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Foreword
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[ foreword ] Wayne Franklin What do we talk about when we talk about land? Sharon Stevens deftly answers this question by redirecting it. She attends to what we say about land, to be sure; but more than that, she attends to how we say it. Not that she is interested in the literary “style” of environmental discourse. What attracts her far more than that is the social rhetoric by which we constitute the environment as a subject, by which in the process we also form ourselves into a community. We are all familiar with the polarization that often seems to rule discussions of the world around us. People are presumed to hold a priori positions that sharpen their individual arguments at the same time that they limit the freedom with which they can talk about what are at bottom shared problems. Without denying that people do indeed take such rigid stances, both as a matter of practice and as a matter of ideology, Stevens insists that we should not therefore jump to conclusions. Suspending for a while the urge to pin people down to the implied or stated positions they occupy is common courtesy. It is also a very useful strategy if what we really value is effective (meaning effect-bearing) discussion. Problems with the environment seem so pressing at this point in the twenty-first century that it is easy to become impatient with the endless talk that environmental issues generate. If the insights offered by Stevens appear to be productive of yet more talk and little action, one might reflect that human action in many cases has been a big part of the problem. Had we attended more to the world and less to our own imperatives, the world (and we) might be in better shape today. But I do not want to divide action from language, for language is, as it were, a precursor of action—that which both disposes us to and serves to rationalize certain courses of action. Part of the lesson Stevens gives is that discourse is itself part of the problem. We know that is so if we observe how people in modern industrial cultures tend to speak about nature. It is usually the object of our verbs, the plastic recipient of our meanings and purposes. Of course it is much more than these things; but that is how we talk about it, where we position it in our discourse about the world. Because we assign it such narrow, passive roles in our language, we rarely see beyond those roles to the booming, buzzing realities of the world-as-such. Our sentences are imperially selfcentered . An acquaintance in a well-settled part of metropolitan Boston, talking on the phone the other day, blurted out, “There is a moose in my backyard!” That was, as one might say, an utterly natural response to an unusual occurrence. Yet one might perceive the intrusion quite differently if one viewed nature as something more than a collection of yards and fields and roads and parking lots. An ecological language might de-center the sentence, replacing the presumption of human control with something like a web of syntactic crossings. In many ways, we cannot imagine the world as science tells us it is because our everyday language is inherently possessive. The limits placed on nature by our discourse about it have the tendency to suppress our recognition of the dissonance between statement and actuality —and to worsen the bad effects of our “doing” on and in the world. Nature writers since Gilbert White of Selborne and Henry Thoreau of Concord at times have managed to crack open the hazy, shellacked surface of our talk about nature and let some light and air and actual things through. In Walden, Thoreau erases our terms while endeavoring to listen for those the world might be thought to offer. At the end of his chapter “Sounds” (which is a mélange of human and nonhuman noise, from locomotive whistles to the “dismal screams” of the screech owl), he thus imagines the human house as a natural object, with “No yard! but unfenced Nature” reaching up to its sills, so that an intrusive suburban moose could be no surprise at all in his Concord. Such flips of terminology and perspective are salutary and sanative. But for the most part even nature writers do not often allow nature to take over human language. They deal in talk, not things. Thoreau himself verges perilously close...