Ecocriticism 2: Thinking Like a Child or a Mountain

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Ecocriticism 2 Thinking Like a Child or a
Mountain

• William Wordsworth vs.
• Mary Oliver, Aldo Leopold

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Review

• Different Usages of Nature incorporation (as
  background), symbolization, interaction (as
  background or characters)
• Ecocriticism -- Methodologies (from critique,
  re-reading to reconfiguration) Issues (e.g.
  nature vs. culture, the picturesque)
• Examples
• the picturesque and Tinturn Abbey
• To Autumn Weather and Time
• Immortality Ode Nature Childhood
  Romanticized?

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Outline

• Wordsworths Views of Nature Immortality Ode
  Nature Childhood Romanticized?
• Aldo Leopold
• General introd.
• The Land Ethic
• His Legacy
• Mary Oliver Two Poems
• Peonies
• Wild Geese
• References

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Examples II Nature Childhood Romanticized?

• Immortality Ode Structure
• Stanzas I-II past glory vs. his present sense of
  loss
• Stanzas III IV his confirmation of the present
  beings while missing the visionary gleam bespoken
  by a tree, a field and the pansy
• Stanzas V-VII the process of human (our) growth
  and learning of different arts, lies and
  imitation in the lap of Earth
• Stanzas VIII XI reconfirmation of both past
  affections, recollections and truths and the
  present natural beings and child (child --we)

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Examples II Nature Childhood Romanticized?

• Immortality Ode
• Do you agree that the child is father of the man?
• How is nature presented in this poem?
• How does Wordsworth resolve the issue of
  inevitable aging, forgetting and death?

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Ode On Intimations of Immortality

• Memory of lost childhood sensuality, splendor in
  the grass, led Wordsworth to a very different
  truth. . . . he demoted nature from mother to
  homely nurse because he wanted to claim a more
  diverse parentage, a patriarchal one with God,
  who is our home.
• Few romantic poets, even those like Wordsworth
  who wrote to recover a closer relation to nature,
  finally see themselves as entirely natural
  creatures, for natural creatures die, and poets,
  as Wordsworths title indicates, must find an
  imaginative route to immortality. (McNew)

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Aldo Leopold The Land Ethic

• Starting Questions
• What is ethic for Leopold? Is it something
  absolute (a transcendental signified)?
• How about the biotic pyramid?

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Aldo Leopold General Introduction

• a scientist who wrote poetry, a scholar who was
  most comfortable in the field, a conservative man
  who came to advocate a revolutionary idea
  (Callicott 172)
• Contributes to transforming ecology from a
  descriptive schema in botany (or animal
  distribution) to a functional approach to the
  total environmenta concern with processes and
  relationships, with causes and effects. (Flader
  6-7)
• Argues for the normal circulation of the energy
  among the various levels of the biotic
  pyramidthe stability and healthy functioning of
  the system(F 31)

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Aldo Leopold General Introduction

• e.g. Wisconsins deer problem for Leopold --
• Deer and cottontails were inflicting severe
  damage on plantations and natural forest
  reproduction,
• and the commission had the obligation to get
  whatever help it could from wolves, coyotes, and
  foxes in trimming excess deer and cottontails to
  mitigate the damage. (F 210)

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The Land Ethic Structure

• Odysseus ?
• The Ethic Sequence ethic defined
• The Community Concept humans as members of the
  land
• The Ecological Consciences vs. the economic
  interest
• Substitutes for a Land Ethic ? to leave
  everything to the government
• The Land pyramid (three basic ideas 218)
• Land health and A-B Cleavage
• The Outlook modern mentality, the farmer, vs.
  land ethic as a product of social evolution.

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Ethic

• Judgment with standards beyond the merely
  expedient
• Ecologically, a limitation on freedom of action
  in the struggle for existence.
• A differentiation of social from anti-social
  conduct (202)
• Premised on the concept of community.

