Revaluing Nature Writing: Toward Love and Flower Power
One Hundred Years of Solitude offers ecocritical scholars a fully realized treatment of the end of man; in bringing an awareness of eco-consciousness to Faulkner’s ego-consciousness, García Márquez’s work provides the basis for a new category on the spectrum of nature writing, for it reminds us that our time on earth is precious and that we must not pass it, or let it pass us, idly by. In providing us with the hope that we have a second opportunity on earth, García Márquez compels us to acknowledge that the time to love, to green, is now. Buscaglia implores us to realize that the past “has value because it made you what you are now, but that is all the value it has. So don’t live in the past. Live now. […] When you are loving, love. When you are talking with someone, talk. When you are looking at a flower, look. Catch the beauty of the moment!” 21 If there was ever a moment with which we could prevent the end of human and nonhuman life, the end of planet Earth, that moment is now, for the “most important function of literature today is to redirect human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world.” 22 Now is the time to reassess the ways in which we have learned to love and green, and now is the time to be great, to amass knowledge and understanding so that we may teach others that, in García Márquez’s words, the revaluing of nature writing would have us “always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” 23
Endnotes
1 Glen A. Love, “Revaluing Nature,” The Ecocriticism Reader, (Athens and London: The University of Georgia press, 1996), p. 226.
2 Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” The Ecocriticism Reader, pp. xviii, xix.
3 Thomas J. Lyon, “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing,” The Ecocriticism Reader, p. 278.
4 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1970), pp. 208, 308, 448.
5 Sture Allén and Tore Frängsmyr, eds., Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1993) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-e.html (10 May 2007).
6 Horst Frenz, ed., Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, (Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969), http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html (10 May 2007).
7 Christopher Manes, “Nature and Silence,” The Ecocriticism Reader, p. 15.
8 Love, p. 230.
9 Glotfelty, p. xxx.
10 Manes, pp. 17-18.
11 García Márquez, p. 2.
12 Leo Buscaglia, Love, (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972), pp. 91, 18.
13 Diane Ackerman, “Introduction,” The Book of Love, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. xxix.
14 Sandra J. Hardy, “Flowers: The Popular Symbol,” 1985, (17 May 2007).
15 Wikipedia Contributors, “People’s Park (Berkeley).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en. wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=People%27s_Park_%28Berkeley %29&oldid=128275305> (10 May 2007).
16 Diane Ackerman, “Summer,” Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2001), p. 73.
17 García Márquez pp. 212-213.
18 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
19 Salman Rushdie, “Out of Kansas,” Step Across This Line, (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), pp. 7, 26.
20 García Márquez, pp. 13, 267, 18, 19, 19, 19.
21 Buscaglia, p. 39.
22 Love, p. 237.
23 García Márquez, p. 443.
