Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally

together.

chapter 1

Introduction

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always anothexpushr dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

The human senses are carriers of memory. Upon hearing flocks of Canada geese flying over my Toronto apartment one April morning a few years back, I expected to rise on a tide of reminiscences ranging from the rhythms of my rural prairie childhood to the stories that over the years have carried me back to that place. For instance, the clamour of spring and fall migrations provide memorable bookends to Martha Ostenso’s well-known classic of Canadian fiction, while in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners a flock of geese flying over north Winnipeg reminds Morag Gunn that the town of Manawaka remains with her despite her move to the big city. ¹ As one who had embarked upon her own series of peregrinations before finally landing in downtown Toronto, the emotions conjured by the call of geese in these texts were certainly familiar to me. However, this particular spring, hearing the geese also registered new anxieties for which no blend of literary or personal memory could account. Each day’s news reports in the preceding weeks had seemed to broadcast word that a new strain of avian influenza was spreading around the world, conjuring the spectre not only of a possible silent spring without birdsong but also of a global pandemic should the virus become transmissible among humans. Further, the combination of a warming climate and urban sprawl now made it possible for Canada geese to remain in some Canadian cities year round, casting the entire possibility of migration into doubt. Sounds that had once been taken as evidence of nature’s wondrous reliability thus were becoming disquieting signs of ecological change.

We still do not know what the final outcome of these kinds of changes will be, nor do the experts who continue to monitor them. And while events such as avian flu and climate change are unfolding in the present (albeit on vastly different scales), what is curious about them is the way their contemplation so often propels us away from the present moment into either reflection or prophecy. Where did our relations with nature first go wrong, we ask, and how can we return to a state of compatibility with it? Alternatively, such threats are seen as yet another sign of nature’s imminent end, another threshold passed on the journey to inevitable planetary destruction. What is most needed, yet so often lacking, in much of our present talk about various environmental threats is a sense of context—without narratives to situate such crises within broader social, historical, and political matrices, phenomena such as dead birds, new diseases, increasing droughts, or rising seas can appear as signs of nature’s capriciousness, things we fear and loathe but otherwise feel quite helpless to change.

My discussion of Canadian prairie literature in the chapters that follow is informed by a belief in the value of context as a tool that enables us to better understand contemporary environmental problems. We cannot begin to comprehend the myriad ecological challenges that the prairies face today, I would suggest, without first examining the impact that particular environmental stories have had on perceptions of the region. There has long been a tradition of viewing the prairies as a site of struggle between what Carolyn Merchant describes as the two dominant plots by which Western European culture—and its offshoots in the Americas—have attempted to frame the relationship between humans and nature. On the one hand, Merchant notes the immense force of the Edenic recovery narrative, a story that has propelled countless efforts by humans to recover Eden by turning wilderness into garden, ‘female’ nature into civilized society, and indigenous folkways into modern culture. ² Another way this narrative of recovery has been expressed in the prairie context is in the image of the Promised Land, a figure variously construed as a form of escape from urban and industrial stresses, as a place wherein the social gospel might be put into practice, and as a tabula rasa upon which the individual might author his or her own version of economic success. ³ On the other hand, Merchant points to an equally powerful set of environmentalist counter-narratives that recount a downward slide from Eden—a slide that is actually accelerated by technological progress and that results in a paved, scorched, and endangered earth. ⁴ Over the past fifty years, writers including Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, and Margaret Atwood have all presented compelling visions of a world in which nature as we know it is no more. Yet while crafting speculative futures has proven fertile ground for artists’ imaginations, figuring out exactly where we went wrong in our relations with nature proves to be a more difficult task. As Raymond Williams points out, attempts to pinpoint the ‘beginning of the end’ soon puts us on an escalator that takes us all the way back to Eden’s gate. ⁵

