Ecocomp and Ecocrit and etc.

Hi folks! Thanks for letting me join you in the blogosphere.

(I'm not entirely clear what's going on - I think I'm supposed to commenting on the ecocomp readings, but since Mackenzie commented on the same thing last week, maybe I'm a week off...? If I'm out of line, somebody straighten me out! )

Anyhow, I'm just going to toss a few ideas out there about the readings that we did - parts of which I liked, and parts of which I could have done without.

I wanted first to start with a general comment about a trend apparent throughout the readings. On page 577, Dobrin and Weisser work themselves into a bit of a tizzy in their effort to separate ecocomposition and ecocriticism: "Several reviewers of our work have insisted that ecocomposition be treated as a subdiscipline of ecocriticism. It is not. Ecocomposition borrows from ecocriticism , but grows on its own." I think this movement is appropriate - separating the two disciplines - but I also think that implicit in their argument in the notion that teachers engaged in teaching ecocomp are already familiar with ecocrit, and can draw on that knowledge to inform their teaching of writing. Ecocrit is the investigation of the way nature/ecology etc. appear in writing that has already been written; ecocomp investigate how we could and should write about the same subjects, now and in the future. But if a writer, for instance, wants to be the next great American playwrite, they wouldn't embark on the project without first reading the canon of playwrites that have already made their mark, and then determining how they'd like to write similarly, or better, or differently. The same goes with ecocomposition - it's very hard to change the direction of a field without first acquainting oneself with where we've already been.

This is, of course, a round-about way of saying that everyone should read some ecocrit, and get themselves familiar with this conversation that we're all joining. In fact, the book that Dobrin and Weisser mention - Glotfelty and Fromm's Ecocriticism Reader - is a good place to start; I've read it before, I'm rereading it again at the moment, and it's remarkably applicable to this conversation.

I wouldn't bring this up, save for the fact that while they don't acknowledge it, Dobrin and Weisser draw heavily on ideas put forth by some of ecocrit's big names in the past 20, 30, or even 40 years. (In fact, they trot out as revolutionary social theories first posited by Karl Mannheim in the 1920s and 30s, but that's beside the point.) The point is that they reference ideas that have been on the table for a while in the world of ecocrit, and to understand these ideas fully, one should delve into the original (just as we have delved, with much contortion and discomfort, into Marilyn Cooper's early article on ecocomp, postmodern quagmire that it is.) Lynn White's article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (found in the Ecocrit Reader, and written in 1967) gets to a lot of the points that Dobrin and Weisser stress: our big problem is how we view nature, we need to rethink how we talk about nature, we need to reorganize American political thought through writing, etc. Also useful are Joseph Meeker's "The Comic Mode," and Ursula Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," both of which investigate how we tell stories, and how we can look to ecology as an inspiration for how better to tell these stories. I won't harp on this point anymore, but I think it's a useful one to consider.

Another observation, perhaps more useful for our classrooms, comes out of Dobrin and Weisser, and Owens as well: if we want to teach ecocomposition effectively, we have to move away from the limiting phrase "nature writing." This phrase simply perpetuates a dialectic (culture/nature) in which humans generally operate outside of nature, but occasionally mosey out into nature, where they contemplate and ruminate and scribble little notes. (I taught a 300-level Environmental Writing and Lit class here at the U last fall, and that was one of the most consistent comments my students had: "Thoreau's writing is cool and all, but did he actually do anything? Annie Dillard too - I mean, who has time to just sit around in a cabin and write? What about the rest of us?") I think it's imperative to get our students beyond the idea that the only writing about ecology and the environment is traditional "nature writing." Ecological writing, on the other hand, does just what Cooper suggests, and allows us not only to write in an ecological way (as in, engaged with a larger system), but allows us to think in an ecological way as well. We must make it apparent in as many ways possible that thinking ecologically/sustainably is not a specialized, narrowing way of thinking, but rather a broadening, all-encompassing, all-considering way of thinking. I really like Dobrin and Weisser's suggestion to use the internet as an example of this, and allow students to think as agents within a web, not writers observing from a distance.

So, how do we do this? Obviously, it's a hard thing to get our students thinking in new and abstract terms, especially with thousands of years of history working against us. But, it helps that there are other folks out in the world that are heading towards and thinking about the same goals that we are. I think it's really useful to allow our students to see that these broad concepts (sustainability, etc.) are visible and accessible in everyday life, and that people are "ecocomposing" all the time. The best resource I've found for this is Orion Magazine's column called "Making Other Arrangements" in which readers send in 500-word essays about how they're aiming for sustainability in their own lives. It's all really readable, and it's also really helpful that there is also an online commentary component to these, if you wanted to use that as an example of an "ecological" connection (i.e. a community is creating a discourse about these ideas). I had my students read a bunch of these, and analyze them not only for content, but for writing and rhetoric as well.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/list/C61/