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Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism Under Critique
Michael P. Cohen
Standin' at the crossroads, risin' sun goin' down
. . . got the crossroad blues this mornin', Lord, baby I'm sinkin' down
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| Robert Johnson |
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| ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIANS and ecocritics—scholars who combine literary and historical criticism of texts about nature—share common roots. Many writers who later would call themselves environmental historians or ecocritics began by reading a few books after World War II that opened both of these traditions of inquiry. Directed toward historians and literary critics, these books pursued, simultaneously, a history and critique of American ideas of the West. |
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Environmental historian John Opie traces his academic interest to the intellectual historian, Perry Miller.1 I trace my interest in ecocriticism also to intellectual historians. Out of Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950), came an awareness of the disparity between the imagined, symbolic West and the actualities, the limits of environmental factors. Out of Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (1964), came the premise that a culture sees its land according to its desires, and this is worked out by following the pastoral ideal in American imagination. Out of William Goetzmann's Exploration and Empire (1966), came the thesis that a culture finds what it seeks. Out of Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), came the idea that a structural link between mind and land was drawn directly from discussions at the Sierra Club wilderness conferences. Historians and literary critics share these books. At the same time that these writers have explored how we imagine where we live and what we have done to our living spaces, they and others writing in this tradition also care to value and protect these spaces.2 |
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Opie also remembers "interest in something definable as environmental history," beginning for him with a long camping trip to the West and wilderness. "Wilderness protection lacked an historical perspective" then, as he later commented. When he organized sessions at the AHA in 1972, 1973, and 1976, and at the American Studies Association in 1975, he found colleagues in Donald Hughes, Samuel Hays, and Donald Worster. |
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As historians and literary critics sometimes move beyond traditional literary and historical studies of intersecting American nature and culture toward the question of what it would mean to act wisely, many of us now study to inform, that people may live well, and as we now say, sustainably. |
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Like environmental historians, ecocritics read texts by Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Mary Austin. We read their lives too. Scholars like Annette Kolodny added gender to the reading. The ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty, who studied Sarah Orne Jewett as a graduate student, began to explore the different kinds of knowledge that compete in the same places and result in diverging gendered values about those places. Literary scholars, like historians, have reached out to other disciplines to understand those different kinds of knowledge. This will require explanation.3 |
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