From the time of European exploration and eventual settlement right up to the present, narrative patterns of recovery and decline have proven to be remarkably resilient means of characterizing the prairie environment. Particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boosters of Western settlement argued that the region’s very immensity made it a fitting site upon which to re-establish the garden. As the expansionist promoter Charles Mair reported to readers of Toronto’s Globe newspaper in 1869, man is a grasshopper here, a mere insect, making way between the enormous discs of heaven and earth. And yet man is master of all this. ⁶. And yet—from this kernel soon sprouted an oft-told story of the prairies as a place that was ready to produce wealth at the touch of a ploughshare, wherein settlers might recreate the old garden in the New World. Along with Mair, figures such as the Irish-born military captain William Francis Butler, Canadian surveyor and geologist Henry Youle Hind, botanist John Macoun, and even British captain and surveyor John Palliser, a man more typically identified with a cautionary approach to agricultural settlement, all touted the prospective fertility of the prairies with varying degrees of enthusiasm. By the time Macoun’s expedition party returned to Winnipeg in the autumn of 1880 after travelling across the region that summer, any previous hesitations about farming the southern prairie voiced by earlier explorers had been all but erased. For Macoun, the practically inexhaustible fertility of the prairie west had become a matter of faith. ⁷

Even as European settlers began to pour into Aboriginal territories in the region, however, some of the biggest boosters of agricultural settlement quietly began to express doubts about where it all would lead. A little over twenty years after he had so confidently forecast European mastery over the prairie, Mair published a poem entitled The Last Bison in which the mythical creature of the title prophesies a sobering conclusion to the European experiment:

I see our spoilers build their cities great

Upon our plains—I see their rich estate:

The centuries in dim procession fly!

Long ages roll, and then at length is bared

The time when they who spared not are no longer spared. ⁸

The future will bring a reckoning, Mair’s shaggy beast suggests, whereby settler culture shall run into difficulties that are every bit as dire as those once faced by the land’s original human and non-human inhabitants. Similarly, by the time Butler published the follow-up to his commercially successful volume of prairie travel adventures The Great Lone Land (1872), he came to view the failure of the Northwest Resistance in 1885 as signalling not only the end of the region’s Native people but also the very end of the prairie itself. In his 1911 autobiography, Butler remarks: It was the last flicker of the old life. Henceforth there would be no prairies, no Indians, no moccasins, no old stories told by camp fires; only barbed wire, the grain ‘elevator,’ the machine-made boot, and the two-cent newspaper. ⁹

In each of these accounts, we are confronted with an idea of the prairies as a region unable to coexist with the transformative forces of modernity. The fact that Butler associates the end of the prairies with such an apparent oddity as a machine-made boot testifies to the tremendous force of a conception of the prairies that is always located just beyond spatial and temporal reach. Yet both Butler’s and Mair’s descriptions of environmental change offer only a partial view, for each rhetorically erases the role of human agents. In Mair’s poem, for example, the bison herds that once roamed in vast herds over the region wane as part of a seemingly natural process: As yields to eating seas the shore,/So yielded our vast multitude. ¹⁰ Meanwhile, in Butler’s account, the presence of the settler is marked only by metonyms, thus shifting responsibility for colonization from human agents onto material artifacts such as newspapers and barbed wire. Notably, one of the other phenomena that Butler sees as signalling the end of the prairies is the construction of the grain elevator. In recent years, the dismantling of these sentinels across the region has in turn been viewed by interpreters as a sign of the end of another version of the prairies—this time one based on agrarian myth.

Of course, bison, First Nations peoples, and farmers alike would doubtless echo Mark Twain’s assertion that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. The declaration of such phenomena as signs of the prairie’s demise only carries weight if one subscribes to a notion of historicism in which the meaning of civilization is determined within a European frame-work based on dualisms wherein the savage or the traditional must inevitably give way to the civilized and the modern. What such thinking fails to take into account is the possibility of counter- or alternative modernities. Instead of presuming that there is one (Western) form of culture that all peoples are necessarily moving towards, the notion of alternative modernities acknowledges different cultural understandings of temporality, recognizing that the flow of ideas between cultures has always moved in two directions. ¹¹ Although settler societies have often been slow to acknowledge that they might have something to learn from indigenous knowledge and heritage, this is gradually beginning to change as parties on both sides recognize that through a combination of forced and voluntary interactions, colonialism has created an intercultural environment in which no culture or way of life is wholly independent, closed, or internally uniform. ¹² When we begin to listen for different stories of the prairie, the Western idea of nature as a fixed paradise from which we have fallen and need to recover is made strange, and, in turn, different possibilities for thinking about nature and our relations with it are opened up. ¹³

