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)

Wanted: New Literary Terminology

In a short interview (available on YouTube here), Jessica Woollard from the Marsh Agency discusses her current stable of writers. Seeking a way to describe Robert Macfarlane, Jay Griffiths and Jim Perrin, she goes for "nature writing, for want of a better phrase." Woollard hits upon a problem that many of us analysing such writing, or contributing to the field ourselves, have struggled with of late: what might that better phrase be? "Nature writing" and "nature writers" seem to be terms we're struck with in today's literary critical circles. If a dash of sexiness is needed, we have "the new nature writing" (itself the title of the excellent Granta issue 102, details here). That "new" implies that the long heritage of nature writers (from gentleman naturalists and clerical scholars, to the Romantics, to twentieth century ecologists and enthusiasts) is now joined by a rank of writers responding not only to that heritage, but to today's environmental predicaments. The new nature writers have an acute sense of their moment in history. In addition, they are able to draw on the rich ecological literary heritage (dominated in the critical consciousness, perhaps unfairly, by British and American writers) to develop distinctive ways of writing about the natural world. For Woollard, "it is all about the writing, in this area." It seems that if you're writing about the environment, elegantly and innovatively, with an awareness of the legacy you inherit mixed with a sense of the particular pressures on today's planet, you are a "new nature writer." We'll work on a new literary terminology to better capture this important endeavour.