Retrieved November 25, 2021, from https://www.globalcitizen.org/ en/content/where-in-the-world-is-all-the-fresh-water/.

Jury, W. A., & Vaux, H. J. (2007). The emerging global water crisis: Managing scarcity and conflict between water users. Advances in Agronomy, 1–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0065-2113(07)95001-4.

Leung, K. C. (2021, August 11). Tackling China’s water shortage crisis: Earth.org - past: Present: Future. Earth.Org - Past | Present | Future. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https:// earth.org/tackling-chinas-water-shortage-crisis/.

Levy, B. S., & Sidel, V. W. (2011). Water rights and water fights: Preventing and resolving conflicts before they boil over.

American Journal of Public Health, 101(5), 778–780. https:// doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2010.194670.

Maiti, R. (2021, April 13). Fast fashion: Its detrimental effect on the environment. Earth.Org - Past | Present | Future. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://earth.org/fast-fash ions-detrimental-effect-on-the-environment/.

McCarthy, B. (2021, April 26). Politifact - Joe Biden Banning Burgers?

Fox News, GOP politicians fuel false narrative. Polifact.

Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://www.politifact. com/factchecks/2021/apr/26/fox-news-channel/joe- biden-banning-burgers-fox-news-gop-politicians/.

Nuccitelli, D. (2021, June 8). California, ‘America’s garden,’ is drying out “ Yale climate connections. Yale Climate Connec tions. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https://yalecli mateconnections.org/2021/06/california-americas-gar den-is-drying-out/.

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Oki, T., & Quiocho, R. E. (2020). Economically challenged and water scarce: Identification of global populations most vul nerable to water crises. International Journal of Water Resources Development, 36(2-3), 416–428. https://doi.org/10.1080/07 900627.2019.1698413 Plumer, B. (2019, April 28). How long before the Great Plains runs out of water? The Washington Post. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ wonk/wp/2013/09/12/how-long-before-the-midwest- runs-out-of-water/.

Refsgaard, J. C. (2020, May 8). Is the world going to run out of water? ScienceNordic. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://sciencenordic.com/climate-change-denmark-envi ronment/is-the-world-going-to-run-out-of-water/1674350.

Reimer, A. (2013). U.S. Water Policy: Trends and Future Directions National Agriculture and Rural Development Policy Center.

ResearchFDI. (2021, August 26). The top 20 largest economies in the world by GDP. ResearchFDI. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https://researchfdi.com/world-gdp-larg est-economy/.

Ritchie, H., & Roser, M. (2017, November 20). Water use and stress. Our World in Data. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress.

Simon, M. (2019, January 14). Desalination is booming. but what about all that toxic brine? Wired. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://www.wired.com/story/desalination-isbooming-but-what-about-all-that-toxic-brine/.

Tollefson, J. (2019, September 8). The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers. Nature news. Retrieved Novem ber 22, 2021, from https://www.nature.com/immersive/ d41586-019-02711-4/index.html.

United Nations. (2006). Water: a shared responsibility; the United Nations world water development report 2, executive summary. UNESDOC Digital Library . Retrieved Novem ber 25, 2021, from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ ark:/48223/pf0000144409.

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United Nations. (2010). HRW, decade, Water For Life, 2015, UN-Water, United Nations, MDG, water, sanitation, financing, gender, IWRM, human right, transboundary, cities, quality, food security, general comment, BKM, Albuquerque. United Nations. Retrieved November 25, 2021, from https://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/human_ right_to_water.shtml.

Wang, Q., & Yang, Z. (2016). Industrial Water Pollution, water environment treatment, and health risks in China. En vironmental Pollution, 218, 358–365. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.envpol.2016.07.011 World Meteorological Organization. (2021, October 11). Wake up to the looming water crisis, report warns. World Meteorological Organization. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https:// public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wake-looming- water-crisis-report-warns.

World Wildlife Fund. (2016). Rich Countries, poor water - WWF. World Wildlife Fund. Retrieved November 25, 2021, from http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/richcountriespoorwa ter.pdf.

Wu, C., Maurer, C., Wang, Y., Xue, S., & Davis, D. L. (1999). Water pollution and human health in China. Environmental Health Perspectives, 107(4), 251–256. https://doi. org/10.1289/ehp.99107251 Zarza, L. F. (2019, January 10). A war over water, a not so distant dystopian future. Smart Water Magazine. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://smartwatermagazine.com/blogs/ laura-f-zarza/war-over-water-not-distant-dystopian-future.

Zetland, D. (2011). The end of abundance: Economic solutions to water scarcity. Aguanomics Press.

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Taking Up the Trash An Ecopoetics of Waste Wenying Wu

That’s one small step into the dumpster, one giant leap for eco-

critic-kind. While ecopoetics loves a pristine landscape, the prioritization of the unpolluted sites where one finds Nature the Sublime risks marginalizing other modes of eco-critical attention—modes crucial to environmentalist work. In “The Problem with Wilderness,” William Cronon argues that the ideal of untouched wilderness neglects “any environmental problems whose victims are mainly people, for such problems usually surface in landscapes that […] are no longer wild” (20). The problems of “environmental justice,” (20) whose subjects are frequently “less than natural,” (20) become consequently excluded from environmental activism (20).

The aesthetic privileging of the wilderness also prioritizes the clean, a fact made apparent by any anti-littering rhetoric that stresses the eyesore created by park trash.

To subvert the clean’s unrealistic beauty standard, I propose a shifting of eco-critical attention to the aesthetics and ethics of cleanliness’ anathema: waste. My definition of waste is inclusive of the material items that one would call garbage, trash, rubbish, or shit—bodily waste, but in the more inflammatory term that contemporary writers on the subject prefer “for political as well as rhetorical reasons” (Phillips 173)—which are all the corporeal things that subjects expel to make themselves clean. Waste, therefore, encompasses all manner of pollution including greenhouse gases, toxic runoff, and the other by-products of various post-industrial lifestyles. Of course, waste poetics should not ignore pollution’s detrimental environmental effects. In this essay, I will outline a waste Page 36

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poetics, applicable to both the eco-critical reading and writing of poetic texts, that calls for contemplation of the waste’s nuanced aesthetic potential and ethical complications. To enrich a practical understanding of the methodology, I will then read four poems from the perspective of waste poetics.

Garbage poetry, not just in the figurative sense, is nothing new. In the American tradition, the landfill is “where the poet can enact a fantasy of regeneration […] a hope that nature has the power to redeem even our grossest examples of wastefulness” (Anderson 54). This type of garbage poem, in which the decomposition process is a fable for the redemptive capacity of nature, evades deeper examination of the relationship between the nonhuman and waste. We cannot rely on natural decomposition processes; the scale of the millennia needed to decay our most egregious ejections, such as nuclear waste, only amplifies today’s waste management problems. Moreover, nature, as the discursive entity constructed in opposition to the human, is complicit in wastefulness. In Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek argues against a utopian idea of recycling, since “in nature itself, there is no circle of total recycling, there is un-usable waste” (35). After all, waste includes not only the human-produced dumpster artifacts of American garbage poems but also, among others, piles of animal shit; frozen, anthrax-ridden reindeer carcasses; and the remnants of species wiped out by catastrophic extinction events. Out of those nonhuman waste categories, only some are ever re-used in “natural” cycles. Thus, waste connects us with the nonhuman, not from aesthetic pleasure or the sentiment of belonging, but from the incontrovertible fact that the world, human and nonhuman, produces a ton of shit. Ecological solutions cannot depend on a utopian view of letting nature run its course, since it is not only our waste that can cause problems.

If waste-production links the human and nonhuman spheres, what does this tell us about the spaces and selves that we attempt to keep free from waste? I suggest two intersecting approaches to contemplating the dynamic between waste and its various sources: to question productive society’s discourses of waste obsolescence and to confront our personal and societal abjection of Page 37

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wasteful spaces and bodies.

The first approach stresses that waste is a material reality that exists beyond the label of obsolescence—a label which suggests both that unusable items are of no importance and that we can default to disposal to manage such items. Recycling, with its “out of sight, out of mind” attitude, counts as disposal. Disposal, which displaces waste away from its producing body, is essential to modern political authorities; the state augments both its image and its power through “naturalizing the concealment of systems of waste processing” (Morrison 79). According to Žižek, when we are “bombarded from all sides with injunctions to recycle personal waste,” the responsibility for mismanagement becomes attributed to the individual rather than “the entire organization of the economy” (22). Current trash economics, which is predicated on the removal of waste from clean spaces, has well-documented ecological consequences, including the build-up of garbage in the Global South from countries like Canada, and the sanitation problems of informal settlements like slums. Waste poetics should interrogate the physical and ideological disposal of non-productive material reality in order to challenge orthodox waste management practices that serve state legitimacy and fail to evade ecological troubles of waste build-up. Human shit is particularly generative in this respect; in “Excremental Ecocriticism and the Global Sanitation Crisis,” Dana Phillips uncovers the subversive potential of shit in “its refusal […] to behave as a good object should, and its stunning performance of its agency” (184). A lot of shit is useless, but a lack of reusability does not mean we erase its physical and metaphorical presence.

The second approach similarly troubles the conception of waste as mere obsolescence, but from a personal and aesthetic lens.

In psychoanalysis, abjection of waste is fundamental to identity formation: “excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without” (Kristeva 71). Abjection is a repugnance that “turns [the self] away from defilement, sewage, and muck” in order to stabilize the ego from the uncategorizable (Kristeva 2). To the interest of waste poetics, abjection additionally pertains to human relationality to the Page 38

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nonhuman. The abject “confronts us […] with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal,” and, consequentially, historical societies have disassociated parts of their culture from “the threatening world of animals” through abjection (Kristeva 12).

Since the abject is tied with filth, our distinction from the nonhuman relies on imagining ourselves as separate from our own shit.