One of the goals of this book is to provide space for considering how different stories might contribute to a vision of sustainable dwelling on the prairies in the twenty-first century. I take up this challenge by looking specifically at how stories of aetiology (literally translated as talk about origins) and eschatology (talk about endings) inform different kinds of environmental relations to prairie literature and landscape. Although narratives that portray the prairie environment as a lost paradise, a promised land, or an unforgiving wasteland have been recited so many times that their authority can come to seem natural, they by no means offer the only way of interpreting this place and its history. First Nations groups such as the Cree and the Blackfoot, for instance, have tended to find such stories a poor fit with their own understandings of the world, since such narrative frameworks tend to rely on an idea of culture as separate from nature. In contrast to such visions, indigenous groups offer an understanding of the prairies as an animated community of beings that includes the human and within which the human has certain responsibilities for maintaining right relationships. Meanwhile, another set of alternative stories can be found by turning to ecofeminist articulations of nature as a source of strength, teaching, and kinship rather than as an abstract entity to be feared or dominated. ¹⁴ Several writers whom I will consider in later chapters put forward visions of nature that offer alternatives to the appropriative and sometimes violent impulses of a masculine colonial mindset. At other times, alternatives arise in seemingly unlikely places, as expressions of dissatisfaction with the environmental status quo emerge within the very traditions (Anglo, male, Christian, agricultural) that the myth of settlement supposedly favoured. Finally, alternatives sometimes lie in the shadow of things left unsaid, as what seem like silences begin to speak volumes to those attuned to hear them.

I am by no means the first to suggest that the prairies need some good alternatives to the boom-bust mythology that has long underwritten many of the region’s dominant cultural forms, environmental practices, and policy decisions. Back in the 1970s, Dick Harrison suggested that the garden myth was among the most harmful precedents hindering the ability of prairie writers to find literary forms appropriate to the physical realities of the region. ¹⁵ As Dennis Cooley has more recently pointed out, the struggle to develop literary forms appropriate to prairie experience has been a long-running theme in the region’s literary culture—it informed the work of early prairie realists such as F.P. Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Robert Stead, ran through such foundational critical texts as Edward McCourt’s The Canadian West in Fiction (1949), Henry Kreisel’s The Prairie: A State of Mind (1968), Laurie Ricou’s Vertical Man/Horizontal World (1973), Harrison’s Unnamed Country (1977), and Robert Thacker’s The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989), and even appeared in the writing of Robert Kroetsch and Eli Mandel, two author-critics more typically identified with artifice and inventiveness than with referentialism or realism. ¹⁶ By the mid-1990s, however, presumptions about the natural connections between literature, culture, and regional landscapes came under increasing scrutiny. For example, Alison Calder pointed out that while portrayals of the prairies as Edenic space were misleading, images of the real prairies as a desolate wasteland were often equally damaging to the region, fostering a tendency to write off the region and its people as unworthy of long-term investment. ¹⁷ This challenge to reigning orthodoxies of environmental (or geographical) determinism in prairie literary criticism found company in work by Frank Davey, Lisa Chalykoff, and especially in Deborah Keahey’s wide-ranging book, Making It Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature (1998). ¹⁸ In concert with these developments, some regional writers and critics—most notably George Melnyk—argued for greater attention to urban and industrial settings, while others sought out the alternate ground of language poetry as a way of situating the prairies within a wider cosmopolitan context. ¹⁹ In recent years, some scholars have questioned whether the notion of a prairie region any longer serves a useful purpose (especially one premised on a rural, agricultural way of life), but others—especially those affiliated with critical regionalism or the new western criticism in the United States—maintain that the region remains an important category of cultural analysis. ²⁰

