Today Lowell Duckert and I submitted the hulking manuscript of Veer Ecology: An Ecotheory Companion to the University of Minnesota Press. The book is already under contract but will need to reviewed before entering production. The project is huge: 29 essays, a [gracious!] foreword by Cheryll Glotfelty and an afterword by Nicholas Royle. Veer Ecology is the third collaboration Lowell and I have undertaken together (the first was a special issue of postmedieval on "Ecomaterialism," the second the recent collection Elemental Ecocriticism). Below is the introduction that came from some intense rumination over the essays, mostly while Lowell moved into my house for four days and we did little besides write, think, drink coffee, cook, and write. Plus a bunch of Google Hangouts in the weeks that followed to get things smoothly gyred ... and somehow the whole thing came together in a way that both pleased and startled us. Consorting with such stellar contributors galvanized us.
I have been fortunate in my collaborations over the years, having written with many scholars far more talented than I am, scholars who have pushed me to think beyond comfortable ambits to accomplish things that solitary writing could never attain (I am looking at you Cary Howie, Stephanie Trigg, Allan Mitchell, Julian Yates, Karl Steel, Stephanie LeMenager and Lindy Elkins-Tanton!). Lowell has been the collaborator with whom I've worked the longest. He has companioned my ecocritical thinking for a transformative span of years. I am deeply honored to collaborate yet again with someone so inspirational.
Let us know what you think of our introduction. We will undoubtedly revise it at least once more.
Veer Ecology: An Ecotheory
Companion gathers a
cross-disciplinary company of scholars to follow the trajectories of some
vibrant terms for thinking ecological theory and practice. We call this book a companion in the hope of offering a
ready partner and congenial fellow traveler, a vademecum to foster
attentiveness and accompany further wandering. Tracing the lively trajectories
of verbs familiar and unexpected, this volume aims not to provide encyclopedic
overviews or definitive accounts of critical concepts (all concepts are critical), but to compose a welcoming, mobile and
heterogeneous solidarity. Imagining possible futures for the humanities during
a time of widespread environmental crisis, Veer
Ecology extends an invitation to shared endeavor. Through collaboration
across historical periods, geographies, archives and expertise, we attempt less
anthropocentric modes of apprehending ecological urgency and danger, as well as
the necessity of shared thriving. We strive to multiply points of view, to
harness the ability of language to transport cognition and affect beyond the
small orbit of the human, to tend to disanthropocentric pulsion within the
mundane. Not every contributor to this colloquy self-identifies as an ecocritic
or expert in the environmental humanities. Our aspiration is that Veer Ecology will make evident that we
(a first person plural that is meant to include you, the reader) are always
thinking environmentally, but our modes of engagement could be usefully
intensified through better recognition of collective precarity and unlooked
for, wide companionship -- even within the modest and fugitive shelters that
projects like book-building extend.[1]
Ecotheory is a convergence of ecology,
philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, feminism, sustainability
studies, environmental justice (including indigenous and postcolonial studies),
queer theory and numerous adjacent fields that seeks to deepen understanding of
the intimacy of humans and nonhumans. Striving to better frame ethical,
historical and cognitive relations to the world, especially at a time of
anthropogenic climate change and global crisis, ecotheory ranges across the
environmental humanities, green studies, social and critical activism, and the
new materialisms (including material feminism, object studies, and vibrant
materialism). Queer ecology conveys these often overlapping yet resolutely
eccentric trajectories best.[2] Literature, history and the
arts bring to environmental science a long and spirited conversation about the
relation of human activity (intellectual and industrial) to a world exceeding
anthropomorphic capture. Working against the concretizing tendency of a
research guide or definitive overview, this book traces ecotheory in motion, as
arcing verb, as veer. Ecotheory is
after all a ceaseless spur and a doing, a way of apprehending from the thick of
things, not the cementing of an extant body of knowledge into perduring form,
or a knowledge to be glimpsed from an exterior point of view.[3] An actively contemplative
response to contemporary and historical states of emergency, ecotheory urges
complicated understandings of human entanglement within a never separable
nature -- a material enmeshment perceived long before the Anthropoocene arrived.[4] This collaboration therefore
aims for catalysis rather than mastery, incitement rather than codification.