Julia Kristeva presents the inspirational potential of meditating on the abject in its production of jouissance, in which “the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the other” and “finds […] a forfeited existence.” While the study of the abject troubles the borders of identity, the materiality of filth prevents the breakdown or “foundering” of the self, since the abject is still viscerally repugnant (Kristeva 9). Waste is a disgusting yet inescapable aspect of living, so confronting its repugnance is both of aesthetic and ethical importance. How do we live with our waste, not hidden away, but as integral to who we are?

Attention to the abject not only engenders more mutable distinctions between the human and nonhuman but also invites examination of the social implications of waste metaphors as applied to marginal subjects. Christopher Schmidt’s The Poetics of Waste argues that condemnation of waste frequently comes with “embedded ideological biases” against marginalized groups, “who were in turn subject to censure and abjection from the public sphere” (157).

Who is filth? Who is shit? Waste discourses can construct exclusions from the clean society, coinciding with the assessment of certain groups as deserving of waste’s toxicity; urban sanitation crises, for example, cannot easily dissociate from the unhygienic reality of slum shit management (Phillips 179). We cannot dismiss filth and claim that everyone is clean and thus socially valid, because cleanliness is a material privilege inaccessible to many. Waste poetics can attend to socially abject bodies by exploring waste’s essentiality and ubiquity rather than by assimilating marginalized bodies into a pure whole.

Everyone makes waste, therefore the sufferance of waste’s consequences, whether in the form of ecological crises or social abjection, is a responsibility of a global scale. Waste poetics presents Page 39

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alternatives to clean selves and spaces that allow for exploration of our connectedness to the nonhuman, our systemic ecological issues prefigured by our view of waste, and our alienation from parts of our self and of our society. Our conception of a well-ordered state is one where waste is hidden from view, so a serious contemplation of our filth as truly our own can disturb the status quo. To elucidate the practical application of waste poetics, I will briefly consider the wasted possibilities, so to speak, of four poems, the latter three of which are Canadian: Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Peter Blue Cloud, or Aroniawenrate’s “For a Dog-Killed Doe”; Billy-Ray Belcourt’s “The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine Is Weesageechak”; and Rachel Rose’s “Raccoons in the Garbage.”

Tennyson’s In Memoriam illustrates waste poetics’ theme of nonhuman wastefulness in its reflection on “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (Canto LVI 15). Initially, Tennyson examines the waste created by his personification of nature on an individual level, claiming, “So careful of the type [Nature] seems, / So careless of the single life” (LV 7-8). Nature, an entity conceived of on the scale of geological eras, does not attend with care to the fate of “the single life.” Tennyson’s speaker further describes “finding that of fifty seeds / [Nature] often brings but one to bear” (LV 11-12), underlining the small proportion of life material that actually enters maturation. Tennyson’s use of personification, through ascribing nature the agency to “bring but one to bear” and assigning nature anthropomorphic traits of care and carelessness, invites a comparison between the practices of his Nature and the processes by which human societal and biological bodies make waste. In Memoriam is salient to waste poetics in its complication of utopian views of nature’s reuse cycles. Additionally, the nonhuman world’s inefficiency in the generation of life disrupts any idealization of the productive society as based on a natural model of efficient total reuse. Attention to Tennyson’s Nature indicates that proper, ecologically responsible waste management cannot separate wastefulness from the nonhuman world.

Tennyson’s Canto LV assessment of nature retains a degree of optimism since the failure of some seeds can still result in the Page 40

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preservation of “the type,” the species, or group. However, Tennyson proceeds to refute even that consolation, ventriloquizing his Nature with the cry, “A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go” (LVI 3-4). These lines invoke the various extinctions that compose the record of species on Earth. Nature’s capacity for waste, or to lay waste, manifests on a massive scope, obliterating even “the type.” Furthermore, the processes by which “a thousand types are gone” also produce coal, petroleum, and imprints of exoskeletons in layers of the Earth, materials that have no apparent natural usage but are instrumentalized by humans. Urban animal scavengers are not the only organisms who root through another’s trash; our fossil fuel pollution comes from the particularly human use of nature’s species dumpster.

In “For a Dog-Killed Doe,” the discourses of waste obsolescence and disposal converge on the human exercise of agency over a nonhuman object—the cadaver of a pregnant doe. After finding the corpse, the speaker’s neighbour intends to “take her body outside the fence / and dump her in a gully” (Blue Cloud 7-8) a course of action accompanied by his claim that “she’s [the doe] no more good” (9). A doe body is not necessarily an object of waste; although “the dog fangs [that] tore her body apart” (2) leave her behind, animal carcasses in general have the potential for reintegration into life cycles through consumption. Nevertheless, the treatment of the body by the neighbour methodologically and discursively renders the doe a waste object. The neighbour’s intended action has two parts: the removal of the body out of the circumscribed private or domesticated territory inside the fence and the disposal—specifically the dumping—of the body into the uninhabited space of “a gully.” Furthermore, this treatment of the body is seemingly rationalized by the neighbour’s assessment of the doe as somehow obsolete, “no more good”—perhaps for consumption of her flesh or usage of her skin, or perhaps simply for the continuation of deer bloodlines. The speaker resists this narrative, insisting that the doe is “still alright” (9) and asserting a value for the deer body that extends beyond the binary of productive or obsolete.

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trash, garbage, and people-shit—but, in “For a Dog-Killed Doe,” the conceptualization of waste embedded in disposal practices still pervades the treatment and understanding of nonhuman materiality.

The encounter of the human and nonhuman in waste space also occurs in “Raccoons in Garbage,” which, following its title, describes raccoons “attacking the green-black sacks [of the speaker’s garbage]”(Rose 7) in order to scavenge. This “attack” leads to an exposure of the human-produced waste that a clean society conceals; “out came” bodily waste material, like “the small stained napkins / used to catch [the speaker’s] monthly blood” (9-10), and other lifestyle by-products, such as “eggshells in a small stack, / hollow monument to Wednesday’s omelette” (14-16). The raccoons uncover from a previously waste-free, or waste-hidden, world the garbage that marks the vicissitudes of the speaker’s material existence. The “small stained napkins” directly reveal the speaker’s abjected menstrual bleeding, while the description of the eggshells as a “hollow monument” indicates waste’s ability to implicitly record the specifics of quotidian life. The poem’s raccoons are independent agents in their ability to engage with human garbage: “the stooges snickered / […] as they sorted / the offal from the meal” (17-19). Rose anthropomorphizes the raccoons through the appellation of “stooges,” which dramatizes the agency that nonhuman life is capable of exerting in the space of waste.

Trash changes meaning in different hands, so, for the raccoons, the detritus of the speaker’s life can be “the offal” but also “the meal.”

What the speaker discards and conceals, the raccoons expose and make do with. Thus, Rose’s poem reflects the far-reaching ethical implications of human waste production, which can transform both human and nonhuman existences.

Apart from waste’s ethics, Rose’s poem also contains something like an aesthetic contemplation of the abject, of Kristeva’s “forfeited existence” found in the other. The speaker, observing the raccoons, becomes “so curious I finally abandoned my body, all but the observant eye” (21-22), briefly recognizing a “scent, / whatever it was, / being or not-being” (23-25) before the raccoons—or that Page 42

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scent?—slips away. The trash is a site to discover, if only for a moment, some form of “being or not-being” that evades the customary mind. The “observant eye” finds, in the image of raccoons rummaging through the abject, waste’s forfeited world.

The last poem, “The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine Is Weesageechak,” invokes the imagery of abject bodily waste through exploration of the marginal, gender-nonconforming bodily experience of the speaker. Sometimes, the speaker explains: gender is a magic trick i forgot how to perform and my groin floods and floods trying to cleanse itself like the women and i too become toxic for men who have built cages out of broken boys.

(Belcourt 9-12) The abject imagery of the speaker’s groin flooding with bodily discharge creates affinity for the speaker with the “ceremonies […] to let the body cleanse itself ” (8) available to Cree women. Additionally, this imagery enters the speaker’s body into the discourse of waste, since the speaker becomes “toxic for men who have built cages out of broken boys”—which may gesture metaphorically towards the speaker’s gender nonconformity disturbing the “cages” of normative masculinity. The speaker’s perception of the filth of waste is optimistic and generative; the speaker has “managed to peace together a sweat lodge out of mud and fish and / bacteria” (16-17), negating the obsolescence and erasure of the dirty and bacterial and reconfiguring abjected materiality into the “sweat lodge”—a metaphor of physical structure and meeting place that implicates both personal identity and community connection. As Belcourt demonstrates, waste poetics can excavate marginalized experiences and bodies through the aesthetics of the abject.

To conclude, let us return to “For a Dog-Killed Doe” and the novel possibilities of confronting the repugnant. After affirming the worth of the doe’s body to the neighbour, the speaker takes stewardship of the body and performs an action that one might consider strange or even repulsive: Page 43

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When I cut Her belly open, that which was dead tumbled out as if to mimic birth. […]

I sit eating the flesh of her young taking the strength of her never-to-be motherhood.

(Blue Cloud 14-21) The abject, in the form of the fetal deer corpse, troubles the lifedeath distinction through a facsimile of life, and the speaker appropriates the fetus which “mimic[ked] birth” by “eating the flesh of [the doe’s] young” and receiving the strength of the doe’s “neverto-be / motherhood.” Heavily pregnant and torn apart, the dogkilled doe is, by many definitions, “no more good.” Nonetheless, the speaker resists her obsolescence, going as far as to consume the fetus. This unconventional treatment of something the neighbour viewed as disposable waste may be sickening to some. However, that action presents exactly the type of attitude waste poetics needs.

