Guest Editors’ Introduction Ecocriticism and a Conservationist Manifesto

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 30 (2009): 1-8 Guest Editors’ Introduction Ecocriticism and a Conservationist Manifesto Ufuk Özdağ and Scott Slovic The breeze will be sweet in your lungs and the rain will be innocent.1 Scott Russell Sanders World history has seen many manifestos—some political, others artistic. American author Scott Russell Sanders’s environmentalist manifesto is uniquely visionary and inviting. Most manifestos are emphatic calls to action. Sanders’s does more than that. In addition to offering a compelling formula for living human lives that take the future into account and will help to create “a culture of conservation,” Sanders helps readers re-imagine what it means to be human in the context of the natural world, what it means to live in a way that considers the limitations and requirements, the “expectations,” of the world beyond ourselves. The forty core declarations of his “Conservationist Manifesto”2 urge readers not to confuse financial wealth with real wealth, to understand that we must work collectively to protect our “common wealth,”3 not only for our own good, but for the sake of generations to come.4 One of the important ideas in Sanders’s manifesto is the notion that “[c]onservation means not only protecting the relatively unscathed natural areas that survive, but also mending, so far as possible, what has been damaged” (211). This restorationist sensibility is particularly important as we begin the second decade of the twenty-first 1 From Scott Russell Sanders’s last essay, “For the Children” in A Conservationist Manifesto (227). 2 See Sanders, “A Conservationist Manifesto” in A Conservationist Manifesto (209-19). 3 See Sanders’s essay, “Common Wealth” in A Conservationist Manifesto (25-42). 4 In “For the Children,” Sanders addresses the children of the future, and states, “…I believe we can change our ways, we can choose to do less harm, we can take better care of the soils and waters and air, we can make more room for all the creatures who breathe. And we are far more likely to do so if we think about the many children who will come after us, as I think about you” (224). Ufuk Özdağ and Scott Slovic century, for much of the planet, as we all know, has been meddled with on small or large scales—it has nearly all been “scathed,” so to speak. And yet that does not mean we should love altered landscapes any less than our dreams of pristine wilderness. We have decided to launch this special ecocriticism issue of JAST with Sanders’s “A Conservationist Manifesto,” for it might be said that the academic field known as ecocriticism, which has existed formally for some three decades and is becoming more global in scope everyday, has contributed to the foundations of the Manifesto. Although Sanders is generally thought to be a “nature writer” rather than an ecocritic per se, he has in fact published important commentaries on American environmental writing, such as the 1987 essay “Speaking a Word for Nature.” For the most part, though, he has devoted his distinguished career to exploring the meaning of his own life in relation to other people and to the larger planet in many volumes of narrative essays. He has also demonstrated a special ability both to ask profound questions about what Lawrence Buell would call our “environmental imagination” and to call for concrete changes in individual and collective behavior. In a sense, Sanders’s work bridges the divide between reflection and engagement that many ecocritics consider to be an essential tension within the field. Ecocriticism, now institutionalized in the West thanks to the efforts of numerous writers and critics, often seeks to “reverse” the very “destructive trends” that Sanders articulates in his Manifesto, albeit by way of the relatively indirect and subtle strategies of literary criticism. It is worth stating, too, that the environmentally destructive trends typically targeted by ecocriticism are also the product of western civilization’s industrial processes, and in this sense ecocriticism is a form of self-critique and self-correction. However, since environmental destruction has now become a global phenomenon, regardless of which cultures actually started the problems that now confront us, it seems important that ways of thinking about this destruction (and about our species’ deeper relationship with the planet) become equally global. As more and more scholars in the literarary profession begin to incorporate ecocritical perspectives in their studies, various methodologies are gaining popularity.5 Glen A. Love’s forceful statement back in 1991 that “the most important function of literature today” might be to “redirect human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world” helped to spur the ecocritical movement during its formative years (213). Lawrence Buell’s 5 Among a number of books on the pedagogical approaches, Teaching North American Environmental Literature by Laird Christensen et al. is a valuable collection on ecocritical praxis. 2 Guest Editors’ Introduction four criteria6 in his seminal The Environmental Imagination (1995), that helped to clarify what it means to categorize texts as “environmental,” was crucial to the growing institutionalization of the field. Cheryll Glotfelty’s groundbreaking introduction to 1996 collection The Ecocriticism Reader, titled “Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” argues that “[a] strong voice in the profession will enable ecocritics to be influential in mandating important changes in the canon, the curriculum, and university policy” (xxv)—and indeed many of these “important changes” have come to pass during the decade and a half since that book was published. Peter Barry’s breakdown of “what ecocritics do”7 in the final chapter of his second edition of Beginning Theory (2002) expands into new tasks for the ecocritic, such as those explained by Buell in The Future of Environmental Criticism, all contributing to Sanders’s “culture of conservation”: But how much will environmental criticism in literary studies matter to those outside its own disciplinary cloister, let alone to the lay world outside the academy? … [T]he answer so far looks more encouraging in the pedagogical arena than in that of critical discourse. As teachers and citizens, 6 Buell’s four criteria, in brief, are: the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history; the human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest; human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation; and some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text (7–8). 7 According to Barry, “[ecocritics] re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world; T (...truncated)