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Exploring The Meaning Of Nature Is Quite A Head Trip
By Gregory MacNamee
Terra Nova: Nature & Culture, Vol. 4, edited
by David Rothenberg (MIT Press). Quarterly Journal, $9.
WHAT IS NATURE? A philosopher of a certain bent, contrasting
nature with culture, its classically paired opposite, might answer
that nature is the realm of being that happens independently of
human consciousness, the realm in which trees falling in the forest
make a mighty crash whether we are there to hear them or not.
Another might reasonably reply that because we are animals, creatures
of nature, consciousness and nature are inseparable. And still
another, inclined to urban values in the manner of, say, Roland
Barthes, might opine that nature is what lies under the concrete
outside our car doors.
David Rothenberg, a professor at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology, offers no ready definitions of nature. However, he
has some interesting ideas of how to approach it--ideas that he
airs in Terra Nova, a relatively new quarterly journal
of which he is the editor. "Everything that connects humanity
to the world that surrounds us brings the mind closer to nature,"
Rothenberg writes in the inaugural issue. "Connections between
humanity and nature are far more diverse, mysterious, and confusing
than most ecological writing has been willing to admit."
Rothenberg is right: Nature writing, as it is practiced in this
country, tends to equate nature with the wild; and to contrast
it with another classically paired opposite--namely, that matrix
of human mores, institutions, and artifacts we call civilization.
In that view, the ice on Walden Pond is nature, while the ice
in John Cheever's cocktail glass is not. It may be one and the
same ice, as any Zen master will gladly point out, but no matter:
The one belongs in Audubon, the other in The New Yorker.
Rothenberg's aim, it seems, is to soften the distinctions between
wild nature and culture, between what the French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss called "the raw and the cooked."
The contributors to his journal are happy to oblige him. In the
just-published fourth issue, for instance, sculptor Barnet Schecter
writes charmingly of community gardens as places that "defy
Western literary conventions and cultural myths about the opposition
of the country and the city," suggesting that those gardens
constitute a third space that partakes of both. And in the third
issue, the eminent translator and literary scholar Roger Shattuck
gently observes, "Nature includes us, and we share it imperfectly
with one another through perception, action, memory, language,
love, and wonder." Nature, in short, is everything in our
world, from the Intel chip to the intelligence of evolution.
The well-illustrated quarterly has found a niche, to borrow a
metaphor from ecology, in a field heavily populated by more narrowly
specialized journals. It stands somewhere between Orion on
the literary front, Environmental Ethics on the academic,
and the sadly departed Wilderness on the political. Its
editorial board is made up of university professors in fields
like philosophy and literature, but also of working writers like
Terry Tempest Williams, who's lately brought so much personal
vigor to the nature essay; and Eliot Weinberger, the New York-based
translator of Octavio Paz and a fine essayist in his own right.
Terra Nova's content is similarly centrifugal, offering
poems, essays, memoirs, and scholarly articles that wouldn't easily
find a home in more conventional outlets. (Among these contributions
are two by Tucsonans: essays by Gary Paul Nabhan and Charles Bowden.)
Of the many outstanding pieces in the first year's issues, I especially
liked Australian philosopher Val Plumwood's thoughtful memoir
of being attacked by a crocodile; David Rothenberg's meditation
on the ubiquity of nature in the world of multimedia (he points
to the ongoing storytelling project at http://www.xs4all.nl/~estory
as an example); poet Margaret Young's reminiscence of a not especially
appealing meal with long-lost family; and television producer
Ted Perry's account of how his free adaptation of a free translation
of a Native American text became Chief Seattle's famous speech
on the sanctity of the Earth--an inauthentic, but still oft-quoted,
touchstone of environmental thought.
Were it in my power to do so, I would also award a special prize
for ambition to Jan Zwicky's long essay, spread out over two issues,
on the poetics of fellow Canadian writer Robert Bringhurst--an
essay that sails off into a learned examination of pre-Socratic
environmental ethics, among many other topics. "The ability
to think lyrically," Zwicky writes in a fine epigrammatic
turn, "is a precondition for sound ecological thought."
Hers is a richly lyrical piece indeed.
Cheerfully diverse, full of new voices and new approaches
to nature and culture, Terra Nova promises to become an
influential journal of contemporary environmental writing. It
may even help us define just what we mean by those slippery terms.
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