Environmental Writing: A Spiritual Voice of Resistance

“Everyone of us is a crossroads of thousands of relations, links, influences, and communications – physical, chemical, biological, and others of which we know nothing…None of us knows how the quiver of a shrub in California affects the mental state of a coal miner in North Bohemia or how his mental state affects the quivering of the shrub” (Havel 15).
    
    People have been writing about their relationship to the land almost as long as writing itself has been around.  However, the meaning and importance of this writing has not been recognized until fairly recently.  We live in an age of globalization and ruthless capitalism and many of us feel the pull of these insatiable forces on our ecological sensibilities.  Many of us feel helpless or exasperated by the continuous degradation of our mother earth, that which is our provider, our nourishment, and our home.  Some of us recycle, some of us protest, some of us pray, some of us contact our representatives, some of us educate, some of us do nothing, and some of us write.  There are many ways to be active in environmental issues, and writing has only recently emerged as a recognized voice of resistance.
    Rachel Carson was one of the first 20th century writers whose work was recognized as a voice of resistance in the environmental movement arena.  Her book, A Silent Spring, became wildly popular after its publication and its impact is still discussed today.  This book combined Rachel’s excellent and evocative writing abilities with her scientific knowledge of pesticides and their effects upon humans and wildlife.  Before Rachel Carson, there were many others whose works contributed to a growing ecological consciousness and morality, although they may not have been recognized as doing so at the time.  In working towards this though, these author’s works acted as a voice of resistance against forces that would harm the environment and its contents.  In this paper we will examine aspects of several nature writers works and how these works relate to using this literary genre as a voice of resistance and spiritual connection in a time of environmental destruction and degradation.
    The ecological consciousness is a term that was coined by Theodore Roszak, it implies a conscious awareness of how one’s individual actions and society’s collective actions are affecting the environment and the planet.  It is a sense of an ecologically minded moral imperative and a desire to integrate this into one’s life.  The thread of this ecological consciousness and its inherent spiritual, textural and resonant qualities exhibited in the writing of environmental writers is a call to action, a call to awaken, a call to connect.  As in the beginning quote, we are all a crossroad, this nexus point in the ecological community of life, a point at which any infinite amount of relationships between ourselves and the environment can exist at any one moment, one affecting and interacting with the other.  In other words, within us exists the possibility of sustainability or destruction.
     Environmental or nature writing can awaken this realization within us by invoking our sense of nature. The most raw and ancient sensibility we have, which is that of living, interacting with, and surviving in, nature, the environment around us.  When this is called forth out of our souls we stir a passion to preserve, protect and cherish the natural world around us.  Thus comes the voice of resistance, nature literature embodies and births an individual’s ecological consciousness and therefore their participation in the preservation of the environment.
     Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862), is one of the most accessible and widely recognized nature writers and he exhibited an ability to keenly observe natures’ workings and quirks and at the same time an ability to criticize and recognize mans fumbling within those workings.  Although Thoreau’s writing to some people can sound like a discontented man’s ramblings, others understand that Thoreau was frustrated by the same things in his time that many of us are today.  His writing can definitely be seen as a voice of resistance as he strived to live simply, which in the world of today is nearly impossible.  “Thoreau cared deeply about the problems of his time and the people around him…, from Henry’s point of view, our world has not improved much…there is generally less today of what Thoreau admired and more of what he deplored.  This only serves to make his ideas more relevant to our time” (http://eserver.org/thoreau...).      Thoreau’s work has influenced many people and continues to do so today.  Thoreau also wrote a volume called Civil Disobedience, which was used as a point of reflection by such important leaders as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.  Civil Disobedience was derived from a lecture that Thoreau had given in 1848 and was originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government”.  “I became convince that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.  No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across that Henry David Thoreau.  As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest” (MLK Jr.).  Obviously Civil Disobedience directly represents a voice of resistance as do Thoreau’s ideas of living simply and in tune with nature, as a member of the natural community rather than ruler of it.  Thoreau mainly wrote essays although he did write some poetry, the work he is most famous for though is Walden, written in 1845..  In this book Thoreau set out to live simply and by himself at Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
        “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep…I went to the woods                 because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,…Our life is frittered away by detail.  An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.  Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!  I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead keep your accounts on your thumb-nail” (Thoreau).