Because of its origins in ecology, ecotheory cannot be divorced from multimodal
forms of activism (including writing) and unforeseen companioning as a form of
challenge.
Veer Ecology emphasizes through its title the
etymology of the noun “environment” in sudden spirals. French virer means "to turn.” This
collection of essays responds to an intensified interest within environmental
studies in directionality. The “animal turn,” “material turn,” "geologic
turn" and “hydrological turn" collect an array of incisive
investigations into how the ecological works: it spins. Our collaborative endeavor takes the ecological turn quite
literally. Far from merely environing the human in anthropocentric ways (Michel
Serres’s worry about “environment”), Veer
Ecology acknowledges a world full of in/human and in/organic things that
will suddenly, and unpredictably, go off course.[5]
They act, they drift, they swerve and resist. In deviating from human
domination, they disrupt secure dwelling in ways that are catastrophic,
pleasurable, orbit-changing. Besides a swift change of subject or direction,
“veer” describes wind's swirling motion. Though not the world’s only sudden
element, air suggests the dynamism embedded in veer, its propensity to circle back, to whirl as a vortex.[6] As the intensity and
frequency of storms like Sandy and Katrina have made evident, climate does not
conform to a bounded system. Affect and atmosphere at once, meteorological and
bodily, a shifter of scale and breaker of partition, climate cannot be
encompassed or controlled. Veer Ecology
stresses the forceful potential of things (inquiry, weather, biomes,
apprehensions, desires) to change course -- with shared, unevenly distributed
and insistently material impacts. This companionate project is therefore not a
compass, not a closed system of neatly arranged points that orients readers.
Each word is a prod to yet more positions. Veering enables ontological,
epistemological, and ethical positions to curl, curve, converge, converse.
We invite you to
accompany us along some spiralling trajectories, a topography of ecotheory in
motion. We enumerate five kinetic possibilities, but our list is incomplete,
and alternative tracks manifold. They await your deviations.
Welcome
to the whirled.
VERB (“to know
motion”)
Welcome is a passionate imperative: an opening, not a capture; an interruption, not a state.
We address its injunction towards ourselves, as a reminder of what this project
aspires to offer, but we hope that you will companion us, for a while, under
its shelter. So, come with us. Please. But bring whatever gear that you suspect
will assist in this shared venture. The ecology that welcome opens is a house awhirl, a moving castle, cleft rock, a
domain in disarray. Dwelling in such a mess is not always comfortable, we
admit, and yet we seldom seem to finish constructing these temporary spaces of
refuge, these hearths for warmth and story, before we find ourselves in company
too boisterous for even the most capacious haven.[7] It is as
if the unfinished Tower of Babel were a inhabited as spiralling encyclopedia or
library, a perpetual gathering and emission device for soundings and new
languages, loquacious reverberation, polyglot and heterogeneous collectivity.
House is a humane verb. Although at their
secret interiors nouns are terms in motion, they have a habit of obscuring the
eventuation of the world, its ongoingness. Ecology is a doing, emergence rather
than structure, a housemaking rather than a house-hold.[8]
The
cleft of definition has a way of believing the dichotomies it founds:
noun|verb, language|world, stasis|mobility, home|wild.[9]
Segregations are imposed with lasting and unevenly felt costs.[10]
If a dictionary is a house of letters, then its oikos must be a restless one, never perfectible. What might such
open books welcome? Words that speak the world and convey whirl.[11]
Thick with ecological possibility and narrative drift, words need not be
animated by human hands in order to move. No alphabet will still or order long.
Ecology and every word it houses attunes us to verbose multidirectionality,
unmooring terms: a veercabulary, never monoglot or merely reiterative, a
tongue-twisting surge of disanthropocentric energy to silence human
soliloquizing. Word-life
thrums with wild life, with world-life.[12]
Always verbalize. Find the
motion in the noun, the play in the preposition, the transport of the metaphor,
the intensification of the adverb, the escalation of the adjective, the doing
of the verb. Tend, attend, tender.
