The Bioregional Imagination

Literature, Ecology, and Place

Cheryll Glotfelty, Karla Armbruster, Tom Lynch

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780820343679
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature.

The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia's Meldrum Creek and Italy's Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism.

Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the "Reinhabiting" section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The "Rereading" essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In "Reimagining," the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the "Renewal" section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet.

In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.

The Bioregional Imagination

Literature, Ecology, and Place

EDITED BY TOM LYNCH, CHERYLL GLOTFELTY, AND KARLA ARMBRUSTER MAPS BY EZRA ZEITLER

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster

PART ONE Reinhabiting

Big Picture, Local Place: A Conversation with David Robertson and Robert L. Thayer Jr.

Cheryll Glotfelty

Still under the Influence: The Bioregional Origins of the Hub City Writers Project

John Lane

Representing Chicago Wilderness

Rinda West

“To Become Beavers of Sorts”: Eric Collier’s Memoir of Creative Ecology at Meldrum Creek

Norah Bowman-Broz

The Poetics of Water: Currents of Reclamation in the Columbia River Basin

Chad Wriglesworth

Restoring the Imagination of Place: Narrative Reinhabitation and the Po Valley

Serenella Iovino

“This Is What Matters”: Reinhabitory Discourse and the “Poetics of Responsibility” in the Work of Janisse Ray

Bart Welling

PART TWO Rereading

Mapping Placelore: Tim Robinson’s Ambulation and Articulation of Connemara as Bioregion

Christine Cusick

The Challenge of Writing Bioregionally: Performing the Bow River in Jon Whyte’s Minisniwapta: Voices of the River

Harry Vandervlist

Figures of Life: Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman as an Australian Bioregional Novel

Ruth Blair

Melancholy Botany: Charlotte Smith’s Bioregional Poetic Imaginary

Heather Kerr

The Nature of Region: Russell Banks, New England, and New York

Kent C. Ryden

Critical Utopianism and Bioregional Ecocriticism

David Landis Barnhill

Critical Bioregionalist Method in Dune: A Position Paper

Daniel Gustav Anderson

PART THREE Reimagining

“Los campos extraños de esta ciudad”/“The strange fields of this city”: Urban Bioregionalist Identity and Environmental Justice in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s “Freeway 280”

Jill Gatlin

Bioregionalism, Postcolonial Literatures, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Erin James

Seasons and Nomads: Reflections on Bioregionalism in Australia

Libby Robin

Reading Climate Change and Work in the Circumpolar North

Pavel Cenkl

Douglas Livingstone’s Poetry and the (Im)possibility of the Bioregion

Dan Wylie

“Fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS”: Thinking the Feral into Bioregionalism

Anne Milne

PART FOUR Renewal

Out of the Field Guide: Teaching Habitat Studies

Laurie Ricou

Switching on Light Bulbs and Blowing Up Mountains: Ecoliteracy and Energy Consumption in General Education English Courses

Wes Berry

Teaching Bioregional Perception—at a Distance

Laird Christensen

Where You at 20.0

Kathryn Miles and Mitchell Thomashow

A Bioregional Booklist

Kyle Bladow

Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seeds for this essay collection on literature, ecology, and place germinated in cyberspace. Cheryll, who wanted to teach a class on bioregional literature and criticism, posted a query to the e-mail list of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Tom then e-mailed Cheryll, suggesting that we edit an anthology on the subject, whereupon we invited Karla to join the team. Our first step was to test the waters by organizing a conference panel on bioregional approaches to literary study; accordingly, we posted a call for papers to the ASLE e-mail list. We received so many strong proposals that we formed not one but three well-attended conference panels at the 2007 ASLE conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Building on the success of those panels, we used e-mail to solicit essays from colleagues whose bioregional work we admired and to announce an open call for paper proposals. Via e-mail and Skype conference calls, we vetted proposals and corresponded with contributors. To create common ground and foster conversation among the essays, we set up a Google Docs site, where we uploaded a half-dozen core readings in bioregionalism and where contributors could read one another’s drafts, making possible many of the cross references in the final essays. While we took the opportunity to meet face-to-face with many of our contributors and with Judy Purdy of the University of Georgia Press at the 2009 ASLE conference in Victoria, B.C., we happily acknowledge our indebtedness to the Internet. We have found it to be a marvelous tool for people working in far-flung locales, from Spartanburg to Reno, from Adelaide to Torino, enabling them to enjoy a frequent meeting of minds, allowing the rich compost of ideas from throughout the world to fertilize the bioregional practice of living-in-place. If this use of the placeless Internet to foster place-consciousness seems suspect, we would like to point out that the pages of CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review during the 1980s were filled with articles on both bioregional thinking and the promise of a subversive, newfangled tool called the personal computer.

The University of Georgia Press has been supportive, exacting, and professional. We feel very fortunate in our choice of publisher. Acquisitions editor Judy Purdy shepherded the project through its early stages, and Nancy Grayson saw the book through to completion. Our thanks to them for being prompt, clear, helpful—and patient. Two anonymous outside reviewers offered an effective mix of inspiring praise and constructive criticism, and we appreciate their meticulous reports that raised the bar and pushed us to make the book better than it otherwise would have been. We also wish to thank the staff at the University of Georgia Press, particularly Beth Snead, Jon Davies, and John McLeod, and our copy editor, Dawn McIlvain Stahl, for their fine work.

