Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory
336
Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory
336eBook
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Overview
This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602233201 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Critical Norths
Space Nature Theory
By Sarah Jaquette Ray, Kevin Maier
UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 University of Alaska PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-320-1
CHAPTER 1
Whose Arctic? Who Cares?
Place, Responsibility, and Elegiac Purpose in the Eskimo Curlew Extinction Narrative
elspeth tulloch / UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL
IN "LOST DOGS, LAST BIRDS, AND LISTED SPECIES: CULTURES OF Extinction," Ursula K. Heise contextualizes scientific narratives about biodiversity loss within the tradition of stories about the deterioration of nature. She reminds us that typical narratives of decline focus on endpoints rather than new beginnings and simplify the way extinction can be understood. Relying mainly on tragic and elegiac modes, these tales either recycle a perennial unease with "modernization processes" or critique modernity's undermining of the relationship of humans with nature. Pointing to some of the limitations in conceptualizing species loss through these modes and drawing on Joseph W. Meeker's seminal work The Comedy of Survival, Heise explores the possibility of deploying an alternative approach to tell "'declensionist' narratives" — that is, at once comic and satiric. Following Meeker's lead, she argues that such an approach can propose a vision "not of the end of nature so much as its continually changing futures."
When considering the fate of species in the North in an era of climate warming, this quest for an alternative narrative mode to tell such a story poses challenges. Indeed, advocating a comic approach, which, as Meeker explains, presumes a paradigm of integration and adaptation, could be misconstrued as encouraging the minimizing or even ignoring of current and future losses of nonhuman species due to human activity. As such, its use could be seen as inviting the evasion of ethical engagement with these problems, Meeker's and Heise's arguments to the contrary. This possible sidestepping of issues is problematic, especially given that anxiety about irrevocable habitat change and the destruction of species unique to the North will no doubt persist. The reasons for this continued concern are multiple and well-known: the anticipated and accelerated alterations in northern environments, the concomitant and increased pressure for resource extraction, and the attendant human encroachment into once relatively sparsely human-inhabited areas. These realities are further complicated by the needs and claims of indigenous peoples with respect to resource use, access to traditional lifestyles, and related issues. Tensions over arctic sovereignty raise additional concerns about how to control or mitigate environmental damage. The relative rapidity with which some of this transformation is occurring understandably generates a deep sense of loss, especially among those who witness firsthand harm to ecosystems. For many wild species, adaptation will be complicated, difficult, and uncertain. Some, such as the ivory gull, face extinction. As such, the situation invites the use of the conventional modes in question.
This chapter will not focus on the first of these modes — the tragic mode — given its partial connection with classical tragedy and the latter's problematic fostering of what Meeker qualifies as an arrogant conception of morality that sets humans up above their "natural environment and animal origins." Rather, my argument considers the more contemplative elegiac mode, one that may reflect on, or invite the reader to reflect on, the loss the text describes. Originally a term attached to certain poetry of lament and mourning, elegy has also been used to describe prose works with similar thematic concerns, such as those "dealing with a vanishing way of life." When such texts are environmental essays, they can, in Timothy Morton's words, "fuse elegy and prophecy, becoming elegies for the future." As such, "[e]cological elegy asks us to mourn for something that has not completely passed, that perhaps has not even passed yet." The "anticipatory elegy" is a phenomenon Bonnie Costello also observes in ecopoetry, leading her to coin the term ecoelegy. While pointing to current decline, the environmentally engaged elegy can thus evoke a sense of impending greater, indeed ultimate, loss in the future, which explains the mode's ubiquity in this age marked, as many biologists believe, by the sixth mass extinction. The evocation of extinction discourse in ecological elegies, through the lamenting of the future passing of entire species, has parallels with the extinction discourse that Patrick Brantlinger identifies in the "proleptic elegies" of imperialist texts, that is, elegies "mourning dying races before they had actually expired." Aldo Leopold's essay "Marshland Elegy" in his classic A Sand County Almanac exemplifies the extinction-drenched ecological elegy. Describing the long-term degradation and near annihilation of a marsh, it concludes by envisioning the eventual demise of the migrating crane that once made this habitat its home. Leopold's elegy inspired at least one ornithological conservationist, George Archibald — originally from the Maritimes ("southern" Canada) and cofounder of the International Crane Foundation — to take up his life's work and eventually go North in quest of cranes. His passionate response to an ornithological ecoelegy shows their power and invites their study, particularly as they deal with northern species and habitats far from the bulk of human populations affecting them, and especially species that migrate over southern space. In what follows, I attempt to answer the call for this type of work by examining iterations of a widely circulated yet little studied extinction narrative about a northern, or at least northern-attached, species — the Eskimo curlew. My aim is to elucidate how this narrative of a vanishing northern-attached species functions in popular culture, how it makes appeals to southern dwellers in North America, and how it acts proleptically by refocusing the elegiac mode from the past to future, as environmental elegiac literature often does. At a time when transregional, transnational, not to say global solutions are touted as key to addressing complex ecological problems, the desire to increase the sensitivity of populous and resource-consumptive southern dwellers to northern issues continues.
