Greening The Lyre: Environmental Poetics And Ethics

Afterword: Politics and Environmental Poetics

1 5 Politics and Environmental Poetics  When I began this study, my office was on the second floor of the tallest building on the University of Oregon campus, a structure that also houses the departments of English, history, sociology, philosophy , economics, and comparative literature, as well as the Humanities Center. If I climbed to the seventh floor and looked through the windows of a seminar room that was usually unlocked, I was often rewarded with a fine view of the university with its manicured lawns and stately trees. Farther east, the Cascade range rose, its snowcapped summits visible when weather permitted (and when the grass seed farmers refrained from burning the stubble in their vast fields to the north). Below those peaks lies the most “productive” forest in the United States. Wave after wave of logging has stripped entire slopes of their trees, leaving vast swaths of blasted ground and snarled slash baking in the summer heat. In the towns that dot the flank of the Cascades, trees are processed into lumber and veneer and paper, products very much in evidence in the typical academic office, including my own. As the remaining ancient trees are consumed, the mills close one by one; the industry is shifting south to stands of tropical timber and back to the maturing monoculture forests of the southeastern states. One morning, as I was readying an early draft of this book, the radio announced the ravaging by fire of hundreds of thousands of acres of forest in the central and eastern parts of the state. To the south, in California, the lights flickered and went out—the second large-scale power failure of the summer. The unusually hot weather caused high-voltage lines to sag; when they touched the trees below they arced, jolting the grid from Mexico to Canada. Crews kept themselves busy cutting down hundreds of trees that posed a threat to the system. To the north, on the great dams of the Columbia, the Bonneville Power Administration dedicated more water to electrical generation to satisfy an increased demand for power. Water was diverted from spillways and fish ladders. Some scientists and environmentalists predicted that , endangered chinook could perish each day they were forced to negotiate the steel turbine blades of the electrical generators or were compelled to circle endlessly at the base of dry ladders . An industry spokesman estimated that less than ten fish were likely to die during the period of increased energy production. Ravaged forests. Dying salmon. In Imagining the Earth, John Elder argues that “poetry’s task is to ground human culture once more on a planet rich in nonhuman life and beauty” (). It is a noble sentiment, made nobler as the world around us becomes less rich and less beautiful with the destruction of forests, rivers, and other ecosystems . But what can poetry really hope to accomplish in the face of environmental devastation and extraordinary rates of extinction? How can an art that is considerably marginalized in the public sphere     alter the bearings of a culture bent on destruction? Do we have reason , at this late date, to believe, with Eliot, that poetry “makes a difference to the speech, to the sensibility, to the lives of all the members of a society, to all the members of the community, to the whole people , whether they read and enjoy poetry or not: even, in fact, whether they know the names of their greatest poets or not” (“Social” ; Elder )? To the extent that humanity is presently reevaluating its relationship to the nonhuman world, poets are contributing to the effort by offering both novel and time-honored metaphors as alternatives to the concepts and attitudes that accompany environmental destruction .Evenso,tomanypeopleNatureremainsmerelyaresourcetobe exploited, raw material for human ambitions. But to others, Nature is mother, lover, friend, the real polis, the web of being and becoming . If our hope is to minimize environmental destruction while working to establish something like “balance” with the nonhuman, the prospect for success arguably rests with the production of more responsible metaphors to live by, and their extensive propagation. While I have supreme faith in the ability of poets to generate the figures that might shape a better world, I am far less sanguine concerning poetry’s ostensible power to move through the world with strength and grace enough to change minds and hearts. Other rhetorical acts, especially those that command a larger audience than...