Voluntary Measures: Environmental Stewardship in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

ROBERT M. MYERS Lock Haven University Voluntary Measures: Environmental Stewardship in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses IN MARCH 2012 REPRESENTATIVE BOB GOODLATTE, A REPUBLICAN FROM Virginia, introduced legislation that would limit the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Goodlatte praised individual farmers who are making “good faith efforts” to clean up the bay and denounced the EPA for ignoring the “voluntary measures being undertaken by farms and individuals.” In March 2013 Kathleen Hartnett White of the Texas Public Policy Foundation urged conservatives to reject the environmental establishment’s “regulatory control of economic activity and private lives.” Instead, those who believe in “individual responsibility” need to point out that “human effort is the only means by which the environment can be improved.” Both Goodlatte and White are drawing upon the anti-government ideology of the Reagan Revolution, which led to a backlash against regulatory agencies. Ultimately, however, the roots of the debate over the role of the government in environmental issues can be found in the New Deal.1 Although critics have consistently defined Faulkner’s “great period” as beginning in 1929 with The Sound and the Fury and ending in 1942 with Go Down, Moses, it was not until Ted Atkinson’s 2006 book, Faulkner and the Great Depression, that anyone noticed that these dates correspond almost exactly with the years of America’s worst economic crisis.2 As Atkinson points out, this oversight is the product of a consensus by both leftist and formalist critics that Faulkner’s modernist aesthetic is fundamentally apolitical (3). The discussion by Atkinson and other critics of Faulkner’s engagement with the ideological issues of the Depression years opens up an ecocritical reading of Go Down, Moses. Previous ecocritics have recognized the centrality of environmental issues in the novel. Noting Faulkner’s “evocation of a vanishing natural 1 Switzer discusses the history of American opposition to environmentalism. 2 For Faulkner’s “great period” see Millgate, Achievement 201. 646 Robert M. Myers splendor that has been destroyed,” Judith Bryant Wittenberg argues that Go Down, Moses explores “with elegiac eloquence essential questions about the interconnections between human beings and their environment” (69). Similarly, Louise Westling sees Ike McCaslin as one of the group of American literary heroes who excuse their mistreatment of the landscape “by retreating into a nostalgia that erases their real motives, displaces responsibility, and takes refuge in attitudes of self-pitying adoration” (5). I would argue that Go Down, Moses is not just elegiac or nostalgic, but productive, as it negotiates a space between individualism and governmental coercion. At a time when Americans were considering statist intervention as a response to the environmental destructioncausedbytheindividualisticethicofthenineteenthcentury, Faulkner’s novel posits a responsible individualism as an alternative. In turn, this reading invites a reappraisal of the role of the Edmonds family. I On June 12, 1941, as Faulkner was finishing the manuscript of Go Down, Moses, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company dedicated the nation’s first “tree farm” on a cutover tract near Elma, Washington. In November, capitalizing on the enthusiasm generated by the Weyerhaeuser event, the National Lumber Manufacturers Association created the “American Tree Farms System,” and by 1949, 17 million acres had been certified as tree farms.3 But not everyone saw this reforestation effort by the industry as altruistic. US Forest Service Chief Lyle Watts grumbled, “I cannot escape the conclusion . . . that the real object of this campaign is to ward off public regulation” (Sharp 43-44). Indeed, Watts’s skepticism was legitimate: for decades the lumber industry had been aggressively fighting those who argued that governmental regulation was necessary to restore the forests that had been devastated by private forestry. The Southern forests were in an especially dire condition by the 1940s. In the 1880s after Northern lumber companies had exhausted the forests of the Great Lakes, they began buying stumpage in the South. By 1890 the federal government had sold the industry over two million acres of public land, often for as little as $1.25 an acre. Giant mills were constructed and railroad lines were extended deep into the forests. Such heavily capitalized projects demanded continuous production, and state 3 For the...