These debates lay some important groundwork for the present study, although they must also be supplemented by greater attention to Aboriginal cultures and a more thorough engagement with the environmental turn that has been taking place in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences for the past decade or so. ²¹ Environmental historians have in recent years provided literary scholars with a set of useful models to follow, examining how regional environments have been understood and altered in the past in order to help current residents negotiate an uncertain future. ²² Anthropologists have similarly taken up ecological questions in their work, exploring such matters as the environmental effects of urbanization, globalization, and development, the politics of biodiversity conservation, and the representation of indigenous peoples by environmental groups. ²³ Meanwhile, geographers have developed extensive vocabularies that are useful for literary scholars looking for ways to talk about the sociality of nature (about which I will say more later) and to articulate theories of space and place that recognize the insufficiency of fixed notions of the local, on the one hand, and celebratory vocabularies of migration and mobility, on the other. ²⁴ In the field of literature, an environmental focus has similarly begun to open up new avenues of inquiry, inviting us to consider how texts shape people’s understandings of their surrounding environments, while also reminding us that physical phenomena such as soil, air, and hydrological systems provide the material bases that nurture life and make the production of such texts possible.

To date, one of the more promising avenues for exploring the impact of the environmental turn on literatures of the prairie region has surfaced in what I call emergent models of reading and writing place. This umbrella term—which covers approaches that have variously been described as the deep map, time-geography, topochronicity, or intercalated space—has found some of its most eloquent expressions in writing about the American great plains and Canadian prairie regions. ²⁵ Fundamental to the deep map aesthetic is the assumption that places gather—that is, that they are composed of a huge and unruly range of things including animate and inanimate entities, experiences, histories, languages, thoughts, legends, and practices. ²⁶ The term deep map comes from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s experimental 1991 text PrairyErth, which attempts to write the natural and cultural history of Chase County, Kansas, from the early geological and palaeontological period to the present. Heat-Moon’s deep map emerges out of a consideration of the clash between official cartographical and experiential forms of knowledge in the representation of place. PrairyErth explores this antinomy by juxtaposing conventional maps illustrating things such as roads, rivers, creeks, and railway lines with psychogeographical or emotional geographies of the county based on individual residents’ personal memories and associations. ²⁷ Heat-Moon’s approach reminds us that when considering how different parties portray a physical place or understand particular environmental problems, we need to take account not only of material traces, or stories about nature, but also of what William Cronon refers to as stories about stories about nature. Landscape is never simply a physical phenomenon composed of material traces; it is also a complex imaginative archive, an accretion of stories told and retold as a way of making sense of the present. ²⁸

While deep maps serve as effective means of gathering places, they also serve as documents of loss. Susan Naramore Maher suggests that an attention to loss helps to explain why the deep map has recently emerged as such an important form for literary-environmental critics of prairie and plains writing: Without substantial adaptation, without attending to the lessons of the Plains’ past, chronicled in its soil, its remaining native remnants, and its cultural artifacts, modern Plains culture could face its own diminishment. ²⁹ To mark loss as part of one’s aesthetic experience of place heeds Theodor Adorno’s insistence that [c]onsciousness does justice to the experience of nature only when … it incorporates nature’s wounds. ³⁰ Nature is dynamic, but humans also bear significant responsibility for the impacts that environmental change has had on the fragile ecosystems of the prairies in the past and for what character such change will assume in the future. A vacated niche will never remain empty for long, but the erosion of biodiversity across many parts of the prairies means that what comes along to fill that niche may not be as rich as what had previously resided there.