    John Muir, (1838-1914), although famous as an environmental activist, was not well known as a writer until fairly recently.  Muir however, is another very accessible personality in the arena of environmental resistance.  His accomplishments are huge and unforgettable.  He helped create and protect many of our national treasures such as the Yosemite National Park, not only this but he also formed one of the first major environmental organizations, the Sierra Club.  His writing style has been described as spiritually in tune with nature and he definitely held a place for nature in his heart and soul that is echoed in his writing.  This too is an important theme in using literature as a voice of resistance, a sense of the divine in nature.  People have become so disconnected from the awe and wonder of nature that they often have a hard time recognizing the spiritual side within it.  Once recognized though this spiritual side to nature can bring about great activism and awareness in the environmental arena, it serves as a catalyst for action.  For this reason, as discussed above also, the spiritual side to nature writer’s works is very important in formulating a voice of resistance.  Muir was driven by his spiritual connection to nature and it led him to be a great environmental activist.  In the following quotes from Muir we can get a sense of Muir’s spiritual perception of nature and his ecological consciousness.
        “There is a love of wild nature in everybody an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties…Brought into right relationships with the wilderness, man             would see that his appropriation of Earth’s resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and begat ultimate loss and poverty by all…The clearest way to the universe is through a forest                     wilderness…Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will             drop off like autumn leaves” (www.sierraclub.org/john-muir...).

    Muir’s writing was not only spiritually observant but was also very ecologically descriptive of the areas of which he wrote.  Muir was an avid naturalist and became very well versed with the ecosystems of the areas he traveled and studied, so when reading his works the reader can gain a natural historical perspective also.  Muir also had the ability to describe his landscapes in detail in a way that transports the reader there so that they can feel the wind blowing on their face, hear the rustling of a bird and smell the breeze blowing past a flower.  This too is another important aspect to using writing as a voice of resistance.  If the reader can get a textural and sensual grasp of what is being described then they are much more likely to be moved by it and to act in its best interests.
    This leads us into our next author Annie Dillard, (1945).  Dillard is a very descriptive and evocative writer who catches the reader with rawness.  Although she is not an activist per se, her writings reflect the kind of spiritual connection to nature that one finds in most environmental activist’s hearts.  She has been called a mystic and a transcendentalist and compared to such writers as Thoreau or Emerson.  Dillard wishes to study the divine presence in nature and our relationship to it.  In the book At Home on this Earth, the editors discuss Dillard and say, “she seeks metaphysical insights in the Book of Nature, interpreting natural facts in terms of their spiritual significance” (295).  One of Dillard’s most famous works is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she, like Thoreau, went to live in nature simply and observantly for a full year.  Dillard’s writing is often hard to categorize or criticize as she is a highly intellectual writer who touches upon a myriad of topics.  To give an example of some of her work we will look at quotes from several of her books.
        “The creeks…are an active mystery, fresh every minute.  Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present,         the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection…If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation…the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness…Even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for.  The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently             radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough.  But look what happens.  You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose” (www.earthhlight.org/earthsaint....).

    Patiann Rogers is another female writer who often reminds people of Dillard.  She has been writing for more than thirty five years and has written several books of poetry in that time.  She is considered an environmental poet and her work can often be found in the curriculum of many college environmental literature courses.  Her writing style is beautiful, sensual, evocative, and pours forth with scenes of lush, verdant ecosystems.  In her view all one has to do is pick up a field guide to find inspiration and vocabulary to use for poetry.  Through her poetry Rogers hopes to open one to broadening their experience of the natural world, in a manner that is direct and textural.  Poetry is a medium of experience that is somewhere between art and music.  It is rhythmic, colorful, aesthetically pleasing to the mind’s eye, healing and while definitely based on language, creates a music of its’ own.  Rogers work does all these things for the reader by creating her poetry so that it becomes a vehicle.  A vehicle for a reciprocal and sensing relationship with nature through her word, where one can be brought to nature in a unique form, a raw and breathing experience of that, which at one point, we came from, and from whence we long to be.  Rogers truly expresses nature’s relationship to language and enables us to immerse ourselves in it so that we may search out new understandings of our place within nature.  The following is a poem of Roger’s titled “The Hummingbird: A Seduction”.
        If I were a female hummingbird perched still
        And quiet on an upper myrtle branch
        In the spring afternoon and if you were a male
        Alone in the whole heavens before me, having parted
        Yourself, for me, from cedar top and honeysuckle stem
        And earth down, your body hovering in midair
        Far away from jewelweed, thistle and bee balm;