Keywords unlock
multiple doors. This ecotheory companion would not have been possible without
foundational projects like Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society -- a work that had
the forethought to offer blank final pages as part of its arrangement, a signal
that lexical inquiry “remains open” and that “the author will welcome all
amendments, corrections, and additions.”[13] The
capacious volume Keywords for
Environmental Studies has recently offered a collaborative terminological
inventory for building a bracingly cross-disciplinary future for environmental
studies.[14]
The volume is arranged alphabetically, and its companion website offers
pedagogical tips for reshuffling its contents in the classroom. Greg Garrard’s
indispensable Ecocriticism organizes
the field into thematic strands, articulating parameters through key terms
(“Apocalypse” “Animals” “Pollution” “Wilderness” “Pastoral”).[15]
The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism,
which Garrard edited, offers a more gregarious and open surveying of contours
and possibilities for the field.[16]
Yet every such guide demands a foundational principle of order: arrangement by
time period, discipline, alphabet, genre, topic. The burgeoning number of
readers, companions, handbooks, and research guides that attempt to gather the
environmental humanities into a comprehensive volume risk obscuring the
turbulence, plurality, and proliferativeness which they reflect and enact.[17]
Rather than explicate terms so that we can ensure “that we get our lexical and
conceptual bearings straight,” rather than articulate lasting boundaries for
ecocritical significations, this collection follows a slightly different path,
accompanying some ecologically rich if at times rather unlikely verbs,
companioning their trajectories, seeing where they lead when they perturb
disciplines, thresholds, domains, dialects.[18] Against a
humanities that too often becomes a war of the words, we hope for a shared
ethics of veering, a turning towards
and with that entails deep attunement
to human and nonhuman thriving.
COMPANION (“to accompany,
even when difficult”)
Keys are good tools. They unlock and
explain. A companion does not necessarily unbolt anything, and will not likely
provide quick access to a storehouse of provisions or knowledge. Yet a good
companion will hold open hospitable doors, invite conversation, wander with you
along unexpected paths. Companion is
a reliable verb.
You
seem like you are having a lot of fun. So stated an audience member at a
conference panel we arranged for the project that preceded this volume, Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth,
Air, Water and Fire.[19]
We were pleased that the critical conviviality propelling that collaboration
was palpable -- and we hope that a similar joy in working together is evident
in this anthology. We trust that our happiness in shared venture does not
obscure the seriousness or urgency of the themes contemplated. Collaboration
involves challenge -- and the contributors to this book pushed us, repeatedly,
to do better: refine our terms, embrace new ambits or disrupt old ones, contemplate
possibilities and limits. The twenty-nine essays, foreword and afterword arose
from sustained conversation. Our invitation to contribute to Veer Ecology arrived in the mailbox of
each contributor with a list of suggested verbs, only some of which were
welcomed. Several authors chose their own verbs, or realized that a verb had
chosen them. Some changed their verbs before or after their essay was complete,
so far had trajectories veered from origins. We warned our contributors that
their verbs would want to become nouns, freezing into concepts rather than
transporting the unexpected. “Watch out for that peril,” we wrote, “and veer
rather than stabilize -- but other than that, feel free to be as creative and
provocative as you wish.” We never policed, but we did push, wonder with, and
companion. We found that those who wrote for and with us brought Veer Ecology along trajectories we could
not have predicted. Lines whirled into spirals, coils became rhizomes. The
ethos we attempted to cultivate was one of intensification, a building together
of fugitive havens for thoughts that might not thrive in solitude. In these
days of narcissistic nationalisms, closed borders, gated communities,
human-engineered ecological disaster, resourcism, and neoliberal bigotry, we
are attempting to place a little more motion into concepts like home and haven.
The essays offer a series of capacious hearths around which communities of
humans and nonhumans might cluster, to shade themselves or find a roof against
the weather when it rains, maybe even to remember some sustaining stories. Shelter is a necessary verb.
The welcome we
extend opens a door through which unexpected things will pass, including some
monsters. In an ancient but weirdly contemporary poem about fire, ecology, refuge,
and entanglement, Grendel invades the hall of Heorot because its music -- its
foundational story and divine place setting -- excludes him, leaves his family
to roam a distant moor, to inhabit a sunken home. Example and warning, a
monster not so different from the community that built its timber walls against
him, Grendel smashes doors, benches and tables. His havoc is unsettling, making
a mess of what had been hierarchy and order. But he also brings an inexcluded
outside within, an unwanted change of climate to spur a community to think more
deeply about the limits it imposes, to contemplate sustained violence, the
drowning of those declared off a nation’s maps. In retelling the medieval tale
it is difficult not to behold the shape of economies and ecologies to come. So
let us overturn the epistemological tables -- or at least allow unexpected
guests their seats. Admit that any shelter is likely to prove temporary, so
enable the place by the fire to be capacious, community difficult, admittance
and sustenance just.
