Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

17. John Steinbeck

SEVENTEEN John Steinbeck: Late-Blooming Environmentalist Joel w. Hedgpeth A contemporary and colleague ofboth John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts , Joel Hedgpeth is also a native Californian, marine biologist, editor of Between Pacific Tides, and recipient ofthe Browning Awardfor Conserving the Environment. In short, he is eminently well equipped to discuss the coevolution ofSteinbeck's environmental consciousness with that ofthe nation at large. Hedgpeth, who defines environmentalism as the recognition that lithe human race is exceeding the earth's carrying capacity at an exponential rate by. overpopulation" and that IIcontinued exploitation of the earth's resources to support our elaborate material culture is not sustainable ," concludes that Steinbeck's most sophisticated thinking about the environment occurs in his later works, especially in America and Americans (1966), now sadly out ofprint. Americans, even in these days of rising concern, still tend to look on nature through an eighteenth-century rose-colored window-Palladian is understood. I speak not only of the creationists, who still consider Moses the best biologist ever and vehemently reject the overwhelming testimony of scientists about evolution, but also of economists, politicians, manufacturers, and happy summer campers, for all of whom nature is forever infinitely generous, forgiving, and abundant. We cannot do any real damage to her, we still say to ourselves; she is now, as ever, a mother who never says no to her children . Eden survives for us, if only in the endlessness of our material expectations. -Donald Worster, The Wealth ofNature (1993) John Steinbeck was a country boy, born and raised in the small town of Salinas, the principal town of an agricultural and stock-raising region, the valley and flanking hills of the Salinas River. Not far to 294 Hedgpeth the west there was the sea, the broad bight of Monterey Bay, with the city of Monterey and its satellite Pacific Grove on the south, its beaches teeming with the life of the sea. As a boy Steinbeck roamed this country as his own and often described it in beautiful passages, dripping with nostalgia, that added a sense of reality to his stories. That power to evoke the feeling ofhis natural environment remained with him all his life, and it was no surprise to see that the opening pages of East of Eden, the best of his later novels, were selected to accompany the 1850 painting of the Salinas Valley for that elegant collection of reproductions of paintings of California scenes, 0, Cali- "fornia! (Vincent 1990). This same extract was also included in a literary anthology (Michaels et al. 1989). As Wallace Stegner put it, "Steinbeck had a transcendent sense of place, (he) knew the Santa Lucia Mountains, from the stacks and skerries of the shore through the mist forests of the westward-draining canyons up through the high chamisal country to the baking ridges and waterless valleys of the rain shadow" (Stegner 1992, 149). Fondness for scenery or remembrance of places past are not essential for environmentalists, however,and we find little in the tone of Steinbeck's early work that suggests more than a fondness for scenery , oftentimes mystical in its intensity. Most readers of Steinbeck do not think of him as an environmentalist in the modem sense of that word. Environmentalism, as we know it today, is based on the realization that the human race is exceeding the earth's carrying capacity at an exponential rate by overpopulation and that continued exploitation of the earth's resources to support our elaborate material culture is not sustainable. Used in this sense, the term "environmentalism" did not come into common use until the observation ofthe first Earth Day on 21 April 1970.1 John Steinbeck died on 20 December 1968, about fourteen months earlier. Nevertheless, our generation (I include myself as well as Steinbeck, since I am only nine years and eight months younger) began to hear about concern for protecting natural resources fairly early on. The word then was conservation, ardently espoused by Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, who defined it as "wise use" of natural resources. In 1910 Pinchot published a collection of his polemics titled The Fight for Conservation, in which we find this statement: A Late-Blooming Environmentalist 295 The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development. There has been afundamental misconception that conservation means nothing but the husbanding ofour resources for future generations. There could be no more serious mistake...