        And if I watched how you fell, plummeting before me,
        And how you rose again and fell, with such mastery
        That I believed for a moment you were the sky
        And the red-marked bird diving inside your circumference
        Was just the physical revelation of the light’s
        Most perfect desire;

        And if I saw your sweeping and sucking
        Performance of swirling egg and semen in the air,
        The weaving, twisting vision of red petal
        And nectar and soaring rump, the rush of your wing
        In its grand confusion of arcing and splitting
        Created completely out of nothing just for me,

        Then when you came down to me, I would call you
        My own spinning bloom of ruby sage, my funneling
        Storm of sunlit sperm and pollen, my only breathless
        Piece of scarlet sky, and I would bless the base
        Of each of your feathers and touch the tine
        Of string muscles binding your wings and taste
        The odor of your glistening oils and hunt
        The honey in your crimson flare
        And I would take you and take you and take you
        Deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted (Firekeeper:..).

    Barry Lopez, a very well respected environmental writer also brings us closer to the wonder of animals within nature in both a spiritual and ecological manner.  As in Dillard’s poem above Lopez’s writing shows us a spiritual connection with animals and allows us to see how we can relate to them on a different level, a level that transcends an object-observer relationship and rather takes us into an interactive emotionally participatory relationship.  Reading Lopez’s work can remind us of why it is so important to cultivate our voice of resistance in order to help preserve, protect, honor and understand the wildlife that we share this earth with.  
    Besides revealing a more spiritual and respectful possible relationship with wildlife Lopez also writes about the relationship between culture and environment and where we fit into this as both individuals and members of an unsustainable society.  In an essay Lopez wrote on this subject he argues that nature writing has been around much longer than has been recognized by scholars.  In the beginning of this paper it is noted that people have been writing of their relationship to the land for many, many years but this writing has not been formally recognized as a voice of resistance until fairly recently.  Lopez touches on this when he says,
        “In the United States in recent years, a kind of writing variously called             “nature writing” or “landscape writing” has begun to receive critical             attention, leading some to assume that this is a relatively new kind of             work.  In fact, writing that takes into account the impact nature and place             have on culture is one of the oldest-and perhaps most singular-threads in             American writing.  Melville in Moby Dick, Thoreau, of course…If there is         anything different in this area of North American writing – and I believe             there is – it is the hopeful tone it frequently strikes in an era of cynical             detachment, and its explicitly dubious view of technological progress,             even of capitalism…In numerous essays it addresses the problem of             spiritual collapse in the West and, like those literatures, it is in search of a             modern human identity that lies beyond nationalism and material wealth”             (1).

    In other words, Lopez is discussing how this type of literature of writing has become used and recognized only recently as a voice of resistance and of hope.  It is a very important educational tool in this respect and it is the belief of many that this type of writing, both older literature such as Thoreau, and newer writing by currently living authors such as Lopez, etc. should be used in some type of high school course curriculum.  In this way young people who may have previous to reading these works not had a real concept of languages connection to nature, or even of environmental issues may be ignited to take action and delve deeper into the subject perhaps becoming environmental activists or writers themselves.  God knows we need more people like this in this critical turning point in earth’s natural history.  Where are we headed if we all live in ignorance and apathy?  Environmental literature not only serves as a voice of resistance but can also serve to create and cultivate a voice of resistance in those who are exposed to it.
    One of the ways in which environmental literature cultivates this activism and awareness is, as discussed above, by revealing to us a different sort of possible human-nature relationship that we may not have realized was possible.  It opens our ecological consciousness to the realization that there is a great and wonderful amount of wisdom other than our own to be found in nature and the processes and creatures contained within it.  A wisdom that is no less important or valid than our own, albeit a wisdom that is somewhat mysterious as it is composed of the very essence of life itself.  This wisdom therefore contains an inherently spiritual quality that is often unperceivable by technology or logic but rather must be sought out through the soul and then transferred into a line of mental inquiry that invokes action on its behalf.  
    In Lopez’s book Lessons from the Wolverines, he sets out to explore the wisdom available to us not through our logic or through our science but through a willingness to become vulnerable and open to the nuances of nature and in this case the wolverines.  This is a beautiful short story that shows the main character’s search for the wisdom of the wolverines that he has been attracted to for so long, he wishes to seek out and find the root of their mysterious power and goes on a journey to do so.
        “I began dreaming about the wolverines.  It was night.  I saw the two of             them lying on their backs on the side of the hill.  They were talking…They         were talking about the stars.  “You have to pay attention,” one of them             said.  “We’re going to show you something.”  I looked up into the sky and             along one edge of the Milky Way I could see it was different…”Look in             there,” said the other wolverine…I looked into the pattern.  I was a bird             then, looking down like an osprey, flying high over the water, a river             moving across the tundra…I could see many things moving in the                 current…One leaf was my father’s face…Some faces, some animals, I             remembered…I started to remember them all, every one of those                 animals…”I’m afraid,” I said.  “I want to get down, come down to the             ground now.”…”Keep going,” said one of the wolverines…Then I saw             myself below, looking up,…I was waving.  “This is our power,” said one             of the wolverines” (26-29).

