Revaluing Nature Writing: Toward Love and Flower Power
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It is important to recognize that the word “green” in this context (along with its active verb form, greening), was introduced in the late 1960s; the three major movements to emerge as world-issue, literary concerns during this time period were “civil rights, women’s liberation, and environmental degradation.” 1 As a result, literary scholars became deeply interested in examining how issues of race, class, and gender are represented in literature; it was not until 1993, however, that ecocriticism—or literary ecology, the study of the relationship between literature and the environment—emerged “as a recognizable critical school” to ask legitimate questions like: “How is nature represented in this sonnet? What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel? Are the values expressed in this play consistent with ecological wisdom? How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? How can we categorize nature writing as a genre? In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category?” 2 These are important, provocative questions, questions I hope we will all come to accept as inextricably linked to the profession of literature, especially since we are now witnessing a large-scale revaluation of green. What stands in the way, however, is nature writing—at least by its traditional definition.
Thomas J. Lyon, in “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing,” provides us with these categories in the spectrum of environmental literature: Field Guides; Natural History Essays; Rambles; and Essays on Experience in Nature, subcategorized into Solitude and Back Country Living, Travel and Adventure, Farm Life, and Man’s Role in Nature. 3 That these are not just boring but agonizingly so indicates that, as a genre, nature writing is in dire need of its own revaluing. This is not to say that traditional nature writing no longer has a place in literature; it does, but for my purposes here, the revaluing of nature writing, as I see it, is quite simple: let us apply an ecocritical lens to literature we already love; literature not thought to be nature writing; literature that takes seriously the representation of nature, the role of physical setting, values consistent with ecological wisdom, metaphors that will positively influence the way we treat our environment; literature that compels us to examine place as eagerly as we do race, class, and gender. And once we reveal the environmental merits in these literatures, why not add them to the spectrum of nature writing?
I can think of no better example than Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—a novel that satisfies all of these conditions while, at the same time, problematizing the reality of our environmental crisis because its setting, Macondo, is as much a fiction as global warming was once thought to be. It is a place where yellow flowers fall from the sky, where birds break through windows to die indoors, where animals proliferate with such frequency that Aureliano Segundo “barely had time to enlarge his overflowing barns and pigpens,” and where yellow butterflies that can fill a house in a moment always precede “the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.” How can this place, Macondo, possibly teach us anything of value about our human relationship with the nonhuman world when its natural representations are in sheer defiance of ecological wisdom? The answer is that, at the novel’s close, Macondo, “wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men,” 4 serves as a place that should reinforce our concerns that planet Earth can suffer a similar fate. But because it is not located in reality, the implication could be that we need not take the metaphor too much to heart because, in real life, the end of man is an impossibility, a fatalistic stance.