Our universities offered crucial support, which we gratefully acknowledge. The University of Nebraska, Lincoln, funded a research assistant and awarded a grant that helped defray expenses. At the University of Nevada, Reno, the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant Program provided a grant, and the English Department funded a summer research assistant. Webster University underwrote photocopying and contributed a grant from the Dean of Arts and Sciences. Our research assistants deserve special mention. Tom’s assistant, Tracy Tucker, tracked down core bioregional readings and helped set up the Google Docs site. Cheryll’s assistant, Kyle Bladow, collated, proofread, and formatted the manuscript and annotated the Bioregional Booklist. Our sincere thanks to Tracy and Kyle—it’s been a privilege to work with you. We count ourselves extraordinarily lucky to have engaged the services of cartographer Ezra Zeitler and indexer Sandra Marshall, both of whom are masters of their craft.

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment facilitated this project in more ways than space permits us to enumerate. To show our appreciation, royalties from the sale of this book go directly to ASLE to further its mission “to promote the understanding of nature and culture for a sustainable world by fostering a community of scholars, teachers, and writers who study the relationships among literature, culture, and the physical environment.” In the profession we would like to thank John Tallmadge for his enthusiastic support of this project and Lawrence Buell for graciously allowing us to adapt his book title The Environmental Imagination. To the contributors to this collection, thank you for working with us to make this book!

Tom would like to thank his colleagues and the many students who participate in the Place Studies interest group in the UNL English department. They have perpetuated a lively intellectual community in which the sorts of ideas discussed in this volume can be explored and debated. He has been fortunate at Nebraska to inherit a long tradition of commitment to regional studies. He would also like to acknowledge his family. His wife, Margaret Jacobs, is a model of blending the life of a scholar with the equally though differently rewarding role of parent and partner. His two boys, Cody and Riley, keep him grounded and remind him why concern for sustainability is not just an intellectual exercise. And he would also like to mention his border collie, Xena, whose need for a daily outing forces him away from the computer screen and out into the local terrain, regardless of weather.

Cheryll would like to thank Peter Berg and Gary Snyder for their inspiring ideas, David Robertson and Rob Thayer for their time, Eric Rasmussen for ably chairing the UNR English department, and colleagues and friends in the department. She thanks students in her graduate seminar on regionalism and bioregionalism, who influenced her thinking and created fond memories. The best things in Cheryll’s life usually involve her husband, Steve; daughter, Rosa; and the mountains and deserts nearby—she thanks them for being there.

Karla thanks her family: her husband, Pete; her daughters, Lila and Lucinda; and her canine and feline companions. Each has provided invaluable support as well as much-needed reminders about what is most important in life (love, play, food, walks, and snoozing in a warm spot on the bed). She is also grateful to her students, whose energy, curiosity, and optimism are a crucial source of inspiration, and to her colleagues, whose friendship and generosity in sharing the administrative work of the department made it possible for her to take on this project during a term as chair. And finally, she recognizes the subtle but crucial influence of the human and non-human members of her adopted community of Webster Groves, Missouri (more specifically, Tuxedo Park): after taking a connected sense of place for granted as a child and then losing it as she moved around the country in pursuit of an education and job, she treasures each interaction that reminds her of the ways that she knows—and is known in—her new home.

THE BIOREGIONAL IMAGINATION

Introduction

TOM LYNCH, CHERYLL GLOTFELTY, AND KARLA ARMBRUSTER

ON A SEPTEMBER EVENING in eastern Nebraska, several hundred community residents gather at Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, a restored tallgrass prairie, for a “Twilight on the Tallgrass” celebration. As people wander the trails, they encounter stations where they learn about native insects, birds, wildflowers, and medicinal plants. At one station, local writers read from their prairie-inspired work. Nearby, a Winnebago tribe dance troupe gets into costume for a performance of traditional powwow dances. Outside the visitors’ center, a local astronomy club sets up telescopes they will later use to show visitors a close-up of the night sky.

In South Dakota, a rancher replaces his herd of cattle with bison, then writes a book recounting the pains and delights of the experience. His book is chosen as a One Book South Dakota selection and subsequently read, discussed, and debated by tens of thousands of citizens around the state.¹

In North St. Louis, a predominantly African American community, crowds gather every Saturday morning from June through October for the North City Farmers’ Market. In this neighborhood, where gas stations, convenience stores, and liquor stores long ago crowded out the grocery stores, and some residents have no way to travel to distant supermarkets, the stands selling fresh produce are a much-needed source of healthy food. Just as importantly, the market brings neighbors together and provides a source of community pride. Although traditional rural farmers participate, many of the produce stands feature vegetables, herbs, and fruit grown in nearby urban gardens. Another vendor, a student-run garden at Washington University, fosters connections between North City and the university population. The market also features health screenings, healthy-cooking demonstrations, and entertainment by local artists....

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• The Bioregional Imagination