The varied
contributions to this book offer seismic, somewhat spontaneous definitions of
ecology: not a perfected house that walls the project, but a trans-historical
hostel of in/human agents, a lively commons taking shape around a portable
hearth. A “companion,” Donna Haraway observes, is someone to break bread with [cum panis],
a messmate.[20]
We love tables that welcome and homes that invite. We also love the making that
happens around the fire, the leavening and enlivening. This ecology or open
house or mobile hearth is a space in which we experiment rather than consume,
where we share story and song rather than arrange ourselves into a hierarchy of
prearranged seating. A commons must welcome more than human and animal guests.
Interspecies and ecomaterial, parasitical and hospitable, a commons as shared
refuge includes the ingredients and the debris, airborne yeast and insects, the
bread and its crumbs, the ants and the rats, a perturbed ecology in which to
dwell. Intellectual, physical, material and social energy propels these
endeavors, threatens to exhaust, potentially disempowers. Welcome to the whirled, a crowded place where we power down, eat
together, speak together, story together in gyred conviviality, limned by
disaster.
SPIRAL (“to move
forward by curving back”)
Rotation occurs around an axis, a center
that may wander. From inside the whirl it is difficult to know if motion is
inwards or outwards, a loosening or a tightening. Things move apart and thereby
touch other things. Ends become beginnings and contiguities proliferate. Roland
Barthes once declared of spirals that inside their trajectories “nothing is first yet everything is new,”
by which he also meant nothing is last and everything is already ancient.[21]
Time is a complicated verb.
What a
whirligig: forwards and backwards, here and elsewhere at once. Spirals are the
topography of perspective shift. To see the world from multiple viewpoints
curves senses into motion. Propulsion can offer a falling behind, a sudden
touching of history thought long surpassed.
RECYCLE
REPURPOSE RESTORY (“to rework a mantra”)
Recycle. Three arrows
fold in upon each other, their trajectory an eternal loop. Designed by college
student Gary Anderson and intended to represent a Moebius strip, the Universal
Recycling Symbol is a corporately sponsored, public domain figure for how to
dwell sustainably within a closed system. Re-cycle.
In the Pacific Ocean a gyre of trash spins, aping that rotation a little too
literally while challenging the assumption that environmental cycles can remain
closed. The apposition of these two ecological circlings suggests that
sustaining our current modes of existence is neither possible nor desirable.[22]
The universal recycling symbol conveys the spin of a system in which everything
supposedly remains inside; recycling means using obsolescing things over and
over with no waste, no exterior, like a nation that imagines itself behind a
secure wall. A turbulent whirl of debris, the Pacific gyre spins with the actual
vectors of waste and profligacy that propel contemporary capitalism, a
whirlpool global in scale, open and toxic.[23] Love
child of petroleum culture run amok, plastic is outsourced for recycling but
keeps coming back, churned through border and bodily crossings.[24]
As pellets and microtoxins, this waste inhabits the bodies of fish, seeps into
human and animal bodies, litters shores. The refuse of industrial nations
clings to lands only imagined as distant, the “away” to which unwanted things
are “thrown.”[25]
Rocks, hills, even islands sediment from unwanted “landfill,” because some
spaces are too full of discarded objects and substances, sent out of sight and
attention, globalizing the local. The Pacific Garbage Patch is a spiral of slow
churning violence, the bending together of a series of transfer stations that
aim to obscure the transits of waste, a “patch” that does not mend its harms
but exposes its wounds, a matterphor for unwanted ecological intimacies.[26]
Recycle too easily greenwashes,
commodifies, obscures its motivating imperatives consume and forget. A
mantra of enmeshment becomes a motto for malfeasance. We convince ourselves
that our trash must surely be a treasure for others. So we send it to them:
corporate outsourcing, the offloading of a heavy burden in the guise of a
virtuous circle. Behind the closed circle of the recycling symbol is a
maelstrom of accident and intention, a relentless vortex that materializes
through violent gathering the torrid entanglement of things, porous zones,
forceful global currents, the agency of matter and elemental forces in drift.
