Revaluing Nature Writing: Toward Love and Flower Power
Diane Ackerman—naturalist, essayist, poet—reports that Egyptologists discovered the subject of love preserved in written poetry as early as around 1300 B.C.E., and that although “these poems were written over three thousand years ago, they weave together many of the same themes, worries, and rejoicings we find in love poems today.” 13 Make no mistake: if green is to become a fad, then at least nature writing, in including literature about love, will stand a chance of enduring. And if love is a learned human phenomenon, then isn’t it possible that there is hope after all for the future of green and for the environment? For if we are unhappy with the way we have recently learned to green—the way we have come to appreciate nature by ridiculously conceiving of it as a place where we can either escape to or from, rather than as a place where human and nonhuman meet to create a new and sweeping utopia of life—I should think we can easily relearn and come to appreciate that environmentalism is a worthy cause. To say that revalued nature writing can keep green from becoming a fad, can help green to be sustainable, is to offer that it has the power to do so because it will weave together many of the same themes, worries and rejoicings we first preserved in written form thousands of years ago.
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So what is the link between the past, proven sustainability of love and the hoped-for future sustainability of green? Flowers. Flowers have been used historically as metaphors for human mortality; 14 more recently, the idea of flower power emerged with the slogan “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” entering public consciousness in May of 1969 during the People’s Park movement in Berkeley, California. 15 Today, thirty-eight years later, I propose a new understanding of this phrase: flower power—no longer an act of civil disobedience but an act of love. To clarify my earlier claim that nature writing should include certain literatures concerned with love, I mean to say that any literature with love as its subject matter, and with just one representation of a flower (metaphorical or otherwise) within its pages, can be considered nature writing that can help green to be sustainable. For if we can recognize a flower and be reminded, ego-consciously, of our own mortality, then we might also be reminded to green, eco-consciously, out of respect for planet Earth’s as well.
Georgia O’Keeffe lamented that nobody “sees a flower really—it is so small it takes time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” 16 It is interesting to consider that in Victorian times, people often sent each other yellow roses to symbolize and express their friendship. Contrary to Manes’s notion that humans have rendered nature silent, this method of communication—known as floriography, or the language of flowers—indicates that flowers were once privileged, on behalf of humans, as speaking subjects. It is even more interesting, then, to look at the yellow rose a mysterious traveler gives to Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude: “He heard mass standing, as he always did, and at the end he stepped in front of Remedios the Beauty and offered her the solitary rose. […] The saddest part of his drama was that Remedios the Beauty did not notice him. […] She accepted the yellow rose without the least bit of malice, amused, rather, by the extravagance of the act. 17 Who knows if García Márquez intended for the traveler’s yellow rose to symbolize friendship? I personally believe it is offered more out of the traveler’s determination to obtain sexual rights to Remedios the Beauty, and that, ecocritically speaking, we ought to reflect on the problematic desire to possess a thing of natural beauty.
