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Imagination, Beauty, and the Urban Land Ethic Teaching Environmental Literature in New York City Devin Zuber The problem with nature in New York is that there isn’t any. A student said this to me in a class I was teaching, Environmental Literature, in response to a question I had asked about how one can maintain contact with nature and the wild in New York. Her response was typical of an attitude I encounter at the start of the semester in this course: a prevailing assumption that nature is separate from our densely populated streets, that it is in upstate New York’s Adirondacks, in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, perhaps, maybe, in the north of Central Park, but certainly not in the urban spaces we inhabit as New Yorkers. Teaching literature with an environmental edge, engaging urban students with the growing field of what English professors are calling ecocriticism , always brings me back to some core questions about the discipline when I face the misperception that nature is ‘‘out there’’ and beyond, but never in our own city backyards: What role is literature to play in fostering a broader environmental awareness, especially in a multicultural city of millions? How does reading poetry and the process of writing relate to the beautiful, complex worlds outside of the book and away from the classroom? I believe environmental literature has a special function in nurturing what Aldo Leopold famously termed the land ethic: a deepening connection to the areas we inhabit, an awareness of the systems that shape our habitats into something unique. ‘‘This,’’ in Leopold’s words from A Sand County Almanac, ‘‘reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health PAGE 109 109 ................. 18313$ CH11 09-07-12 13:55:34 PS 110 Devin Zuber of the land.’’ The land ethic is thus a moral imperative that is contingent on our perception; it transforms the abstractness of living in space into a concrete and localized place. In William Kornblum’s essay that appears in this volume, he describes how simply walking around the local streets with an attentive eye is the first step in fomenting a land ethic in his students. Reading natural histories of local places also certainly helps, and Kornblum and many others in this book have made important contributions to broadening New Yorkers’ collective sense of place. (After finishing Sullivan’s recent Rats, I must even admit a new regard for the millions of hardy vermin that crawl under our streets and through the walls; see his essay here for an account of that book’s process.) As an English professor and not a natural historian, I would further argue that the land ethic is fundamentally enriched by literature of the imagination, by so-called fiction, and that such work should be a core part of any environmental literary curriculum. If a land ethic is contingent on the senses that observe the areas we inhabit, and these observations are enriched by knowledge of ecosystems and circulations often invisible to the naked eye, it is equally dependent on the human imagination: the universal and innate capacity to image ourselves and others beyond the confines of what is seen, heard, and felt. Poetry feeds the imagination, which in turn energizes our perception and broadens the space within us for a potential urban land ethic. Ever since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with its cult of reason and embrace of empirical science, imagination has often received short shrift, paling alongside the virtues of logic and universal objectivity. The Romantics rebelled against this paradigm and struggled to bring back an appreciation of imagination as an intrinsic part of human perception. Not coincidentally, many have argued that in poetry by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake (among other Romantics) we can locate the first glimmerings of an ecological consciousness, a green thinking that anticipates our modern conservation concerns. Still, our dominant contemporary world view remains close to the secular humanism that emerged in post-Renaissance Europe, with the imagination viewed, at best, as a sort of entertainment luxury, and at worst as a dangerous source of delusional fantasy. I often point out to my students a relationship between the histories of poetry and environmental crisis in the twentieth century: that precisely as poetry declines as a popular mode of cultural expression, environmental problems become more endemic, and are related to a growing perceptual disconnect from nature. Both facts...

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