Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (review)

Blending narratives of outdoor adventures in Nevada, Oregon, California, and abroad with references to his wide reading in the fields of nature writing and ecocriticism, Scott Slovic contemplates the role of writing that contributes to the environmental movement in his new book Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. A collection of previously published essays and several speeches, Going Away to Think addresses the question of what is most relevant for scholars and writers working in today’s post-9/11 world of terrorism and social unrest.

“Ecocritical responsibility requires both social engagement and reflective retreat,” he asserts in his preface (n.p.). A professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno as well as a founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Slovic references an array of writers, poets, artists, philosophers, and activists, from Henry David Thoreau to Terry Tempest Williams. He reviews the contributions of writers and scholars around the globe to the literature of the environment and encourages communication among writers, scholars, artists, and scientists, maintaining that ecocriticism and environmental literature must exist in a social context.

Slovic praises “the lyrical intensity of the narrative voice” as a response to environmental crisis in many of these essays but nowhere more forcefully than in his own narrative of grief and loss, “Be Prepared for the Worst” (50). Assembled as if in a series of journal entries ranging from 1994, when he and his former wife, Analinda, lost a child, to 2004, when he concluded a research project on the way nature writers work, Slovic’s essay examines the power of modern parables in books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991) to shape public opinion and public policy even as he relates his own story of loss. Without reflection, without poetry, and without storytelling, he implies, it is easy to slip away into the “gray bureaucratic language of the boardroom” where only statements of profit and loss matter. “The phenomenon of valuation—the actual process of forging values—is perhaps the most important aspect of our relationship to the natural world that environmental literature can help us to understand,” he writes (51).

Ecocritics, Slovic affirms, are often “muscular scholars” who are equally at home on mountain trails and in libraries, but they must be careful to understand their place in the world. “Storytelling, combined with clear exposition, produces the most engaging and trenchant scholarly discourse,” he asserts (34–35). In “Seeking the Language of Solid Ground,” he tells his own story of a near fatal fall while hiking the Shirakami Mountains in Japan. Weighed down literally and figuratively with a backpack full of books, Slovic slips off a ledge and slides eighty feet down a rocky cliff. Miraculously escaping serious injury, he concludes that “ecocriticism without narrative is like stepping off the face of a mountain—it’s the disoriented language of free fall” (35). By telling his own stories, Slovic illuminates the nature of nature writing, its power to inspire attentiveness to our place in the world—and he invites us to get out there and experience the natural world for ourselves.