While Naramore Maher focuses mainly on representations of rural spaces in literary non-fiction, the principles of deep mapping can be more widely applied to urban spaces and across genres. For example, one might variously apply the deep map model to Canadian visual artist Greg Curnoe’s multimedia history of the London, Ontario, lot on which he lived and worked in Deeds/Abstracts (1995), Aritha van Herk’s exploration of the four quadrants of her own city in the long poem Calgary, this growing graveyard (1989), Jon Paul Fiorentino’s dreamlike splicing of poetry and old photographs to form a portrait of Winnipeg in Transcona Fragments (2002), or John Terpstra’s Falling into Place (2002), a text that blends poetry and prose in its study of the natural and cultural history underlying a stretch of busy highway in Hamilton, Ontario. In these depictions, place is shown to be plural, discontinuous, and even heteroglossic as the discrepant narrations of those who interact with it are brought to the surface. Returning to a rural setting, Sheri Benning’s recent meditation on NW 18°36’22 W 2nd, her family’s farm in east-central Saskatchewan, provides a good example of how the prairies today might be written as a place of emergent multiplicities" consisting of overlapping assemblages of history, technology, and ecology. ³¹ While most of the literature on deep maps has tended to focus on creative non-fiction, looking at how the concept operates in other literary forms helps one to recognize that deep maps are more than just documentary reconstructions of specific places—they also self-consciously reflect upon the aesthetic and political implications of their own acts of representation.

For cultural geographer Allan Pred, one of the earliest proponents of a time-geographical approach, place is not only composed of a set of features visible upon the landscape, but it is also a phenomenon that takes place ceaselessly in the everyday. Place is not merely product but also process—it is an outcome of ongoing interactions among different entities. ³² Of particular interest is the role that language plays in the becoming of places, for, as Pred notes, language is a key medium through which projects that alter places are developed and carried out. This notion has important implications for thinking about the kinds of stories that have shaped invader-settler thinking about the prairie region, for it reminds us that dominant aesthetic perceptions of the prairie environment are neither impromptu nor natural. However, failure to see the constructed—and, hence, alterable—character of such perceptions leads to the possibility that they will become self-fulfilling prophesies. Since we are told that the prairie is an Eden, so the logic goes, we must do everything in our power to make it live up to this ideal—when these plans are frustrated, we turn back to the biblical script only to see that the environment’s fall from grace was inevitable all along. Once the environment is understood to have reached its narrative conclusion as a wasteland, it can only be endured, rejected, or escaped.

This does not mean, however, that our imaginings of the prairie must forever re-enact the same teleological scripts. Not only do we have the capacity to listen for different stories of this region, but the languages out of which stories of place are constructed also exist in a continual state of becoming. ³³ As geographer Doreen Massey explains in her book For Space, only if we conceive of the future as open can we seriously accept or engage in any genuine notion of politics. Only if the future is open is there any ground for a politics which can make a difference. ³⁴ Whether one is speaking about language, space, or identity, then, an emphasis on dynamism is crucial for the larger argument that this book makes about the relationship of aetiology and eschatology to the prairie environment. If, as Jo-Ann Episkenew observes, languages and stories have the power to destroy, they also have the capacity to heal. In western Canada, this healing must begin with an examination of white privilege and a commitment to telling the truth about our colonial past, for without first acknowledging the traumatic effects of European mythologies on First Nations peoples and the environment, our attempts to implement a new vision of how to live together in this place cannot possibly succeed. ³⁵ In thinking about the prairie past, then, we will certainly need to consider the matter of environmental origins beyond familiar interpretations of the Genesis narrative. Just as there is no singular path to decolonization, neither is there an originary, unified cultural site to which we can return as a way of determining how to live within the present limits of the biosphere. Similarly, the task of negotiating an often frightening environmental future demands that we move beyond the dualistic habits of thought encouraged by conventional apocalypticism and think instead about how the future might be a space in which prairie residents achieve reconciliation with the earth and among themselves.