On a personal and systemic level, many prospective solutions for sustainable waste management will feel profoundly alienating and disgusting. Something like a broad, institutional replacement of single-use plastics packaging in food products would inevitably result in a closer human relationship to the filth and fluids of groceries, particularly for many urban dwellers used to plastic-wrapped meat. That example is only one of the more easily imaginable courses of action; other possibilities may require an even greater visibility or reintegration of disposed waste into our lives and spaces. Through a sustained regard for the ubiquity of waste between the human and nonhuman, the abject aesthetic potential of waste, and ideological consequences of privileging the clean and wasteless, waste poetics can inaugurate rich, environmentally conscious reimaginations of the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of our reality: life in a garbage world.

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Works Cited Anderson, Christopher Todd. “Sacred Waste: Ecology, Spirit, and the American Garbage Poem.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 17, no. 1, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 35–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/ isp155.

Belcourt, Billy-Ray. “The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine Is Weesageechak.” This Wound is a World, Frontenac House Poetry, 2017, pp. 9.

Blue Cloud, Peter (Aroniawenrate). “For a Dog-Killed Doe.” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009, pp. 236.

Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History, vol.

1, no. 1, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 7–28, https:// doi.org/10.2307/3985059.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982.

Morrison, Susan Signe. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Rose, Rachel. “Raccoons in Garbage.” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009, pp. 444.

Schmidt, Christopher. The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Edward Moxon, 1850. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010.

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History, Abridged

Modernity and the Romantic Mode of Poetics Palvasha Khan

Historical understanding supposes a homogenous order of time,

diachronically fashioning the past, present, and future into a single, smooth, continuous band. Through this scheme, antecedents fluidly transmit into the future as the guiding base of history. Using historian Reinhart Koselleck’s semantics on historical time, this paper argues that modernity, marked by the French Revolution, is a heterogeneous time in which the past’s ‘space of experience’ and the future’s ‘horizon of expectation,’ are sundered. Analyzing John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and John Clare’s “Helpstone” against Koselleck’s theoretical framework, this paper attempts to situate Romanticism as a movement out of the French Revolution, encrypting the distinctively modern experience of temporality and space into a new mode of poetics.

In the longue durée of history, the French Revolution represents a rupture—a new temporal order configured as a right-angled chasm between the past and future. European historicity, until France’s revolution, had long been conceived within the framework of Judeo-Christian prospectivism (Abrams, 59). Under the symmetrical scheme of Biblical teleology, heaven and earth would be succeeded by a “new heaven and new earth,” just as human bodies would return “earth to earth, ashes and ashes, dust to dust” into eternal life. For the first time, however, the French Revolution birthed a temporality unmoored entirely from chiliastic tradition.

The trial and execution of Louis XVI, Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and the declaration of the French Republic could have been a three-part narrative of no novelty; indeed, the cycle of regicide, Page 46

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interregnum, and restorations is practically monarchal inheritance.

What differed was the depth and dispersal of France’s revolutionary moment. There may have been a precedent for regicide; there had never been a precedent for upheaving an entire social order. Lynn Hunt, in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution notes that “by the end of the decade of the revolution, French people (and Westerners more generally) had learned a new political repertoire: ideology appeared as a concept, and competing ideologies challenged the traditional European cosmology of order and harmony” (Hunt, 27). The revolutionaries discovered, abruptly, the shakiness of authoritative foundations legitimated by tradition. The newly-acquired utopian vocabulary left nothing unexamined: established religion, bourgeois hegemony, the bases of social relations—the ideology of revolution, itself revolutionary, was that social and moral positions were liquid. Royal graves could be desecrated, and church bells silenced; the sacrilege merely resettled material conditions to get at the dogmatic structure underneath (Fritzsche, 18). In this achingly modern emplotment, the past no longer lived embryonically in the future. Tellingly, French revolutionaries chose to rework the calendar system, the year 1792, the first year of the French First Republic, now L’an I. A tomb of rejected ideals, the past was sealed off, inaccessible even through calendar calibration, split and discarded from the temporal span (Fritzsche, 19). To borrow Peter Fritzsche’s pithy observation, from L’an I, the past turned remote and the future inconceivable. In the period following the Revolution, modern man has nowhere to be but “stranded in the present” (Fritzshe, 10).

Doubling as a psychic revolution, the French Revolution upended time itself. Cicero’s idiom Historia magister vitae had provided the guiding vision for both Biblical and secular histories alike— that history, as the teacher of life, directs towards praxis (Koselleck, 28). The annals of history must form a unitary whole, then, to impart their lessons; the future rests on a smooth continuum of structural repeatability. At the turn of the eighteenth century, however, history flared. A deluge of iterations of the new accelerated socio-cultural change at an unprecedented rate; acceleration itself Page 47

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was accelerated instantaneously (Sachs, 105). Apparently, the future came from behind. The violence of outpour lent this new temporality a stunning sense of contemporality; Wordsworth would declare, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, that “a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a stage of almost violent torpor” (Sachs, 166). A blunted power to trace historical precedent in a fast-approaching future engenders broadly a feeling of estrangement from time. Reinhart Koselleck’s tidy formulation diagnoses the modern malaise: space of experience and the horizon of expectation are two temporal modes cleaved apart within modernity’s totalizing scheme (Koselleck, 11). Experience, that teaching of the magister vitae, is untethered entirely from the subjunctive future when it fails to keep abreast an exponentially transforming actuality. The future once recognized in the past cannot translate across time and space. The past’s claim is forever belated. The future once envisioned, becomes, paradoxically, a former future. As history is left to be contemplated from the standpoint of epistemological uncertainty, the single band of time splinters into a kaleidoscope of conflicting pluralities.

In a letter to art historian Sulpiz Boisserée in 1809, Dorothea von Schlegel notes that “time has now become so fluidly rapid” that “it is not possible to keep; between one mail day and the other lies an entire historical epoch” (Fritsche, 93). For comfort, Schlegel details, she chose to contemplate on the ruins of the Rhine Valley. It is a curious reordering, to find greater understanding in the ruins of antiquity than in yesterday’s past. The Romantics’ cult of ruins is a grasp at restoring unity via the paradigm of decline.

Decline signals a certain temporal order— a terminus, closing the possibilities of an open future (Sachs, 124). The life cycles of empires past projects a classical standard onto new statehoods. The translatio imperii of a known past onto an unkown future makes it, in effect, potentially knowable (Sachs, 126). Against heterochrony, decay is indiscriminate and subsuming. It is, perversely, then, the very comfort Schlegel describes it as.

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Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is, in the spirit of classicism, both a mediation and an aesthetic ravishment. Keats opens with an address to the urn itself, doubling his ekphrasis as a kind of epistolary narrative. The urn is addressed as an “unravished bride of quietness” and a “foster-child of silence and slow time” —-these are, notably, contractual rather than biological relations, denoting silence as a choice rather than as inheritance (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 1-2). Keats sets his task, then, to tease out answers.

The first stanza progresses into breathless inquiry as if to lay way for a pivotal discovery. Until then, the “mad pursuit” depicted on the urn’s marble surface is Keats’ own mad pursuit (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 9). The second stanza represents a major reversal: the poet no longer stands outside the urn as a spectator, but absorbs the urn into his own interiority. In the lines “Ye soft pipes, play on/ Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d/Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone,” the poet enfolds the carving of pipes into his rapture; the pipes are playing, but only below the threshold of sensual perception (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 12-14). Their tune does not reach the ear but the poet’s spirit in timeless felicity. The repeated exclamations of “happy” in both “happy, happy boughs!” and “More happy love! More happy, happy love!” in the fourth stanza elicits the sensation of a drunken reverie (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 21-25). The poet is now fully within a stupor. The crescendo of “happy” recapitulates the movement of the preceding three stanzas; the rhythm of the address has hastened such that the thread of his previous lament of the “Bold Lover” who “never, never, canst thou kiss”—-a love, in other words, that is never sated nor declines—has dissipated completely (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 17). The self-immersion is complete. Yet, the urn’s subsummation into poetic interiority is in itself a kind of violence. In his relentless engagement with the urn—with his speculations abound, he weaves the urn into an unceasing attempt articulate its silence. Yet, the urn is pungent with its own silent eloquence. It is, to reiterate, “still an unravish’d bride of quietness” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 1). “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a catalogue of narrative endeavor fragmented by unarticulated space. The sequence of stanzas accelerates towards what Page 49

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Keats’ poet anticipated to be a major discovery, but ultimately, he fails to give voice to the urn. It is an acceleration towards no established goal. By the final two stanzas, the urn is referred to as “O mysterious priest” and “O Attic shape,” the “O” a cipher, silent and without content (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 32-40).

Essentially, Keats’ poet engages by ravishing. In the desperation to wring any meaning from the urn, he depletes it entirely; it becomes a ruin through verse. The Venetian ruins, imbued with the residual glories of the Roman Empire, had caught Byron and Shelley’s poetic eye for reinstating the traditional temporal order of rise, growth, and fall. Ruins are physical manifestations of time itself. Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” then, can be understood as an attempt to reinstate the traditional temporal order at the level of self. Keats’ imaginative engagement with the urn just as soon ends as it starts. The urn is mute; it refuses to allow itself to be projected into the present as a denotation of time’s continuum. Significantly, however, Keats’ urn is not in ruins. It is, however, by virtue of its Hellenic origin, in the same realm of classical ruins through the pressing awareness of its antiquity. The appellation “Cool Pastoral!,” referring to the pastoral figures carved in its marble, signals unequivocally its ceramic inertness (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 44).

Nevertheless, the urn engenders a sense equivocal Being. “Cool Pastoral” suggests the heat of human activity cast in the death mask of marble. “Cool Pastoral” is a paradoxical totality of experience, as is the urn’s historical chronology as a piece of antiquity fully preserved in the modern world. Keats’ urn emanates a weak messianic power of eternality; it will survive the old age that “shall this generation waste.” The mystical transcendence of its temporality reestablishes a notion of time in continuum. The urn’s timelessness owes to the very fact of its timeliness, that it is tethered to the history to which it owes its very existence.

