Ecopoetics Rule 1: A Good Workman Always Blames His Tools

In searching for a new springcoppice “Poem of the Month,” I have been reminded of Andy Brown and John Burnside’s poetry collection Goose Music (Salt, 2008). Here the poets set out explicitly to address the question of how human beings might dwell ethically on the earth. An ecologically engaged collection, it explores the capacities of an ecopoetic mode to analyse and explicate relationships between human beings and the wider natural world. One poem, “The Other Brother – Part III: My Brother Audubon,” describes the undertakings of the great ornithological illustrator:

“The bird he sees and the bird he draws

are one. Which begs an inner silence,

shifting from the world of words

to the language of tone and line. 

He must forget the names he knows – 

neither ‘tail’ nor ‘wing’, nor ‘beak’ nor ‘claw’ – 

and simply more along the edge of each, 

with his eye set in his pencil-tip,   

thinking of no sound at all – save that of ink

on paper – to catch the truth

of their existence, out there, in the world.”

[…]

   

Throughout his career, Burnside has demonstrated a particular interest in the notion of language as a Fall from a direct relationship with the natural world. His work incorporates a fascination with Adamic naming, and the implication that the poet himself must always work with broken tools. Yet one of the most distinctive features of Burnside’s poetry is his rhythmic listing of plants, animals and features of the landscape. He appears torn between poetic cataloguing that is a kind of hymning, or perhaps incantation, and the notion that naming succeeds only in letting the described world escape.

In the poem “Taxonomy I: Flora,” Burnside notes that “looking always worked towards a word: / trading the limits of speech / for the unsaid presence.” In this reading, any act of articulation has an elegiac quality, since language displaces this presence of what remains unsaid. (The elegiac note is an appropriate one for the work of Audubon, who famously killed vast numbers of birds in order to accurately record their appearance.) Further, in “Taxonomy 2: Fauna,” Burnside reports that “Once we are close enough to give them names / we cannot help but treat them as our own,” one of the poet’s more explicit statements about the consequences of knowledge, inevitably framed in language, and its links to the use of the natural world as resource. The latter claim suggests that an ecopoetic work would necessarily acknowledge the faultiness of language, its displacement of the real and, most importantly, its unfair claims to environmental ownership.

In “My Brother Audubon” the problem of interceding language is side-stepped by the illustrator as he creates a link between his direct experience of the sight of a bird, and the picture he captures on the page. The closing down of the language gap – in which the witnessed bird is described in the mind, before being transcribed on the page – is indicated by the transfer of the eye to the tip of the pencil. Looking and touching / drawing “are one.” The pencil-point eye becomes an organ of touch and trace – it is epidermic, a particular modification of the skin. Yet while language must be removed from Audubon’s endeavours in order for accuracy of depiction to be enabled, such a practice is described through the medium of just this faulty, fallible language. The artist may be able to side-step words, but the poet(s) of course cannot.

In Nature Cure (Chatto & Windus, 2005) Richard Mabey delivers a credo: “I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it.” Ecopoetics must, then, continue to work with the only tools available, the broken ones of a language that claims false ownership, intercedes and ill describes. In doing so it must acknowledge this problematic toolkit. A good ecopoetic workman must always blame his tools.

Self Preservation

Having lamented the absence of a detailed account of the evictions executed in the formation of America's National Parks (see post here), I now discover that Mark Dowie's Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples (MIT Press, 2009) offers just such an account. Dowie argues that while the aims of the conservation movement had behind them an in many ways admirable moral imperative, their conflation of the "natural" with a landscape empty of humans resulted in the persecution of native populations. The subsequent displacement of such populations from their homelands, in areas including Yosemite, Yellowstone and Mesa Verde, was so agressively undertaken as to allow them to classify, in contemporary terms, as refugees.

In a recent article, Dowie suggests that a major source of the conflict between conservationists and resident peoples was "conflicting views of nature," along with "radically different definitions of 'wilderness.'" While recent attempts to understand the notion of the "wild" or of "wilderness" (in the work of Jay Griffiths, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane amongst others) may seem to be merely interesting exercises in philosophical history, Dowie's point suggests that a faulty or one-dimensional understanding of these terms can in fact have serious, widespread consequences over a lengthy historical range. His other important observation is that "the very landscapes they [the conservationists] seek to protect owe their high biodiversity to the practices of the people who have lived there, in some cases for thousands of years." Behind this claim is another - that man is himself an intrinsic part of the natural world, and any attitude or philosophical stance that suggests that nature stands outside man, and is available for his contemplation without consequence, is sadly misguided. While the motive behind such contemplative exercises might very well be the understanding of the self, creating emptied landscapes in order to faciliate insight is no preservation of the "natural" at all, and as such can provide limited insight into the human self, which can surely only truly be understood in relation to the natural world, other humans included.

(Image: Miwok-Paiute ceremony, Yosemite Park, 1872)

Guilt Edges

Yesterday's Guardian prints a response from Trudie Styler (here) to accusations made by Marina Hyde (here) regarding the sincerity of her environmental campaign work. Hyde had wondered whether environmental credentials really could accrue to someone who flew to meetings and campaign events, at times by private jet. (The private jet stories have been reported extensively in the tabloids - the red tops may not be very green, but they are sniffer dogs for celebrity insincerity). Gut instinct draws me towards the thoughtful and acerbic Hyde, and away from Trudie "Seven Homes" Styler. The headline used for the latter's Guardian response is "It is not hypocritical to fly if I'm campaigning for the environment" - too glib by half at first reading. But Styler points us toward interesting questions about the ethics of travel-as-awareness-raising, particularly when that awareness typically involves recognition of plane travel's contribution to anthropogenic climate change.

Last year, Timothy Morton used videoconferencing to "appear" at an ASLE conference here at Edinburgh University (he discusses this decision here). Next week, the Ashden Trust will use similar methods to contribute to the Earth Matters on Stage Festival and Symposium in Oregon (as Robert Butler mentions in his excellent blog here). And poet and author Kathleen Jamie claims to have turned down a BBC invitation to visit the Arctic because she felt that it could not be justified as essential travel (see interview here). What questions might this raise in the minds of those artists and writers who have travelled in the region, for example with Cape Farewell? Ian McEwan's much-anticipated new novel (which will apparently feature a "background hum" of a climate change theme, as reported in The New Yorker here) was partly inspired by his Cape Farewell expedition. Richard Mabey states that in Findings (a collection of prose pieces) Jamie "has written far and away the best book in my field" (see Ashden Directory article here). What might Jamie have achieved if she had made her own journey to a polar region?

These issues must surely strike all of us who travel in order to undertake what we can loosely describe as environmental work. Can I justify my own flights to the Peruvian Amazon this summer, since the expedition I will be helping to lead (BSES Amazon 09) actively seeks to create scientists and environmental campaigners from among its young participants? Shouldn't an environmental awareness leader (my role) simply stay at home? Whatever our intentions to assist in the creation of a new mindset regarding our treatment of the environment, we must look rigorously at our own behaviour first. It seems many attempts to be green are guilt-edged.