    There are many approaches to environmental writing and it is a quickly expanding field with degree programs now available in such areas as eco-criticism, which is simply the critique of nature writing, and many other subfields.  It is certainly an exciting time to get into the field of nature writing and there are many expanding opportunities for those who wish to do so.  Besides the types of nature writing discussed above there are also more direct forms, authors who wish through their work to immediately and directly bring about a sense of activism through powerful imagery and language.  Edward Abbey, (1927-1989), is one of these writers.  Abbey is well known for his book The Monkey Wrench Gang, which is a fictional account of four environmental activists who are attempting to liberate parts of Utah and Arizona from destructive forces such as road-builders and miners.  This book inspired a new generation of environmental activists and thus served as not only a voice of resistance but also ignited that voice within many people.  This particular work actually helped in the creation of the organization of Earth First!, a group of direct action environmental activists.  There is now actually a term derived from the book, ‘monkey-wrenching’, which denotes a means of direct action through sabotage such as practiced by the ELF, (Earth Liberation Front).
    Abbey has a cynical and surly writing style that can definitely seek out the anger or passion within an individual.  The following excerpt is from a piece titled “The Journey Home” and was written in 1977.
        “To save what wilderness is left in the American Southwest – and in the             American Southwest only the wilderness is worth saving – we are going to         need all the recruits we can get.  All the hands, heads, bodies, time,             money, effort we can find…those who learn to love what is spare, rough,             wild, undeveloped, and unbroken will be willing to fight for it, will help             resist the strip miners, highway builders, land developers, weapons testers,         power producers, tree chainers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers,             subdividers – the list goes on and on before that zinc-hearted, termite             brained, squint-eyed, near sighted, greedy crew succeeds in completely             californicating what still survives of the Great American Desert” (624).

    In Abbey’s passionate writing many hearts find themselves stirred to action.  This can be a very positive thing, although not when done in a violent manner.  Nonetheless, the environment needs more activists if we are to have a chance of sustainability.  In conclusion, we can see through the work discussed in this paper the vitally important and exciting role that nature writing has in both serving as a voice or resistance and in cultivating that voice within those that read it.  Nature writing serves as a portal through which we can find ourselves transported into the many dimensions and aspects of nature and in turn ourselves, since as we often forget, we too are nature and a part of it.  There are many dimensions to a personal relationship with nature and this type of literature opens these possibilities and realities to the reader.  Through the interaction of language, culture and nature we can find many textures; spiritual, primal, sensual, and so forth.  We can regain a sense of our place within nature, a place that is inherently powerful, mysterious and reciprocal.  We come to realize through reading this literature that when we harm the environment we are only harming ourselves, this is the first step in awakening our ecological consciousness and thus becoming active members of the global community.  Thus we find our voice, a voice of resistance, a voice of resonance and responsibility, a voice of reward and possibility…

    Works Cited/Consulted:
www.earthlight.org/earthsain24.html  (Annie Dillard)
www.eserver.org/thoreau/  (Henry Thoreau)
www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/  (John Muir)
Anderson, Lorraine and Thomas S. Edwards eds.  At Home on This Earth.  Hanover,     N.H.:  University Press of New England, 2002.
Finch, Robert and John Elder eds.  The Norton Book of Nature Writing.  New York:      W.W. Norton and Co., 2002.
Gutkind, Lee ed.  On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors.  New York:  Penguin     Putnam Inc., 2002.
Lopez, Barry.  “A Literature of Place.”  Portland Magazine.  Summer 1997:1-3.
Lopez, Barry.  Lessons from the Wolverine.  Athens, Georgia:  The University of     Georgia Press, 1997.
Rogers, Pattiann.  Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems.  Minneapolis: Milkweed     Editions, 1994.