To be ‘stranded in the present,’ Peter Fritzsche notes, was not only a temporal malaise, but a spatial malaise. Extinguished tradition during the French Revolution was joined by, it is signficiant to note, mass dislocation. For the wartime causes of the French Republic, there was a leveé-en-masse of millions of soldiers Page 50

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(Fritzsche, 17). Mass mobilization, of course, was not solely contained to France; France’s invasions of central and western Europe provoked British, Prussian, Spanish, and Austrian armies alike.

From 1789 to 1815, George Steiner remarked, “wherever ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge, they saw bayonets passing” (as qtd. in Fritzsche, 17). Against dislocation from space and dislocation from irreversible, unrepeatable time, nostalgic manifestations became a part of a shared historical consciousness.

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym traced the origin of nostalgia as specifically a soldier’s affliction, diagnosed in 1688 by Swiss army doctor Johannes Hofer (Boym, 217). Return to the motherland was his recommended remedy. Modernity’s cleaved time, however, posed a complication for the returning soldiers of the revolutionary moment: what does it mean to return to a land that has been inalterably transformed by the irreversible march of time? What does it mean when the literal space of experience no longer matches the horizon of expectation? “What is true of all exile,” Edward Said writes in his “Reflections on Exile,” “is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss in inherent in the very existence of both” (Said, 190). Of the Romantic poets, John Clare and his “Helpstone” is the embodiment of this loss; Clare is foremost a poet of exile.

“Helpstone” is Clare’s impulse towards recollection. The poem is a textual restoration of Clare’s childhood memories in his native Helpston, written at the time of the Enclosures Act. It opens with a stanza introducing “Hail, humble Helpstone” and the poet-peasant persona himself (“Helpstone, 1). Both are unknown —as Helpstone “lifts its lowly head,” the poet mirrors the “low genius” that tries “Above the vulgar and vain to rise” (“Helpstone,” 2-10).

The impression of an unrecognized land and its unrecognized poet establishes a relation of land and class that roots the labouring class’ identity in the particularity of their locality. Clare’s equation of the land and its people tinges his pictorial imagery with anthropocentrism; he writes, in one vignette, “To see the woodman’s cruel axe employed/A tree beheaded or a bush destroyed,” depicting the destruction of nature as a kind of forced removal, like a beheading Page 51

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(“Helpstone,” 86-7). Just as parishioners are evicted from Helpstone, so too are its plants. Within Clare’s literary scheme, this shared sense of dispossession parallels the loss of nature, representing both the loss of community and individual identity. Clare’s painterly eye doubles as a documentarian’s eye; in his pictorial representation of Helpstone’s idyllic past, the understanding that “those scenes exist no more” pushes Clare to use the written word to memorialize a past erased (“Helpstone,” 115). In doing so, the scenes of Helpstone are obscure no longer—dislocated from his home, Clare instead lays claim to the poem as the space in which the idyllic scenes of his past can continue to exist. Here, near the finish of the third stanza, Clare’s tone shifts from an elegy to the effervescence of his childhood to a lament of the ecological collapse rendered by enclosures.

Moving across the partition of time by pronouncing that “those scenes” of the past “exist no more,” Clare enters the present by illustrating images of Helpstone’s past landscapes, only to declare them banished “In a dark corner of obscurity” (“Helpstone,” 120).

From this pictorial j’accuse, Clare addresses the enclosures directly for the first time, condemning the “Accursed wealth, o’erbounding human laws/Of every evil thou remainst the cause” (“Helpstone,” 127-8). In using “thou,” Clare is also addressing the forces responsible for the enclosures and pits them against Helpstone’s collective “our.” In the last stanza, Clare’s gaze turns back to Helpstone as the tether of his nostalgia; his final appeal to revisit the Eden of his youth is simultaneously the existential recognition of his estrangement from the time and place now irreconcilable with its modern form.

Clare’s poetic mode is both that of a documentarian attempting to safeguard his memories in a reality that can no longer sustain them, and a craftsman, attempting to rework the debris of his displacement into a structure. Clare’s constructivist approach— his desire to construct an identity from his sense of displacement— is a distinct product of his working-class identity. There is no Keatsian languidity to be found here; Clare’s poetics are flavoured with an urgency to anchor his space of experience against a quickly vanishing actuality. Clare cannot begin to clarify his horizon of Page 52

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expectation because his present has already accelerated through unprecedented changes. Stranded in a hostile present, Clare safeguards his selfhood by stressing the fixity of his experience: he was once here. His memories prove it.

Ultimately, the inability to reconcile the space of experience and horizon of expectation is a particularly modern brand of lethality. In the age of Anthropocene, it becomes lethal yet. For physical and psychological displacement, spatially and temporally, life in the Anthropocene adds an ecocritical dimension. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” articulates, much in the tradition of Koselleck, the apprehension of disconnect defining the contemporary age: the continuity of human experience against a backdrop of past, present, and future is being infringed upon. Where the French Revolution ushered a modernity increasingly accelerating away from its past, the ecological crisis has ushered a hyper-modernity in which the future, rather, increasingly accelerates away. Hyper-globalization has, jointly, undermined the sense of place. Annihilating space by time, capitalism, forever revolutionizing itself, creates and discards spaces, creating what Rem Koolhaas terms “junkspaces” (Morton, 85). Today, with a severed past and departing future, humanity finds itself in a perpetual present—in a directionless acceleration of processes with no destination. And yet, illustrated by affective underpinnings of Romantic poetics, the impetus to constitute oneself in space and time as self-definition centres in the human experience. In times of ecological crisis, this is nevertheless a consolation.

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Works Cited Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, Norton & Company Inc., 1971.

Boym, Svetlana. The Svetlana Boym Reader, edited by Cristina Vatulescu et al., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.”

Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222, https:// doi.org/10.1086/596640. Accessed 15 Apr. 2022.

Clare, John. “Helpstone.” I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Fritzsche, Peter. Stranded in the Past: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History, Harvard University Press, 2004.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Eve of St. Agnes: And Other Poems with Biographical Sketch, Houghlin Mifflin, 1915.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Future Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, 1985.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Harvard University Press, 2007.

Sachs, Jonathan. The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Granta Publications, 2002.

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Rhizomatic Landscape and Memory in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la Luz Isidora Cortes-Monroy Gazitua

Exiled from Chile in 1973, Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries have been dedicated to denouncing the human rights abuses committed under the Pinochet regime and the amnesty that followed. In line with these professional interests, his recent trilogy explores the vestiges of the dictatorship through the lens of the Chilean landscape, specifically the Atacama Desert, the Pacific Ocean, and the Andes mountains. The following paper will be concerned with the first of the three documentaries, Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light), which focuses on the desert.

Located in the North of the country, along the frontiers with Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, this borderland landscape is one of crossings and encounters. In addition to its geopolitical importance, it has also been an important historical site in the production of nationhood. Among the events that have given it a meaningful place in our national memory, and which will be touched on in this paper, are the Saltpetre Boom (1862-1930), which saw the birth of Chile’s labour and socialist movements, and the Pinochet regime (1973-1991), which utilized the desert as a place to torture and discard political dissidents. In addition to these events, we must remember the nomadic indigenous families that for centuries had made a home out of the desert. These days, the desert continues to be a site from which resources can be extracted, primarily lithium.

In addition, it has become an international centre for astronomers, where some of the most powerful telescopes can be found.

As can be seen in this unforgivingly short summary of its role within the nation, a variety of people have crossed paths in the Page 55

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Atacama. The desert portrayed in Guzmán’s documentary reflects this space of encounters, not only in its reference to its history, but in the way these pasts are made to interact and are connected.

An example of this occurrence is the use of Chacabuco in the documentary, one of the Pinochet regime’s largest concentration camps. While showing his audience the first shots of the camp, the narrator explains that “like the geological layers, there are layers of miners and indigenous peoples; layers which the never-ending wind shifts.They were nomadic families” (Guzmán, 00:27:50)1.

It is never specified, however, who those “nomadic families” are, whether they are indigenous families or the families of the miners.

Guzmán in this way syntactically blends both historical groups of people into a shared history of nomadism.

Then, after a two-minute sequence of close-ups of the abandoned town, where all that is heard are the hanging spoons swaying in that same wind that touches both the indigenous’ and the miners’ past, the viewer is given a few shots of the giant telescopes nearby. These shots last a minute, showing the complex mechanisms of the apparatuses, and then end with a silhouette looking into a telescope.

The narration then moves back to an aerial shot of Chacabuco where Guzmán explains that, not too far from these telescopes, “in the middle of this immense emptiness…the ruins of the camp are actually the ruins of a mine” (00:32:05)2. Within this four-minute sequence, Guzmán connects the histories of the indigenous, the miners, the astronomers and the disappeared, bringing to light the cyclical violence that plagues Chacabuco, which in turn acts as a synecdoche for a wider violence that inhabits and repeats itself in the Atacama Desert. Even in the case of the astronomers, who are not directly inflicting violence on the region, they nonetheless represent the violence stemming from the State’s abandonment.

As one of the disappeared’s wives lament, there are telescopes powerful enough to detect stars that are lightyears away, yet there is 1 All translations are mine. The original Spanish version is: “[c]omo las capas geológicas, hay capas de mineros y de indígenas que mueve el viento que no termina nunca. Eran familias errantes” 2 “en medio de este inmenso vacío… las ruinas del campo son de verdad las ruinas de una mina” (Guzmán, 00:32:05).

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no technological equivalent to find the bones of her missing husband.

Returning to the desert as a space of encounter, it becomes clear that time in this space is not linear; much like the way these landscapes refuse to be contained within strict cartographic boundaries, time refuses to be mapped in a way that neatly categorizes eras as either past, present, or future. It is not like the temporality we see in the capital city shown in the trilogy’s third film, which is violently linear in its push towards an elusive “progress.” Instead, these temporalities in the desert coexist in a way that blurs any boundaries between them, making them flow into each other like the “never-ending wind” that moves between the desert’s “layers.”

