The Nature Pages

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~at Outrider

	Environmental Renaissance Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature by Andrew McMurry University of Georgia Press, 2003		The book's title is a cynical homage to F.O. Matthiesen's American Renaissance
	The author of this work of ecocriticism says his aim is to evoke a dialogue about how human societies make waste of their environments, and their seeming inability to do otherwise. Considering our ecologically perilous times, how can we rhapsodize about nature and pick at the finer points of aesthetics when the very infrastructure upon which the natural world -- and our lives -- depends upon is being sullied and endangered? Are we smelling the roses while Rome burns?		That Thoreau's attempt to speak a word for nature finally ends with him also speaking a word, however backhandedly, for a kind of cultured naturalism should not come as a surprise: to sustain the position of purity, as in the summit experience of Ktaadn or in the opening lines of 'Walking' itself, is finally too fatiguing -- and unattainable besides.
	"Our current environmental vocabulary seems to exude a confidence in environmental praxis we have never -- I repeat, never -- earned: sustainability, conservation, renewability, cleanup are the high-toned markers in this lexicon. Words like these might prompt one to suppose that a regime of positive environmental health actually exists or is on the horizon. But despite what we may hear about the improving state of the environment, on the scale that counts (the planetary one), nothing is truly sustained, conserved, renewed, or cleaned up," Andrew McMurry explains.		Andrew McMurry University of Waterloo
	With humanity rapidly outstripping the planet's capacity to support life, is there anything that ecocriticism can do besides conduct genteel, specialized conversations about the history and aesthetics of environmental literature? McMurry expresses his doubts, but nevertheless produces a work that tracks literary apprehensions about the precariousness of the natural world and its uncertain future through the past century and a half in a manner not so gentle or exclusive. Employing theories of autopoesis and social systems, he seeks to recast the nature philosophies of Thoreau and Emerson in a contemporary and potentially apocryphal light.		As critics -- and this will be the stumbling block for many in the ecocritical community -- we must be concerned with the observation of the observation, not the observation itself, and we should be asking questions like "What would it take to square an economically inflected version of nation with an aesthetic one?" and not, as if too often the temptation, questions like "What does nature teach us?"
	Both challenging and erudite, McMurry's call to arms pushes at the boundaries of environmental literature and demands a criticism that's more relevant and effectual.		The Slow Apocalypse:  A Gradualistic Theory of The World's Demise by Andrew McMurry