Matter is storied.[27]
No system is closed. Environ is a
troubling verb.
Repurpose. We are not against recycling. We cannot dismiss any practice that reduces ecological harm,
that decreases environmental injustice, that assists the arrival of less toxic
futures. Nor are we against being green. But the spectrum holds a diversity of
hues, many of which human eyes cannot perceive. All are ecological.[28]
The grounds from the coffee that fueled these sentences will soon be atop a
compost pile, the paper bag that held the beans deposited in a bin for
transport to a facility that will render its fibers into something else. But we
do not suppose that because the bag and the “fair trade” grounds have been
recycled that we are off any hooks. Because “we shape the world through
living,” we always want to know better the intimacy of small choices to larger
networks of possibility and harm, and to make better collective and individual
choices.[29]
Although well intentioned, the Universal Recycling Symbol is a bounded system,
a gated community. Too often we aspire to enact some version of its call to
plenty and to closure, striving towards an exclusive totality that to sustain
its endless cycling imposes a high a price upon “offsite” humans and nonhumans
alike.[30]
We want to open re-cycling systems to the gyres that underlay their motion.
Matter may be transferred, transported, thrown to some unthought away, but
matter does not disappear.
Neither does
story. Restore might be repurposed to
mean “re-activate and intensify story.” Linear histories and crystalline origin
myths anchor the world we know in a world that has always been. As shelters
they are always too small. They delimit and justify exclusive community. Counter-narratives
make such stories spin: books of beginnings over a single Book of Genesis,
vegetating chaos over walled and perfect gardens. Reverse could mean: decorate, magnify lyricism, unmoor aesthetic
force from the merely human. Re-versing counters narrative forces of
containment, opens meager and ungenerous homes to widened refuge. Skew story.
Companion the plot twists. Veer Ecology
gathers a historically diverse archive because we have a hunch that the
re-story-ation of the world will be aided by a return to narratives and modes
of thought that carelessly relegated to the dust heap of the past.[31]
This “heap” is actually a teeming site (matter does not disappear) for
activating new possibilities, for re-framing more capacious futures in a time
of austerity, catastrophe, and the widespread inflicting of harm. Turn back to forge ahead. We are not
speaking about retrieving all things lost, but renewing how we story, all
together. Haunt is distantly related
to home.[32] Rather
than forget or abandon, we might try to slow down, engage, attend heavy weights
and long waits, contemplate more to act better. Resilience is not a stiffening
against but a bending towards, a winding up with others.
VEER (“to
anthologize unexpectedly”)
Nothing in good order, everything in
motion, weird, ardent, curving. “Desire,” Nicholas Royle writes, “is a veering
thing.”[33]
Veering things are in turn saturated with revolutionary desire. Veer is therefore the difficult verb we
have chosen to place not only in our book’s title but here in lieu of an
ending, hoping it will convey an unsettling motion that inheres within all
ecological thinking. To veer is to gather (anthologize)
unlikely but passionate companions, and in that sudden community to hope.[34]
To veer is to enlarge, to break closed circles into spirals, to collect for a
while, to dwell in revolution.
This collection
of essays is meant to affirm an ongoing project of inclusivity. Widened
belonging is seldom comfortable. Our contributors render snug habitations
strange, opening them to a world agentic and wide. The curving trajectories of veer do not abandon the past. Reduce, reuse, recycle: these are words
for matter, words that matter. As imperatives to a less oppressive mode of
dwelling we take them seriously, even as our collaborators find their kin in
some less conventionally ecological verbs. We do not aspire to complete,
transcend, or otherwise leave behind the academic and activist work that has
laid the foundation for an ecotheory anthology. This companion would not have
been possible without the challenges of queer theory, environmental justice,
ecofeminism, indigenous studies, or any other interrogator of how limited the human in the humanities has too often
proven. Veer Ecology collects beneath
the fugitive refuge of its covers some shared labor, some provisional attempts
to follow the ecological trajectories of linguistic organisms, especially as
vectors of disanthropocentric story. To behold the summons and provocations of
the worldly and nonhuman agencies that thrum within narrative requires the
estranging of what has become too familiar, the widening of our house, its
widening or repurposing, sometimes its abandonment, always the building of
wider sanctuary, a refuge for ecologies in wandering motion.