A Rhizomatic Landscape It is at this point that I would argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic principles of connection and heterogeneity best illustrate these historical and locational relationships. “Any point of a rhizome” they argue, “can be connected to anything other, and must be” (7).

Early in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe rhizomatic structures as something made up of multiplicity, a connection of different elements without one unifying source that controls this connection (7). They clarify this by comparing two images: the first, a plant, which although rhizomorphic in structure, is essentially unified by one core element, producing what Deleuze and Guattari term as an “arborescent” structure; the second, by contrast, a group of rats which are connected in their multiplicity rather than by one authoritative figure, and therefore rhizomatic.

The temporality of the city depicted in the third documentary is one that could be seen as arborescent. This is not only because the present and future are shaped by visions of progress but also because remembrances of the past are shaped to fit into this narrative of progress. This means aggrandizing certain events and omitting others, such as the violent forgetting that is the abandonment of the disappeared’s bodies.

The desert in Guzmán’s documentary is therefore what the Page 57

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ecocritic Ramón Grosfoguel would describe as a subaltern space (“un espacio subalterno”, 45). It is a landscape that escapes the arborescent structures of the governing urban centre, whereby memories of the past are not subjugated to an idea of future progress.

There are no temporal hierarchies, rather they exist on the same plane of consistency. The indigenous nomads, the saltpetre miners, the disappeared and their wives, the astronomers, all interacting in the same space and becoming interwoven so that the temporal boundaries between them are unclear.

Deserts as Metaphors However, Guzmán’s use of the Atacama Desert is not free of its own ethical problems.

Guzmán’s portrayal of the desert is poetic at best, perhaps more accurately described as utopic. While his documentary encourages Chilean viewers to engage with a national memory that steps outside that ordained by the lettered city1, it does not go far enough in encouraging them to engage with the landscape itself.

Instead, the Atacama Desert seems to function more as a stage from which Guzmán can enunciate his political objectives. It appears to only exist so long as humans with a memory of it can exist. Perhaps the best argument in favour of this criticism is the fact Guzmán is able to make three documentaries using this same structure yet looking at different landscapes.

While the desert in Guzmán’s documentary can be one that provides a space of resistance to arborescent narratives of memory, there is still the continued issue of it being simply a landscape from which one can extract resources, be they saltpetre or political imagery. This leaves me then with my concluding question: how can we incorporate the environment into our own politics of remembering and forgetting, without simply turning it into a metaphor aimed at capturing our own human experiences?

1In reference to Angel Ramas’ theories on the lettered city, outlined in La ciudad letrada.

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Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Una introducción a la ecología política latinoamericana.” Lugares descoloniales: espacios de intervención en las Américas, Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2012, pp. 45-71.

Guzmán, Patricio. Nostalgia de la luz. Atacama Productions, 2010.

Rama, Angel. La ciudad letrada. Arca, 1998.

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The Erzberg Mine

Seavey van Walsum

a terraced mountain grows nothing but dust cuckolds a long line of tall and brilliant peaks whose snow and thistled trees wind tosses like hair

red light falls onto red stone cut like a gem but dissected like a corpse, it has the brutal beauty of industrialism lit up by a summer sunset

a terraced mountain grows nothing but dirt blemishes the scalp of the alps like a bald spot grows starkly up into european sky like a malplaced pyramid:

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a car stops and tells a legend whose punchline is extraction and highlight is a talking fish and men who barter for gold, for silver, for iron. and through iron, time. the terraced mountain grows no more time grows nothing but stairs dusted with dandruff and rust that men and miners might walk up to greet to the great fish aquarius red light burns erzberg pickaxe scars into eyes, those not donned with airport sunglasses squint and find the legend faker than most

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What Makes a Place

Interaction of Geology in the Poetry of the Boreal Shield Ecozone Seavey van Walsum

One of the great discourses of ecocritical nature poetry is the

reconciliation of the human and non-human divide. This division is ubiquitous and ecocritics often critique it as an impediment to a more complete understanding of place. The human-nonhuman divide can be likened to the division of sciences and arts in academia, both of which constitute a subject-object relationship; poetry as the human subject speaking for the nonhuman place which replies objectively through geological reports. Geocritics such as Eric Prieto argue that place as a specific regional and embodied understanding of a location’s nature is constructed in the sensus communis through the evidence of both poetry and scientific reports.

The poems “Laurentian Shield” by F.R. Scott, “The Height of the Land” by D.C. Scott and “Precambrian Shield” by Don McKay are situated on Canada’s Boreal Shield ecozone and use regional geology, ecology, as well as paintings from the Group of Seven to evoke a cultural materiality and construct placehood. An investigation of the interaction of geology in the poetry of the Boreal Shield Ecozone reveals how the subject-object informs a naturalisation of settler-colonial pathos into dominant human understandings of a place. F.R. Scott’s work, “Laurentian Shield,” demonstrates exchanges between location and culture. “The Height of the Land” by D.C. Scott shows the inscription settler colonial culture into landscape. “Precambrian Shield” by Don McKay acts as an informed critique of the inherent vice of Canadian settler-colonial “indigenization” (Morgensen 9) and the exemplary “link between two scholarly fields pertinent” (Patrick Ferguson 165) to Page 62

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investigations of subject-object. Critical material analysis of these poems and further reading of reports from Environment Canada destabilizes the legitimacy of colonial projections and the legacy of human-nonhuman divide via the elucidation of Canadian nature poetry’s inherent vice: human-environment interaction and more specifically, the acidification of the Boreal Shield Ecozone.

The Boreal Shield Ecozone (BSE), is Canada’s largest ecozone. It is an area of overlap between the Canadian Shield— likewise known as both the Laurentian and Precambrian Shield— and a swath of boreal forest. Don McKay and F.R. Scott’s poems directly reference this geological landmark in their poem’s titles.

The ecozone takes up 20% of Canadian land mass and holds 22% of its freshwater by surface area (The Canadian Encyclopedia; Environment Canada), the region is characterised by exposed bedrock, a “wide variety of conifers,” thin topsoil and lakes whose drainage pattern is “disrupted, disorganized – even deranged” (Environment Canada). These material traits are explicitly expressed in “Precambrian Shield’’ which writes in reference to bedrock, “bone of the planet that was just/ last week laid bare by the blunt/ sculpting of the ice…” (“Precambrian Shield,” 2-4) and “The Height of the Land” which refers to schizophrenic lake drainage observable by Environment Canada and the naked poet’s eye, “the lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,/ and the enormous targe of Hudson Bay” (“The Height of The Land,” 42-43). Thin topsoil renders the ecosystems of the boreal forest especially vulnerable to changes as there is “less buffering capacity” (biodivcanada), “algae, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and birds are affected by increased acidity through reduced survival, growth and reproductive success, and loss or alteration of prey species’’ (biodivcanada). Alterations in the pivotal monuments of the natural landscape apart from those caused by human dwellings are also possible: “…Acidification may also negatively affect the growth rate and health of trees, for example, sugar maple and red spruce in northeastern North America’’ (biodivcanada). These changes would affect certain poetic observations, such as “Did we even notice/ that the red pine sprang directly from the rock” (“Precambrian Shield,” 17-18).

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These selected poems are heavily informed by their landscape of origin. The poems “Laurentian Shield’’ and “Precambrian Shield” directly link themselves to the BSE through their titles, while D.C. Scott’s “The Height of the Land ‘’ locates itself near Hudson Bay (43) and refers to local “Ojibwa” (D.C. Scott 7) people (self-name Anishnaabe) whose territory falls directly inside the BSE (Native Land Digital). This would confirm Northrop Frye’s theory of land as “the immediate source” (Frye, 1943) that unites and forms Canadian nature poets, the natural result of shared experiences in “a huge and thinly settled country” (Frye, 1943).

However, the affectation between land and its texts are not one way.

Geocritic Eric Prieto writes that the poetry of a landscape and its scientific evaluations are “taken as part of a body of evidence that will lead to a better understanding of the place” (Prieto 24). On a linguistic and socially constructed scale, poetry begotten of the BSE fabricates a communal conception of the ecozone, thus forming an epistemological feedback loop between the literary subject and the physical object. In the selected poems of this ecozone, geologic references are common and serve to reify a specific local material culture and bolster the credibility of a poetic account through a demonstration of scientific understanding of the landscape.

In “Precambrian Shield,” McKay writes “Sometimes/in Tom Thompson’s paintings you can see/vestigial human figures, brushstrokes” (29-30) as freely as he writes about the “red pine” (18) and the “bone of the planet” (2), these are all explicit calls to the derived materiality of a set location. Whether human-made or nonhuman, they serve as proof to further McKay’s portrayal of a place. This use of geology as evidence appropriates the objective truths of a landscape for social, subjective, artistic means in order to validate poetic sentiments as more closely aligned, or produced by, the land itself. The immediate advantage of this practice is an intimately bound subject-object relationship that begins to fray the borders of the two categories. The myopia of this form of nature poetry and Frye’s theory of it, is the validating factor of geology may prove useful for the “the indigenisation of settlers” (Morgensen 9). While a multidisciplinary approach is commonly recommended in Page 64

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pursuits of embodied knowledge, Morgensen writes the need for this particular alignment and use of subject-object “‘is driven by the crucial need to transform an historical tie (‘we came here’) into a natural one (‘the land made us’)’” (9). “The land made us” rhetoric is evidenced by Frye’s immediate source hypothesis and it works to naturalize not only settler families into Canadian placehood, but settler religions, ways of life, and ways of relating to land.