All of this does not mean that we should stop creating, studying, and revising accounts of environmental beginnings and endings. In fact, I will argue that it is vitally important that we continue to do so. As Simon Schama has remarked, the failure of an ostensibly disenchanted culture such as our own to take longstanding narratives and myths about nature seriously leads to an impoverished understanding of the world we share with past and future generations. ³⁶ Stories of origin, for instance, help us to figure out who we are and how we fit into the world around us, and they can provide an overlooked set of cultural resources that might help us to better adjust to shifting environmental circumstances. Similarly, stories of environmental endings, though often disconcerting, can serve as important vehicles of social critique. They jolt us out of complacency, reveal instances of injustice and vulnerability within our social structures, and insist that the time is ripe for change. As the philosopher Ernst Bloch has argued, a better future is partially glimpsed through humanity’s discontent with this world and its hope for a better one. ³⁷ So even if we cannot make complete sense of an ending, telling stories of environmental conclusion might challenge us to do some imaginative work in the present, envisioning the kind of future that we want rather than allowing it to be entirely determined for us. ³⁸

Stretching one’s imagination to consider alternative futures is especially important considering that the consequences of environmental decisions in the present are often displaced onto seemingly remote places and times. ³⁹ My call to resituate a discussion of endings firmly within the ground of the present may seem paradoxical at first, but I would suggest that it is appropriate to a period of history in which anxieties about living in a climate of multiple risks generated by industrial society have surpassed worries about immediate annihilation by nuclear war. In an age of environmental crisis, we are thus confronted with a situation whereby the immediate rush of apocalypse has decelerated into a way of life. ⁴⁰ As the effects of global climate change and toxins in our air, water, and bodies manifest themselves with greater frequency, we will likely be called upon to think much more deeply about how to live both creatively and ethically in the midst of ecological catastrophe. ⁴¹ Indeed, such changes might initiate alliances between human and non-human others that we might never have foreseen or thought possible. If we are to live in hope rather than in despair, we will need to engage more earnestly in retrieving and nurturing the sources of that hope.

This book’s subtitle introduces two terms that collectively suggest one form that such imaginative work might take. But what does it mean to read environmentally? Is the environment best understood as content to be deciphered in texts? Or can ecology, broadly conceived as a field that examines the webs of interaction within and among biophysical (including human) systems, also provide some method for interpreting them? ⁴² Several factors preclude easy answers to such questions. First, terms such as nature or environment have no universally agreed upon meaning—they can not only refer to biophysical phenomena, but they can also express, justify, or describe particular values, judgments, courses of action, or ways of thinking. ⁴³ Indeed, in recent years, the whole idea of an autonomous Nature has been called radically into question. In areas such as science studies, geography, social theory, and cultural studies, for example, we are now more likely to hear talk of multiple natures or composite collectivities than reference to a singular entity that pre-exists cultural activity. Indeed, some critics suggest that the very term Nature should be set aside in favour of a language that makes more transparent the impermanence and historicism of all living beings. ⁴⁴

Second, if ecology provides a promising basis for the interpretation and evaluation of texts, then this basis has also become considerably less stable—and certainly less innocent—than was once presumed. For example, Susie O’Brien has convincingly demonstrated how ecology, first hailed as a subversive science, came to be increasingly adopted by the political mainstream in the 1970s, leading to its co-optation and deployment by several imperializing projects using the language of natural economy. ⁴⁵ Further, ecology is a contested field in which scientists are constantly debating and revising their ideas about what healthy ecosystems look like and how they operate. By way of illustration, we might consider how ecosystem models that privilege principles of dynamism and non-linearity have come to challenge Frederic Clements’ once-influential notion of the stable climax community as the culmination of succession. On the one hand, this newer emphasis on disequilibrium and building resilience in the face of ecological disturbance is promising for it permits creative intervention in ecosystems without necessarily presuming that such intervention will always be destructive. Further, it is better able to account for places where unpredictable moisture levels and temperature extremes will establish dominant ecosystem patterns. On the other hand, however, ecological concepts of resilience must be employed judiciously lest they end up being used to justify the disruption of nature in the service of neo-liberal economic goals. If dynamism is too blithely promoted as nature’s way, critics worry that those who currently profit from environmental exploitation will have yet one more reason to do little to address problems such as climate change and pollution that are largely anthropogenic in character. ⁴⁶

