Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

18. Steinbeck's Environmental Ethic

EIGHTEEN Steinbeck's Environmental Ethic: Humanity in Harmony with the Land John H. Timmerman Steinbeck's ethical imperative is apparent not only in late works ofhis socalled "moral phase" but throughout his career. His environmental ethic in particular is trenchantly voiced in America and Americans, Travels with Charley, and Sweet Thursday, where he decries America's wastefulness as a moral lapse. Informing his earliest novels is an equally compelling, ifless strident, concern with human responsibility toward the environment, and throughout his oeuvre characters struggle to establish a harmonious relationship with the land. During his later years John Steinbeck entered a period of intense ethical reflection that inevitably influenced his literature. It occurred to such an extent, in fact, that one might be tempted to categorize the work of the last decade as the "literature of moral concern" or the period itself as a "moral phase." If one were to categorize Steinbeck's fiction in such a way, and this essay intends to demonstrate the futility of so doing, one might date the period from the publication of East of Eden (1952) with its gnarled philosophical speculations, its exploration of moral obligations and the effects of moral transgression , and its proliferation of biblical allusions as a sounding board for supporting echoes. The works of the next decade might seem an extension of similar speculation, one author musing upon the moral decay and ethical paralysis of a people whom he has long loved but now finds dangerously distanced from a holding center of personal and national virtues. Such categorization and such terms, however, are decidedly insufficient , suggesting the discovery of something altogether new and unfamiliar. It is as if Steinbeck suddenly caught a moral vision the way one catches a cold-quite by accidentof circumstance and con- Humanity in Harmony with the Land 311 dition. At the worst, such terms suggest that the literature of earlier years was somehow bereft of moral concern. Such terminology, moreover, renders whatever moral concerns Steinbeck held during this period indefinable, simply an amorphous cloud of political opinion, petty grievances, some old-age raillery; and a dyspeptic affliction of conservatism, mixed together on the final horizon of his life. What, precisely, was this so-called moral concern about? The task, when it comes to a consideration ofhis ethical views as a structured pattern of both moral oughtness and also an enactment of that oughtness in human actions, is to isolate a particular instance as a case study-in this case his sense of an environmental ethic. In so doing, how:ever, one discerns three things: first, his environmental ethic did in fact receive deliberate articulation during the final decade of his life; second, that ethic, nonetheless, had been intuitively held throughout his life; and, third, that ethic infuses his literature by providing thematic pattern and direction. Perhaps the most overt expression of Steinbeck's moral concern appears in America and Americans (1966), wherein Steinbeck is invited , like an elder statesman, to reflect upon things past, the woeful present, and the uncertain future. He doesn't miss a punch. He names the enemies of the moral order as comfort, plenty, securitythe very ideals that the nation sought but that, in its 'marvelous excess , it perverted to a poverty of spirit: cynicism, boredom, and smugness. It is Hadleyburg on a national scale. As Steinbeck lamented in a 1959 letter to Adlai Stevenson, "We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty" (SLL 652). In America and Americans Steinbeck traces our failure in regard to the environment to a perfidious irresponsibility with roots in the spirit of humanity. While in modern environmental ethics we are inclined to see irresponsibility in terms of criminal actions-that is, littering is a criminal act punishable by a fine, as is toxic waste dumping-Steinbeck sees this irresponsibility as a failure in understanding and sympathy. While littering may not have been, in his time, a criminal action, it was an evil action nonetheless. The distinction is important to the case here, for evil, in Steinbeck's ethics, is a positioning ofthe heart in regard to other living things. We either devour those things like tigers, as Cannery Row had it, or live with them in a respectful equilibrium. 312 Timmerman Yet the history of Americans in regard to the land, in Steinbeck's view, is marked by a rapacious attitude that sees the land merely as something...