D.C. Scott’s “The Height of The Land” is a key example of “settler indigenisation” in the poetry of the BSE. The poem begins at dusk in the ecozone, the speaker praises the region’s “lofty air” (Scott, D.C. 16) and “violet shadow” (20) and mentions sleeping “Indian guides” (22), on the campsite, indicating that the speaker is an amateur camper or outsider unfamiliar to the area and in need of their services. This unfamiliarity between the speaker and the region is quickly absolved by an unguided access to the “golden and inapellable” (51-52; 58-59; 157) “region spirit” (68) the speaker finds. The speaker’s ostensibly naturally endowed understanding of the land is bolstered with land-based activities such as portaging (108), and references to drainage patterns of the area (2) which implies a wealth of knowledge. Portaging in particular contributes to the “land made us” (Morgensen 9) ideology, as it is an important cultural activity necessary to life and highlights how the speaker is shaped by the restrictions of the physical landscape.

The physical curbing of the speaker gives heightened authority to the observations they make about the “region spirit” (Scott 68) who coincidentally happens to align with the Christian church: “dawn/ tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces” (Scott, D.C. 122).

This inscription of “belfries” into the landscape is an indigenisation of settler-colonial religion and an erasure of indigenous ones. D.C. Scott writes, “Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound/ of acquiescence” (10-11), which mirrors the sonorous tolling of churchbells described later in the poem.

The mastery the speaker seems to exercise and the overwritten local Anishnaabe faith with more suitable settler religion is a fantasy. This legitimisation of arrival cultures as inherent to the BSE ignores their “we came here” (Morgensen 9) origin and the Page 65

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constructionist effect of their poetry; the subject has no impact on the object in this poem. Inscription of settler systems is not without its insidious practitioners, D.C. Scott worked in the Department of Indian Affairs in the early 1900s and is infamously attributed as saying, “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department” (Facing History & Ourselves; The Canadian Encyclopedia). The “the land made us” (Morgensen 9) paradigm works in a proto-problematized human-nonhuman binary, it understands the speaker as not staunchly separated from nature, but instead as borne of it with no power to reshape the environment in return. The inverse of this dynamic pitches Nature as a hapless victim of human presence and is just as ineffectual in a reconciliation of the human and nonhuman in nature poetry.

Geocritic Eric Prieto and anti-colonial critic Scott Morgensen argue there is a cognitive exchange in a place’s construction, and reports from Environment Canada and biodivcanada on acidification prove a material one.

Documentation of acidification in Canada began in the 1960s and triggered a series of reports, committees and international legislation in the mid 1980s to late 1990s following provincial agreements in the 1970s (“Acid Rain: History” Environment and Climate Change Canada). Acidification is an anthropogenic course of environmental change in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems caused by acid deposition that affects the BSE and works to reshape the landscape. Acid deposition is commonly known as acid rain but the term encompasses dry forms of nitric or sulfuric acid deposits such as gas or nitrogen-based fertilizers (EPA). Acid rain may come from natural sources such as erupted volcanoes, but the major modern contributors are gasses released from fossil fuels burnt in human activity (EPA). The scientific tone and language of the selected poems of the BSE may work to legitimize the poet, and for D.C. Scott it may help his “land made us” (Morgensen 9) mission, but the content of the scientific disciplines trace a human culpability in the physical nonhuman world; the presence of D.C. Scott’s settler Page 66

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speaker is not without its effect.

Studies since the initial rise in awareness of acidification find the “widely studied” (“Ecological Assessment of the Boreal Shield Ecozone” Environment Canada xiii) and “well-documented effects” (“Ecological Assessment of the Boreal Shield Ecozone” Environment Canada xiii) of acid rain in the BSE include: decreased net photosynthesis and nutrient uptake, impaired germination, reduced frost hardiness, damage to protective leaves and needle cuticles, decreased ability to cope with other stressors such as climate warming, drought, insect outbreaks, and disease (xiii) A small, persistent, and pervasive change in pH can affect so much down to the protective wax in the archetypal trees of the landscape. A 2008 study on acidification in the needles of trees such as the white pine found “Alcohols, esters, and fatty acids are significant components of leaf waxes and… are subject to nucleophillic attack…” (Padgett 72) when exposed to nitric acid. A report from 2000 reflects on data from the aquatic ecosystems of 152 lakes studied from 1981 to 1997, it reports that “41% became less acidic, 50% remained the same, and 9% became more acidic” (“Ecological Assessment of the Boreal Shield Ecozone” Environment Canada xiv).

While the scientists aren’t optimistic that enough is being done to fully repair the damage sustained by these lakes, the data is reflective of a change in environmental policy. Human awareness and concern for the environment of BSE shaped the landscape for the better. Humans shape the landscape that physically makes them and influences their poetry and geological reports; texts which, in return, construct the region as a place.

Awareness of scientific reports by ecologists and geologists in the face of poems such as D.C. Scott’s help to unravel the problematic subject-object relationships that stall ecocriticism and occasionally are used to work towards dubious political and eugenic goals. However, geologic reports alone are not sufficient replacement for poetry in embodied understandings of place. Lynn White Jr. in his essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” warns Page 67

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against an overuse of science, “Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature” (1206). White argues science and Christianity specifically have been used to secularize the land to make it more ready for colonisation, because by putting the saints in heaven Christianity “evaporated” (1205) the “spirits in natural objects” (1205) and “Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled” (1205). Therein lies the crux: too much science leads to a disassociated world with a gaping subject-object separation now ready for colonisation, too little leads to manipulative employments of it to justify colonisation.

Though D.C. Scott’s call to the “region spirit” (“The Height of the Land” 68) of the BSE has its own implications, it at least reinvigorates the landscape with an “inhibition” (White 1205) that may serve to protect the land as a place, if only from ecological crisis.

What remains is the need for a fierce dialogical union of science and poetry when conceiving ideas of the BSE to establish a firm paradigm of embodied knowledge and web of interdisciplinary critique.

F.R. Scott’s poem “Laurentian Shield ‘’ finely balances a geological and human appeal. His clever posing of the two as in conflict can be used to critique systems in which such dualisms were uneven but unspoken. “Laurentian Shield” exposes what humans, such as D.C. Scott in “The Height of the Land,” teach or impose upon the landscape via indigenisation of human presence and industry: A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.

A language of flesh and roses.

Now there are pre-words, Cabin syllables, Nouns of settlement Slowly forming, with steel syntax, The long sentence of exploitation. (“Laurentian Shield” 11-17) Page 68

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This excerpt details a development of a new language apparently taught by humans. F.R. Scott spares no expense to litter the introduction of the new language with gritty words rife with grifting associations. In this language which is “slowly forming” (16) the land speaks “cabin syllables / nouns of settlement” (14-15) so humans of those cabins and settlements can press it into speak its own “long sentence of exploitation” (17). The “long sentence of exploitation” (17) is more than that of a new language; it is a jail sentence given by human imposition. The imposed language of human exploitation and productivity in the BSE—similar to the imposed language of English in residential schools—is preceded by another that is not its progenitor. In the case of the “Laurentian Shield,” F.R. Scott imagines it as “A language of flesh and roses” (12). F.R. Scott’s work may see a stark division in human and land, but it also realises manners of human inscription that constructs place in the BSE. The Boreal Shield Ecozone, as a place, is constructed by a feedback loop of cultural, environmental, and anthropogenic interaction. Its borders are designed by geologists and ecologists, its cultural meaning is assigned by the poets who live within it, and the landscape itself is shaped by those very humans. Landscape-altering acidification in the Boreal Shield Ecozone acts as a synecdoche for the wider dilemma of the Anthropocene. A reading of the Anthropocene in the poems of F.R. Scott, D.C. Scott, and Don McKay troubles the indigenising “land made us” (Morgensen 9) structure of Canadian settler identity, which is indulgently mirrored in the label inherent vice, a term appropriated from booking-making. Inherent vice in document conservation describes the malignant effect of lignin, alum, and hydrochloric acid in paper, whose high levels of acidity causes the material to become brittle and degrade quickly over time (Northeast Document Conservation Centre) like the wax on pine needles in the BSE. Inherent vice works as a metaphor for the internal instability of indigenising settler-colonial Canadian poetry as a specific issue. But the term applies more broadly to nature poetry that does not consider the constructionist form of its human-poet and environment-place impact as a whole. Settler-colonialism is not to be accredited with this emergent complex view of nature. It does Page 69

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not dissolve the subject-object divide, instead it is the problem of forcible binarization that, when critiqued, leads to more nuanced understandings of place—which may equivocally have been reached through incumbent indigenous knowledge systems. Of the same vein, one may argue that the Anthropocene was necessary for this advancement in ecocriticism, and to understand that there is a system of continuous physical, poetic, and extra-human reciprocity we had to affect enough damage to see. One could argue this ecocritical breakthrough makes humans—or what is left of humanity after this analysis—more at one with the nonhuman, and vice versa.

An engagement with this is another paper entirely. To perpetuate a complex understanding of place with sound internal logic, ensuing forms of Canadian nature poetry must steward interwoven disciplines, deconstructed subject-objectivity, and anthropogenic acknowledgement, not reversals to indigenous pre-contact knowledge.

Reversal regrets “the dynamism of place (i.e., the ongoing nature of the ‘social production of space’” (Prieto 25), and gives into a “nostalgic fallacy” (Prieto 25).

Any nature poems that work with constructionism of place, either through foregrounding of the Anthropocene or through discourse of indigenous-settler ways of relating to land, resolve the issues of binaries. Exemplary poems will develop a geocritical “polyphonic or dialogical understanding of the place in question, one that incorporates the widest array possible of perspectives” (Prieto 24). F.R. Scott’s poem is a good example of this genre of poetry because it takes issue with ways that language constructs place and instructs a place’s response to human development. Scott’s poetic reflection on “what will be written in the full culture of occupation” (F.R. Scott 27) and in what language the writing will be in disagrees with the objectivity and righteousness of geologic writing. It is no longer simply that geologic reports are honest communications made by a place itself, but instead geologic reports are aggregates of data compiled by humans for nonhuman places that are affected by human presence. There must be a criticism of poets and scientists, and F.R. Scott provides it by bringing to the forefront their inherent vice. Inherent vice is a critical device for the scrutinization of Page 70

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poetry, science, and conceptions of nature as a whole that will hopefully serve to strengthen a discipline rather than degrade it.