A third factor that complicates our understanding of the relationship between ecology and literature is that unlike the subjects of other literary-political modes of interpretation—including feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, and queer studies—the subjects of environmental criticism do not always signify in forms we can easily comprehend. Put simply, nature does not whisper truth to us. ⁴⁷ The need to respect nature’s otherness while acknowledging its complex entanglement with language and ideology presents unique challenges for ecocriticism. Ecocriticism’s alignment with environmentalism, and, by extension, with science, has meant that its readings of literature have often been based on strongly materialist conceptions of nature—the sense that there is a physical and biological reality that we might collectively defend and on which we might base certain claims. ⁴⁸ Yet the legacy of the science wars has also convincingly demonstrated the dangers of deriving cultural authority from a realm presumed to have special purchase on transcendent truth. Articulations of greenness, no matter how apparently altruistic, cannot escape relations of power. Stephen Bocking thus notes that the science of ecology must walk a fine line in relation to politics, for while ecological expertise is an important contributor to public debate it cannot become a substitute for political conversation: While science can inform, it cannot lead. ⁴⁹

For ecocritics, then, an ethical commitment to act on behalf of a material world perceived to be in considerable environmental trouble rests (sometimes uncomfortably) alongside the belief that we live in a world inevitably shaped by discourse. Although it can be challenging to negotiate a course between these two positions, ecocritic David Mazel insists that a responsible ecocriticism must continue to hold the two ideas in productive tension: Much as some academics would like it to, ecocriticism cannot simply pick a side in these debates. For ecocriticism to do so would be either to jeopardize its alliances with environmentalism and the sciences or to alienate itself from a profession still largely committed to a social-constructionist theory suspicious of ‘nature.’ ⁵⁰ Similarly, Kate Rigby argues that while an ecocritical focus invites critics to consider how texts shape people’s understandings of their surrounding environments, it also calls us to humbly recognize that phenomena such as air, water, and soil both precede and exceed whatever words might say about them. ⁵¹

In recent years, environmental theorists have begun to explore a variety of critical avenues in the hope of achieving a rapprochement between realism and relativism. Some have turned towards evolutionary theories in an attempt to ground literary analysis in biological understandings of human nature, while others have begun to explore the concept of biosemiosis as a way of articulating a joint view of nature and culture as complex, overlapping, and interactive processes of signification. ⁵² Meanwhile, a particularly rich literature of social nature has emerged in the related fields of geography, political ecology, and science studies over the past decade, giving us new tools for challenging old dualisms and working towards an idea of multiple natures that are co-constructions of human and non-human forms of agency. ⁵³ Among the vast array of theoretical concepts that have emerged to deconstruct the scientific realist-social constructionist divide, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s assemblages, Bruno Latour’s and Donna Haraway’s naturecultures, Haraway’s situated knowledges, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Karen Barad’s agential realism, Sarah Whatmore’s hybrid geographies, Damian White and Chris Wilbert’s technonatures, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s notion of constructivism stand out as particularly useful means of articulating the hybrid, entangled, and emergent character of techno-socio-ecological phenomena ranging from climate change to genetic engineering. ⁵⁴ These authors collectively argue that it now makes little sense to ground environmental politics using rhetoric based on an idea of the natural as wholly discrete from culture and technology.

Within the field of ecocriticism, ecofeminist scholars and those working in the environmental justice movement have spent a lot of time considering how questions of nature are bound up with the social. Their work begins from an assumption that the politics of gender, race, and class deeply affect how and what people experience as nature and illustrates the ways in which environmental issues are often crucial to campaigns for access to resources and liberation from poverty, illness, and exploitation. ⁵⁵ Other critics, meanwhile, have proposed methods of reading that situate postmodern notions of the political unconscious within a broader environmental context. For instance, Adrian Ivakhiv extends Fredric Jameson’s Marxist theory of interpretation