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The Land Ethic

• A product of social evolution
• from Odysseus slaves as property
• to the Bible against despoliation of Land
• to the present conservationism community
  instinct in the making
• P. 205 the workings of the biotic mechanism is
  never fully understood.
• But many historical events were actually biotic
  interactions between people and land. e.g.
  Bluegrass?????????(205)

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The biotic pyramid

• the biotic pyramid the energy circuit of
  nature Through millennia of evolution, the
  pyramid had increased in height and complexity.
  
• The carnivores (wolf, bear) at the apex
  (images)
• Man lop the large carnivores from the apex of
  the pyramid and thus disorganizing the system.
• One who could listen objectively to that howl of
  wolveswho could visualize the wolf in its
  relation to the total life process of the
  ecosystem through time, not just as it might
  affect ones own immediate interests was
  thinking ecologically, like a mountain. (Flader
  2)

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The biotic pyramid

• Two examples of Food Chains
• (left) http//sofia.usgs.gov/publications/fs/166-9
  6/fig1.html Schematic representation of the
  mercury geochemical cycle and the pathways of
  mercury through the food chain in the Florida
  Everglades.

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The Legacy of Aldo Leopold

• A Sand Country Almanac 1949
• Not a Nature lover who glorifies Nature or lament
  over its loss
• a scientist, one of the first to profess the new
  science of ecology.
• Without romantic revulsion against plowing, or
  cutting trees, or hunting birds and animals, or
  any of the things we do to make our living from
  the earth.
• Against the furious excess of our exploitation
  (Callicott 234-36)

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The Legacy of Aldo Leopold (2)

• Helping intertwined with competition
• Predator and prey or parasite and host require a
  co-evolution where both flourish, since the
  health of the predator or parasite is locked into
  the continuing existence . . . of the prey and
  host. (Callicott 250)
• Two examples saving the bear rain forest (from
  Earth Pulse)
• The other examples Bambi (hunters criticized,
  nature simplified), Pocahontas (Nature and noble
  savage romanticized).

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Mary Oliver Her Style

• . . . presents the human in the act of
  recovering a truth that we are creatures.
• Instead of forsaking the natural for supernatural
  eternity, her poems follow the cycles of the
  seasons to image loss and the possibility for
  renewal. These vast natural cycles, which usually
  symbolize traps and prison houses for the
  romantic visionary, are strangely consoling for
  Oliver. (McNew)

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Mary Oliver

• Wild Geese and Peonies
• How does the speaker in each poem relate to the
  natural creature? With what language are these
  natural creatures presented (presented as they
  really are, described with human imagination or
  symbolized)?

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Peonies

• . ..all day the black ants climb over them,
• boring their deep and mysterious holes
• into the curls,
• craving the sweet sap,
• taking it away
• to their dark, underground cities

• William Blake The Sick Rose
• O Rose, thou art sick!
• The invisible worm
• That flies in the night,
• In the howling storm,
• Has found out thy bed
• Of crimson joy,
• And his dark secret love
• Does thy life destroy.

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Wild Geese

• Meanwhile the world goes on.
• Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the
  rain
• are moving across the landscapes,
• over the prairies and the deep trees,
• the mountains and the rivers.
• Meanwhile the wild geese,

• A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
• She seemed a thing that could not feel
• The touch of earthly years.
•  
• No motion has she now, no force
• She neither hears nor sees
• Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
• With rocks, and stones, and trees.

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References

• Leopold, Aldo, 1886-1948. A Sand County
  almanac, and sketches here and there New York
  Oxford University Press, 1987, c1949.
• Companion to A sand county almanac interpretive
  critical essays Ed. J. Baird Callicott
  Madison, Wis University of Wisconsin Press,
  c1987
• ???? ????????? / ???.????(Aldo Leopold)?
  ???? ????? ??? ????, 1998?87
• Thinking like a mountain Aldo Leopold and the
  evolution of an ecological attitude toward deer,
  wolves, and forests / Flader, Susan. /University
  of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
• From Janet McNew, Mary Oliver and the Tradition
  of Romantic Nature Poetry, Contemporary
  Literature 301 (Spring 1989), 60, 68, 69, 70,
  72, 75. http//www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r
  /oliver/about.htm