The thirty-one
contributions that follow offer an anthology of verbs that spiral and gather.
Companion us. Welcome to the whirled.
Table of Contents: Titles into Story
Foreword: Cheryll
Glotfelty
Introduction: Welcome to
the Whirled
Vegetate
Catriona Sandilands
Globalize
Jesse Oak Taylor
Commodify
Tobias Menely
Power
Down
Joseph Campana
Obsolesce
Margaret Ronda
Decorate
Daniel C. Remein
Remember
Cord Whitaker
Represent
Julian Yates
Compost
Serpil Oppermann
Attune
Timothy Morton
Sediment
Stephanie LeMenager
Environ
Vin
Nardizzi
Shade
Brian Thill
Try
Lowell Duckert
Rain
Mick Smith
Drown
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Haunt
Coll Thrush
Seep
Steve Mentz
Saturate
Laura Ogden
Behold
Serenella Iovino
Wait
Christopher Schaberg
Play
J. Allan Mitchell
Ape
Holly
Dugan and Scott Maisano
Love
Rebecca Scott
Tend
Anne Harris
Unmoor
Stacy Alaimo
Whirl
Tim Ingold
Curl
Lara Farina
Hope
Teresa Shewry
Afterword (On the Veer): Nicholas
Royle
[1] Inspirational to us in this
project has been the work -- and the encouragement -- of Jane Bennett, whose
sustained attention to matter’s agency as a project both political and ethical
inspired our first collaboration together. See The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001) and Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010).
[2] Our relation to queer ecological
studies is more than homophonic; we are deeply indebted in the framing of this
project to work like Queer Ecologies:
Sex, Nature, Politics, eds. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and
the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2010); Mel Y.
Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial
Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Alaimo
articulates a “queer, green redefinition of deviance,
which casts it as the generative force of life itself” (139; the influence of
Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality will be evident later in this
introduction as well). We are also
grateful to Chris Piuma for coining of the word “qveer,” an inspiration to this
book’s veering embraces.
[3] Donna J. Haraway famously
describes this disembodied perspective as the “god trick” in “Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14.3
(1988): 575-99.
[4] Inspired by the fondness of
Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway for variations on the word cosmos, Jamie Lorimer writes hopefully
of the advent of a Cosmoscene which “would begin when modern humans became
aware of the impossibility of extricating themselves the earth and started to
take responsibility for the world in which they lived.” See Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation
after Nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) 4. While we
agree with Lorimer in principle, we see this Cosmoscene as something that has
long existed within human perception, so that future making mandates a project
of renewal, return, and re-story-ation. For such entanglement in action see
Laura A. Ogden, Swamplife: People,
Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2011).
[5] “So forget the word environment … [I]t assumes that we
humans are at the center of a system of nature” (Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William
Paulson [Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995] 33).
[6] We have explored the shape of
elemental ecocriticism as a vortex in “Eleven Principles of the Elements,” the
introduction to Elemental Ecocriticism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press) 1-26; we are attempting an even wider topography
of ecological reading through the form here.
[7] On the “mess” as fecund
gathering, see J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming
Human: The Matter of the Medieval
Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). On the “messmate”
and companioning, see Donna Haraway, When
Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
[8] On emergence, “unexpected
detours and happy accidents” as a careering vector inherent to nature see Eben
Kirksey, Emergent Ecologies (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2015).
[9] See Jean E. Feerick and Vin
Nardizzi’s introduction to The Indistinct
Human in Renaissance Literature (2012), for example, “Swervings: On Human
Indistinction”: We see it as our burden to create a useful roadmap for these
essays while encouraging and facilitating a reading practice that bends--or
swerves across--our own categories, parts, and pairings” (6). As Steve Mentz
puts it in Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies
of Globalization, 1550-1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2015), “No island is an island” (51).
[10] On the enduring effects of the
American creation of “wild” space upon the people of color long excluded from
them, for example, see Carolyn Finney, Black
Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the
Great Outdoors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
These lasting divisions also tend to be far more exclusive than they seem, with
the “riotous presence” of those who are not Christian and male being
foundationally excluded by big ecological terms like “Human.” Obscured stories
of entanglement are essential to thinking beyond some of the impasses such
bifurcations have established. See especially Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing,The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the
Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015).
