The World in Which We Occur: John Dewey, Pragmatist Ecology, and American Ecological Writing in the Twentieth Century (review)

Neil W. Browne urges ecocritics to shift their focus from the literary realism they favored in the 1990s to something he calls “pragmatist ecology,” a notion he derives from Dewey. Browne argues that in all but name, pragmatist ecology has long informed the work of American writers about nature. But his exposition of pragmatist ecology, and reading of “ecological writing” by Muir, Steinbeck, Carson, John Haines, Barry Lopez, and Terry Tempest Williams, leaves something to be desired in the way of clarity.

Browne treats pragmatism as essentially Deweyan, and unabashedly echoes Dewey’s unfortunate stylistic quirks and off-key word choices. Browne’s devotion to Dewey also leads him to ignore the contributions of neopragmatists like Rorty, Putnam, and others, whose work might have helped him to better realize that pragmatist doubt about epistemology as philosophy has traditionally conceived of it does not entail flouting logic and science in favor of sheer metaphor. As Browne describes it, “pragmatist ecology” insists “that human experience is inextricable from the nonhuman world” and that, as a consequence of this inextricability, the “aesthetic can be understood as ecological” (2). “Inextricable” is a word to which ecocritics often resort, sometimes to post a useful reminder that human beings are, after all, natural entities. At other times, ecocritics use the word to suggest that our entanglement in nature means that we can never really understand its complexities, despite the analytical powers of human consciousness. This seems to be one of those other times: our analytical powers, on Browne’s account, are likely to falsify and misconstrue experience, especially the “ecosystemic experience” (11) most important to pragmatist ecology and to which the writers Browne discusses are peculiarly sensitive. Such experience gives rise more to wonder and art than to understanding and science. It is all-encompassing, enfolding human beings in a never-ending process whereby the boundaries between mind and world, subject and object, and so on, are revealed as “porous—ecotonal” (3). An “ecotone” is a transitional zone between two ecosystems or habitats. Browne turns the word into a metaphor for, among other things, the fluid relation between the world, the text, its author, and its reader—a relation, he argues, that obviates the worries about representation so bothersome to other ecocritics.

Browne uses other keywords, not least of all “ecology” itself, in a similarly metaphorical fashion. He suggests, for example, that Carson’s books on the sea constitute “among them an ecology” (79). His impulse to describe every form of interrelatedness whatsoever as “ecological,” including that between three texts intended to document ecological relationships, seems to involve more than just a manner of speaking. Browne wants his readers to accept that texts and the natural world actively “interpenetrate” one another and therefore “evolve” together—a proposition he repeats many times throughout his book, and one verging on the metaphysical if not the mystical. By pressing his metaphors as hard as he does, Browne risks giving them precisely the kind of meaning—one without any “cash value”—most pragmatists do not find useful.