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Works Cited “Acid Deposition.” Biodivcanada, 2010, https://biodivcanada.chmcbd.net/etat-tendances-ecosystemes-2010/acid-deposition.

“Anishinabewaki.” Native Land Digital, 8 Jan. 2022, native-land.ca/maps/territories/anishinabek-%E1%90 %8A%E1%93%82%E1%94%91%E1%93%88%E1%90 %AF%E1%92%83/.

Barrett Published Online February 7, David. “Canadian Shield.”

The Canadian Encyclopedia, 10 Aug. 2021, www.thecanadi anencyclopedia.ca/en/article/shield.

“Boreal Shield and Newfoundland Boreal Ecozones+ Evidence for Key Findings Summary.” Biodivcanada, 2014, biodivcanada.chm-cbd.net/ecosystem-status-trends-2010/ boreal-shield-newfoundland-boreal-summary#_6_1.

“Ecological Assessment of the Boreal Shield Ecozone.” Edited by Natty Urquizo, Environment Canada, manitobawildlands.org/ pdfs/BorealSheild_Ecozone.pdf.

Environment and Climate Change Canada. “Acid Rain: History.”

Acid Rain: History – Canada.ca, Government of Canada / Gouvernement Du Canada, 29 July 2010, https://www. canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/ser vices/air-pollution/issues/acid-rain-causes-effects/history. html.

Ferguson, Jesse Patrick. “Rocking Cosmopolitanism: Don McKay, Strike/Slip, and the Implications of Geology.” Research Gate, 2009, https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/236699612_Rocking_Cosmopolitanism_Don_ McKay_StrikeSlip_and_the_Implications_of_Geology.

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Frye, Northrop. “Canada and Its Poetry.” Canada and Its Poetry, northropfrye-thebushgarden.blogspot.com/2009/02/cana da-and-its-poetry.html.

McDougall, Robert L. “Duncan Campbell Scott.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 10 Sept. 2018, https://www.thecanadianency clopedia.ca/en/article/duncan-campbell-scott.

McKay, Don. “‘Laurentian Shield.’” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009, p. 122.

Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Taylor & Francis, Taylor & Francis Online, 2012, www.tandfonline.com/doi/ abs/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648839.

Padgett, Pamela E., et al. “Image Analysis of Epicuticular Damage to Foliage Caused by Dry Deposition of the Air Pollutant Nitric Acid.” J. Environ. Monit., vol. 11, no. 1, 2009, pp.

63–74., https://doi.org/10.1039/b804875d.

Prieto, Eric. “Geocriticism Meets Ecocritism.” Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies, by Robert T. Tally and Christine M. Battista, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2016, pp. 19–36.

“Session 4: Caring for Paper Collections.” Northeast Document Conservation Center, www.nedcc.org/preservation101/ses sion-4/2inherent-vice-materials.

Scott, D.C. “‘The Height of the Land.’” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009, pp. 94–98.

Scott, F.R. “‘Precambrian Shield.’” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009, pp. 295–296. “‘Until There Is Not a Single Indian in Canada.’” Facing History and Ourselves, https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-in digenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/ historical-background/until-there-not-single-indian-cana da.

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“What Is Acid Rain.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, https://www.epa.gov/acidrain/what-acid-rain#:~:tex t=Acid%20rain%2C%20or%20acid%20deposi tion,even%20dust%20that%20is%20acidic.

White, Lynn. Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 10 Mar. 1967, www.jstor.org/stable/1720120.

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Take a Moment Ben Murphy

Listen…

You can hear the leaves dying on the trees.

Singing to themselves Before they fall to their eternal grave, And fulfill their purpose.

Stop…

Do not move.

You’ll disturb the snow That sits without thought, in serenity, Over the sleeping meadow.

Feel…

The wind on your skin.

The cold whisper That makes the warm All the better.

Look…

The ground awakes!

The flowers giggle, As water droplets Roll down their smooth spines.

Taste…

The thaw.

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It beckons you To a breeze, a bike, and a smile.

The day is growing And it is sweet.

Smell…

Go on…

You can’t get enough of the air.

Sunscreen and sand: Ants waltzing on their way to a picnic, Weaving through lavish grass— Green as the prospect of tomorrow.

Drink…

Gulp, don’t sip.

You are refreshed By a return, A cycle, A promise, A world Unique in the universe.

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On the Presence of Civilization in F. R. Scott’s Nature Poems Rion Levy

The Canadian landscape has been a key fascination for settler-Ca-

nadian artists since the early 16th century. Although much of the nation remains untouched, the human enchantment with this wilderness acts in opposition to its inherent non-humanness. But as Kate Turner and Bill Freedman argue, “Humans are a part of nature… [there is] a connection between the fate of the natural world and that of humanity” (191). Humans have, and continue to exist with and as a part of nature, whether compatibly or in disharmony.

However, Kate Soper argues that “‘nature’ is opposed to culture, to history, to convention, to what is artificially worked or produced, in short, to everything which is defining of the order of humanity” (15). The external world consists of the entanglement of the natural and the human-constructed. In cities, the human dominates nature.

In rural settings, the human employs nature. In the wilderness, nature exists and humans observe. Regardless of the power dynamic between these two realms, they imprint deeply upon each other.

The mark the natural and human realms leave on one another is remarkable in the works of Canadian artists since “the natural world has always been important to Canadians, and it is a distinctive part of their amorphous, difficult-to-define, national identity” (Turner and Freedman, 171-172). Canadians consider the wild as a part of who they are, and they reflect this dual ownership of and submission to nature in their art.

Further, Northrop Frye argues that the Canadian poet’s

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poetry cannot be ‘young,’ for it is written in a European language with a thousand years of disciplined utterance behind it, and any attempt to ignore that tradition can only lead to disaster. Nor is Canada a ‘young’ country in the sense that its industrial conditions, its political issues, or the general level of its civilization, are significantly different from contemporary Europe. Nevertheless, to the imaginative eye of the creative artist, whether painter or poet, certain aspects of Canada must, for a long time yet, make it appear young. (Frye, “The Narrative Tradition,” 147).

In other words, the Canadian poet uses an ancient language to discuss the even older natural environment and the developed cities spread through it. F. R. Scott represents the prevalence of the natural world in the Canadian consciousness through his nature poems.

These poems often depict detailed Canadian landscapes through a human lens. Whether he poses his scenes through the perspective of the human onlooker or as a part of a much larger human landscape, the human serves an outer frame in his nature poetry. Scott demonstrates that human understandings of nature cannot exist without the human experience as he argues that Canadian nature does not exist removed from human culture. As he weaves human elements into his depictions of the natural, he reinforces the fact that as much as he draws inspiration from nature, he comes from the human perspective. He also writes about the Canadian landscape as though it is on the verge of change as humans engage with and establish themselves in the wilderness. As such, Scott employs elements of human culture and civilization and considers how they interact with nature to offer his poetic depictions of the Canadian landscape.

In the poem “Flying to Fort Smith,” Scott uses an overt human observational position to discuss nature. He opens the poem with the explanation of his viewpoint: The spread of silver wing Gathers us into long lanes of space.

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We peek through panes of glass.

The plain of lakes below Is bound with bands of green Fringed by darker green Pocked with drops of ponds. (Scott, 223, lines 1-7).

From this plane, he views the landscape from above. The expansive scenery of the land below exists regardless of whether a human sees it. Even so, he defies the natural human position from which he is supposed to see this environment: from the ground. He also sees the scene behind a layer of glass, a manmade barrier between himself and the world. Scott writes this poem from a removed and self-awarded God-like position where he sees a more holistic picture of the landscape. He does not see the small details of the ecosystems below but the larger combination of large bodies of water and forestry. He manages to escape the physical experience of this natural environment as he admires it and extracts the beautiful image of the environment for his personal enjoyment. He does not have to endure the reality of this nature. Scott’s experience of Canada’s wilderness is removed; he does not engage with nature but only observes and records it in the poem.

At the conclusion of the poem, Scott writes, “Cities sleep like seeds” (223, line 21) as he “Recogniz[es] the “smallness” of the self ” (Querengesser 455). The city is an extension of the individuals who created and inhabit it. To Scott, the city is also something connected to nature; he views it from the same perspective he views the wilderness. But cities lie as dormant pockets of possibility rather than as established, pronounced, and diverse regions. From his window he describes the rich visual and textual scene of the wild and the cities lie interspersed as small inconsistencies. From this manmade lens, he cannot stop himself from viewing the manmade environment and mentions it as the final word, bestowing upon the human realm significant importance. Cities exist as disruptions to the natural environment. His visual position from the sky encourages him to emphasize the relative smallness of human civilization within Canada compared to the expanse of the wild. He also, Page 79

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inadvertently, suggests the relative unimportance of the individual compared to the cycles of nature. Although humans have the incredible capacity to create change in the environment, there are natural forces, such as time, that humans cannot evade.

Scott writes the similar poem from earlier in his career, “Trans Canada,” through the same human perspective. This poem also depicts the scenery passengers witness on their travels during a flight across Canada. He opens the poem with the flight’s takeoff: “Pulled from our ruts by the made-to-order gale / We sprang upward into a wider prairie / And dropped Regina below like a pile of bones” (Scott, 56, lines 1-3). The prairie instantly widens for Scott as his viewpoint rises. Like with “Flying to Fort Smith,” Scott takes advantage of his human position to assess and appreciate the Canadian landscape before the sky obstructs his view: “Clouds, now, are the solid substance, / A floor of wool roughed by the wind / Standing in waves that halt in their fall” (Scott, 56, lines 11-13).