[11] Tim Ingold’s thoughts on the
“weather-world” animate our words. See Chapters 9 and 10 in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge
and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011).
[12] Nicholas Royle’s term is “wordlife” in Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011).
[13] Raymond Williams, Keywords: A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) xxxvii.
[14] Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed.
Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow (New York: New York
University Press, 2016).
[15] Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2012), 2nd edition.
[16] The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
[17] The sheer number of such
collections makes an exhaustive list impossible, but some which have been
essential to our framing of this introduction include The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll
Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1996); The
Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000), The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003, ed.
Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2003); Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), The
Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. Louise Westling
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008); and Ecocriticism:
The Essential Reader, ed. Ken Hiltner
(New York: Routledge, 2015).
[18] Quotation is from the foreword
by Lawrence Buell to Keywords for
Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason and David
Pellow viii. See also Buell’s prescient The
Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
[19] The comment was made by Jesse
Oak Taylor at the MLA convention in Austin (2016), and was meant to capture the
general sense of pleasure in shared thinking, even during a time of great
ecological crisis, that the presenters evinced.
[20] And as a verb, Haraway writes in
her rich exploration of what inheres in companion, the word means “‘to consort,
to keep company,’ with sexual and generative connotations always ready to
erupt”: When Species Meet 17.
[21] Quoted in Nico Israel, Spirals: The Whirled Image in
Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press,
2015), 22. It is also Israel’s point about a spiral’s ambiguous -- both
centrifugal and centripedal -- turn: “Does the spiral travel outward from the
fixed point, thereby increasing its distance from that point, or curve inward,
diminishing that distance?” (23). He has helped us frame what a spiral does in and beyond the twentieth century.
[22] See especially the cluster of
essays on “Sustainability” in PMLA 127.3
(2012) 558-606.
[23] For Israel, spirals “assert
their relation to the geopolitical...turning...both in toward itself to observe
its own torsions and out to the
‘globe’ (41). Local-global “eco-cosmopolitanism” is the topic of Ursula K.
Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of
Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
[24] For a smart of reading of
petroleum ardor and energy’s deep costs see Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the
American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[25] Timothy Morton’s point in The Ecological Thought (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010): “We can’t throw empty cans into the ocean
anymore and just pretend they have gone ‘away.’ Likewise, we can’t kick the
ecological can into the future and pretend it’s gone ‘away’” (119).
[26] We have in mind here the work of
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
[27] See “Introduction: Stories Come
to Matter” by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Iovino and Oppermann (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2014) 1-17. As collaborators and fellow travelers
Iovino and Oppermann are constant inspirations to our own projects.
[28] On this topic see Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green,
ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[29] Quotation from Jedediah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the
Anthropocene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015) 22. Purdy argues
for a critical engagement with the long human histories of making nature “real”
that have disastrously shaped contemporary landscapes.
[30] Serenella Iovino writes
compellingly of how place contemporary ecotheory must think place as
entanglement. Drawing on Ursula Heise’s notion of “ecocosmopolitanism” and
Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality” (among others) to argue that “we are at
once here and elsewhere; vice versa, what affects the life of other places and
beings has unsuspected reverberations in space and time, eventually touching
our bodies and backyards, too” (Ecocriticism
and Italy: Ecology, Resistance and Liberation [London: Bloomsbury, 2016]
2).
[31] David Macauley discusses “re-story-ation” in Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water As Environmental
Ideas (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 5.
[32] Cf. Nicholas Royle’s notion of
“visiting” in “Veerer: Where Ghosts Live” (Chapter 8 of Veering).
[33] “To desire, to fear, to desire
to fear, to fear to desire: veering” (Veering,
197).
[34] “Anthology,” etymologically a
“flower collection” in Greek (from anthos-,
“flower,” and -logia, “collection”)
later denoted a gathering of verses by various authors. To “anthologize,” we
offer, could also mean to gather ecopoetics with political potential. Through
“passionate” we hope to convey what Tobias Meneley describes as cross-species
“passion as an opening to the world and an openness to the passion of others” (The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the
Creaturely Voice [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) 31.
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