Regionalism and the Humanities

Part One. Sensing Place: The Authority of Nature

Sensing Place: The Authority of Nature i Insisting on the power and authority a specific regional nature exerts over human life has particular value for writers committed to environmental conservation. Thus Annie Proulx regrets the way authors of books about middle-class life dismiss that authority of nature; the mark of middle-class existence for these modern antiregionalists is apparently its economic conquest of and consequently its distance from nature. This distance is just what makes these suburban lives feel unreal and interiorized , at least in comparison with novels of rural or poor folk upon whom nature—described in detail, which grounds the work in physical truths—still exerts force, demanding visceral responses. The country that is “jackstrawed with highways,” in Proulx’s vivid description, is one in which standardized consumer products and their signs are more crucial to middle-class consciousness than trees and birds; and accordingly , any sense of what’s real or specific or what belongs to a place is dulled, since all such physical reality is filtered through a homogenizing web of human (not natural) interdependence.1 For Proulx, the idea of a regionalism based on J. B. Jackson’s definition of landscape as a synthetic or man-made space, a space modified to suit humans that then orders their perceptions, means that there has been a loss of an authentic and powerful natural environment that connects with and impacts human life and thus the loss of a true regional landscape. sensing pl ace 3 More particularly, this erasure of “true” regionalism and the authority of its landscapes is a bad thing for anyone who is interested in preserving wild nature, separated from relationships with humans (e.g., envisioning rivers without dams or bridges). Proulx cites as a model Leslie Silko’s iteration of the idea that nonwestern (true natives , in this construction) peoples do not objectify nature from outside it, but instead they form an inextricable part of the landscape. The writers like Silko whom Proulx praises as making specific landscapes an essential part of their fictions—writing rooted in “a sense of place based on regional landscape,” whether it is environmental literature or novels—project human consciousness into those landscapes ; the cancerous brain, for example, becomes a metaphor of nuclear tests in the Southwest—or vice versa.2 Thus insistence on the importance of details of soil, insects, plants, weather, while at times anthropomorphizing those features, is a tradition designed to preserve (or conserve) nature from becoming another commodity. The promotion of a regionalism founded on man-made systems is less hospitable to a conservationist mission, though it offers benefits for regions like the Midwest (by privileging them in the regionalist discourse), which seem to lack just such a powerfully determining natural environment and whose distinctive features instead seem much more the product of human manipulation. William Slaymaker’s “The Ec(h)ological Conscience” is a case study of how late twentieth-century nature writers project themselves into a regional landscape, with the goal of encouraging readers to “put down roots” in particular ecosystems. In his discussion of the Plains naturalist writings of John Janovy, Loren Eiseley, and Wes Jackson, Slaymaker argues that they connect themselves emotionally to nature by personifying it and endowing it with their feelings. As Slaymaker astutely notes, the intent is to make us “like”—to feel an affinity with and a desire for—local animals and plants and to perceive our resemblance to them. Doing so is specifically an antidote to a view of nature that treats it as an economic object to be efficiently used and manipulated , because it offers instead a view of nature as a model for how humans should exist in a place. However, these authors also seek to 4 sensing pl ace recover the “wildness” of nature, its difference from human mentalities , in order to hold on to what is being ruined by human activity. Slaymaker’s examples are all scientists, often with academic affiliations , who are writing about the Plains not for scholarly peers but for a general audience, for whom their scholarly credentials presumably underwrite the accuracy and objectivity of their observations of nature, as precise botanical illustrations do for their texts. Titles like Back in Keith County seem designed for a regional audience who might feel particular loyalties to a specific place and so be more readily motivated...