Although he appreciates the Canadian landscape momentarily, his loss of sight sends him into a daydream of a different Canadian experience of nature: I have sat by night beside a cold lake And touched things smoother than moonlight on still water, But the moon on this cloud sea is not human, And here is no shore (Scott, 56, lines 30-33).

As Querengesser suggests, “In most instances, however, Scott places himself in the centre of both space and time, using images that unite these two ideas” (471). In this poem, Scott does exactly this: in the absence of the Canadian landscape that he sees upon his ascent from the ground, he recentres the poem onto his memories of Canadian nature. He compares his experience in the plane to his experience in nature and writes disapprovingly of their incongruencies. He yearns for the natural space and his ability to view it.

Turner and Freedman argue that “Many Canadians regard nature as important because it sustains them, in both the material and spiritual realms” (172). From both perspectives, this sustenance appears obvious in both “Flying to Fort Smith” and “Trans Page 80

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Canada.” Although Scott makes no explicit reference to the industry, Canadian fossil fuel reserves inadvertently assist in his ability to fly. Canada’s material wealth provides the space for the development of infrastructure, including the cities that Scott mentions in the prior poem, and they permit him to experience more of its wilderness. These resources support his travels through secure access to water, food, shelter, and transportation. Even so, the more obvious and overt realm that nature sustains in these two poems is the spiritual realm. He demonstrates a keen fascination with the nature below him and pursues memories of it in his temporary state of visual withdrawal. Further, the sight of nature serves as not only the content of his poems, but also as the inspiration for them. His removed and comfortable experiences of nature in these poems, even the one by the cold lake, are what motivate his creative inclinations.

Scott demonstrates this exploitative relationship between the human and non-human environments in his poem “Laurentian Shield.” He establishes the natural environment with the opening lines “Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, / This land stares at the sun in a huge silence / Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear” (Scott, 41, lines 1-3). Scott writes that the Laurentian shield exists and experiences cycles of the seasons, life, and death constantly. Though, he mythicizes and personifies the Laurentian Shield as he suggests it is conscious. It chooses to sit in the silence of the sun and speaks openly in a manner that he cannot understand.

Rather than continue and conclude the poem with the same sentiments, assessing the cycles and story of this environment, he shifts his focus onto human intervention.

Now there are pre-words, Cabin syllables, Nouns of settlement Slowly forming, with steel syntax, The long sentence of exploitation. (Scott, 41, lines 13-17) Instantly, Scott devalues the language he claims the land speaks Page 81

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with his suggestion that the birth of European settlement in Canada is the predecessor to this language of Canada. He slowly establishes settlements and industry on the Laurentian shield and neglects to discuss the landscape’s adjustment. He only depicts what humans do to the land.

Scott continues to demonstrate how humans benefit from Canada’s material wealth as he writes, The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur, And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle; Then the bold commands of monopoly, big with machines, ……………………………………

Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood. (Scott, 41, lines 18-20, 23) “Laurentian” is no longer concerned with the physical land, the environment, nor the nature that existed before human intervention.

It grows thoroughly preoccupied with what humans gain from their presence on the land and how they reshape it. The most shocking sentiment from this poem is the sense that humanity fills in the emptiness of the wilderness. This line refigures how to approach the introduction of the poem: the land is a space that sits empty.

Rather than it being full of nature, life, complexity, and geological formations, Scott reduces the land to a space for both physical and creative potential. He describes people who exploit the land and reconfigure the landscape, but he also exploits the scene for his creative expression. Scott concludes the poem with this very assertion: “And what will be written in the full culture of occupation / Will come, presently, tomorrow, / From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children” (Scott, 41, lines 27-29). He suggests here that this manipulation of the environment is only at its inception as there is more to extract, both poetically and physically.

Northrop Frye argues that “nature makes a direct impression on the artist’s mind, an impression of its primeval lawlessness and moral nihilism, its indifference to the supreme value placed on life within human society, its faceless, mindless unconsciousness, Page 82

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which fosters life without benevolence and destroys it without malice” (“The Narrative Tradition” 148). In other words, Frye suggests that nature’s indifference towards human society, in the sense that it exists as it always has when humans do not act to intervene, makes a resounding impact on the work of the Canadian artist. “Mackenzie River” offers an excellent example of this relationship between he human and non-human worlds. Scott writes that “This river belongs / wholly to itself / obeying its own laws” (Scott, 238, lines 1-3). He immediately establishes a sense of danger and wonder in this river. As an onlooker, he senses its power and remarks upon it.

Unlike in his other poems, this river is one element of the Canadian landscape he does not possess power over. He opens this poem with this realization that he is not the power in control here and creates a separation between his witnessing of the river and its presence.

He continues as he expresses the river’s movement through eight, equally short stanzas. He further exemplifies the river’s strength when he says, “Underneath its stone bed / shows sunken rock / in a swirl and surface wave” (Scott, 238, lines 10-12). Although rocks sink, his attention to its state on the bottom of the river floor, with the waves thrashing around it create a sense of fear. The rock is “sunken” rather than stationed, suggesting a sense of breathlessness and drowning. He “animate[s] nature with an evil or at least sinister power” (Frye, “Canada and Its Poetry,” 142). Rather than interact physically with this river, and potentially suffer the same fate as the rock, he chooses only to describe it as though he is a distant and removed spectator. The lack of his personal voice, compared to his other poems, only helps to contextually affirm his awe at nature, his “fear of an adversarial wilderness” (Turner and Freedman 191).

Then, as has been constant with the other poems assessed thus far, Scott introduces the human element once again. He makes two statements at the end of the poem that politicize and humanize the river. First, he writes that the Mackenzie is A river so Canadian it turns its back on America The Arctic shore Page 83

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receives vast flow

a maze of ponds and dikes (Scott, 238, 28-33).

Although this statement is rhetorical, he claims ownership over this body of water through the statement. The river exists on Canadian territory and his decision to create a political statement supported by the river’s direction suggests that, in order to convince himself to be comfortable with the might and power of the river, he claims ownership over the river since he is Canadian. This sentiment shifts Scott’s fear of the river’s power on its head. Although his prior sentiments suggest awe and terror towards this natural body, he demands power over the river’s power; it is Canada’s powerful river and thus, no longer belongs to nature itself. Then, he suggests that the river is a series of ponds and dikes which only further removes the power he previously reveals the river has. Not only have humans reformed it through the creation of dikes, but he minimizes it to a series of ponds. Although these small bodies of water may be beautiful natural elements, they are not as impressive as the fast-moving, icy river. Though he was not the one to build the dikes on the river, he structures the poem, through establishing its grandeur, only to contrast it with humanity’s alteration of it. Scott demonstrates the natural environment as something for the Canadian to encounter and tame. No element of the environment, no matter how grand, is out of reach to the Canadian based on these sentiments, and it creates the sense that, even on the ground, the human has total control over the wild.

Scott concludes the poem with an insult to the land surrounding the river when he writes: “In land so bleak and bare / a single plume of smoke / is a scroll of history” (Scott, 238, lines, 34-36). After his suggestion that humans can and should seize control over elements of the natural landscape that are powerful and dangerous to humans in their natural state, he suggests that the wild landscape possesses no beauty. Rather, it is not until humans have settled on the land, as he indicates through the mention of smoke, that this place possesses historical importance. This concluding phrase shares a similar sentiment to “Laurentian” in the sense that Page 84

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Scott suggests that the environment becomes meaningful once humans begin to make use of it. The space is “bleak and bare” rather than a complete and rich space that exists as it does due to natural processes that predate human interactions with the land, let alone European interactions with it.

F. R. Scott’s poems engage passionately with the natural environment and the ways in which European settlers and their descendants responded to and altered the landscape. He emphasizes the role of the three external worlds: the one created by humans, the one entirely natural, and the one that exists between the two where they meet. The presence of the inner being, whether through the lens of the human realm compared with the natural, or from the entirely personal self, helps establish himself against nature as someone who uses the riches of the environment for his creative exploits and the material ones of his fellow Canadians. ` Scott’s poems demonstrate a remarkable ability to capture human relationships with the environment as well as the human inclination to assume possession over it. His focus on the vastness of the landscape, both through his aerial positions and discussions of large natural monuments, minimizes its grandiosity. Because Scott is able to acknowledge significant portions of Canada, he demonstrates dominance over its scale. Canada’s expanse doesn’t stop him from recording it. Although Scott wrote during the middle of the 20th century, human exploitation of Canada’s nature was already progressed, and he manages to emphasize this without hesitation in these poems. He understands the wild through the human as it offers both an accessible perspective through which his readers can understand and appreciate the natural beauty Canada has to offer as well as a narrative familiar to many who have visited and live on this land. He makes no attempt to envision the Canadian landscape as though he knows it inherently; he is upfront and explicit in his framework: he writes from the perspective of a human on the land who watches it change and who feels a sense of ownership. Although this essay explores only four of his poems that relate discuss the human relationship with nature, his explicitness, coupled with his persistence in these sentiments in these poems, create a beautiful Page 85

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tragedy. He demonstrates how the once green lands grow dark with the smoke of the city and how there is nothing he can do to stop it other than observe from above water in the air.

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Works Cited Frye, Northrop. “Canada and Its Poetry.” The Bush Garden. Toronto, House of Anansi Press, 2017, pp. 1131-145.

Frye, Northrop. “The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry.” The Bush Garden. Toronto, House of Anansi Press, 2017, pp. 147-157.

Querengesser, Neil. “‘In What Eye Sees’: Shifting Centres in the Poetry of F.R. Scott.” English Studies in Canada, vol. 16, no.

4, Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 1990, pp. 453-476.

Scott, F. R.. The Collected Poems of F. R. Scott. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Soper, Kate. “The Discourses of Nature.” What is Nature?. pp. 1536.

Turner, Kate, and Bill Freedman. “Nature as a theme in Canadian Literature.” Environmental Reviews, vol. 13, 2005, pp. 169- 197.

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