Extinction narratives drawing on unconventional modes will constitute welcome and necessary innovations in this process. Indeed, new, open-ended, and adaptive ways of conceptualizing the future of the North in this changing world, as Will Elliott and Allison Athens explore in their respective chapters in this volume, are vital for finding a path or paths in the uncertain way that lies ahead. Formulating ultimately life-affirming solutions will likely, however, require societies to move through a prolonged and messy coming-to-terms process. This will involve fluctuating between at least two states: on the one hand, dealing with loss, especially unnecessary, disruptive, or massive loss, and on the other hand, working restoratively for as richly diverse a future as possible while adapting to the future as it comes to be. Depending on how one defines it and how it is manifested, fighting against loss could figure in either part of this process. This complex grappling with events has parallels with the bereaved person's oscillation between "loss-oriented" and "restoration-oriented" efforts after the death of a loved one, a taxonomy psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut proposed some fifteen years ago. One part of this "working through" dyad does not preclude the other.
It remains germane then, during this period of decline and disappearance, to scrutinize how a frequently used mode makes appeals to the distant reader's or the distant spectator's sense of and responsibility for a particular faraway place and its common, threatened, and endangered species. In aestheticizing loss, the elegiac mode provides a cultural space for channeling and redirecting sadness, grief, mourning, and despair. As those seeking to foster ethically informed activism observe, sadness can serve to generate anger, which may translate into care, advocacy, and ecologically oriented action. Indeed, the ecoelegy, whether in its poetic or prose form, functions in complex ways in this regard. As Costello, drawing on the work of R. Clifton Spargo explains, "ecoelegy mourns a particular loss in ... terms of anticipatory elegy, as if it could stop the loss and offer belated protection."
Three interrelated elegiac renderings of the Eskimo curlew extinction narrative assign symbolic significance to this species, impart representations of the North and South, and make appeals to southern dwellers over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. It was during this period that the environmental movement and public interest in the North — its peoples and species — began to grow in contemporary culture. Catalysts for concern for endangered species included the founding of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1948, which began compiling and releasing its Red List of Threatened Species in 1963. Almost a decade prior, in 1955, Fred Bodsworth (1918–2012), a Canadian journalist and naturalist, published his first novel, Last of the Curlews, an elegy heralding the impending extinction of the Eskimo curlew. A bird reputed to have once turned skies black in its migrations, the Eskimo curley experienced a devastating and relatively sudden collapse in population prior to the turn of the twentieth century. Bodsworth's documentary novel was an expanded version of a novelette he had published to popular acclaim under the same title in Maclean's magazine on May 15, 1954. Selling more than three million copies, the novel helped regalvanize interest in conservation, something the decimation of the Eskimo curlew and the rapid decline of other birds had done in the United States and Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. The novel has remained a staple among conservationist-minded readers ever since but has been largely ignored in literary scholarship. In 1972, almost twenty years and several editions later (including a 1955 edition in the widely disseminated Reader's Digest Condensed Books series), the novel was adapted into an animated film for the ABC Afterschool Special by Hanna-Barbera Studios. This broadcast coincided with the burgeoning environmental movement. In 1996, forty-one years after the novel's initial publication, the documentary film The Barrens Quest reappropriated the Eskimo curlew's story, showcasing Bodsworth himself. The documentary exposes rekindling concerns about the effect of mining development on parts of the Canadian North.
Extinction narratives often carry a dual signification: the real destruction of the actual species in question and the wider symbolic concept of the eradicative threat humans pose to nonhuman species in general. The fate of the single male protagonist and his mate in Bodsworth's novel and its animated film adaptation and the fate of the Eskimo curlew as a species as recounted in all three texts carry more than these two connotations. As The Barrens Quest baldly concludes, "the story of endangered species invariably unfolds into the story of endangered spaces." In this light, the Eskimo curlew's extinction narrative can be read in the three texts as connoting both endangered northern species and northern spaces and, through the elegiac mode, as seeking to elicit the reader's desire to protect both.
However, when studied in chronological order of production, the three texts can also be seen as increasingly implicating northerners in the degradation of their environment, undermining the rhetorical appeal to southern dwellers to worry about the North's environmental future. This widening of the assignment of responsibility for species or environmental decline reduces the burden to be borne by those human populations most implicated in the decline. As such, it parallels to some extent Brantlinger's observations about the implicit stance of proleptic elegies that mourn vanishing races in imperialist rhetoric. He notes that these elegies found ways to blame the elegized peoples for their anticipated demise, even when the imperialist texts mourned the expected passing of those perceived to be doomed. As I will show, this reworking of the burden of responsibility in the texts under study here also results, by the documentary, in a recontainment of place and a narrowing of ecoresponsibility. These aspects had been by comparison more widely assigned or shared in Bodsworth's novel and its animated adaptation. As an alternative strategy, the documentary attempts to rally the masses to the cause by appealing to ethnic identities dominant among southerners. Further, it widens the symbolic resonance of the Eskimo curlew. Together these tactics strongly direct the elegiac mode toward engagement with the future. This explicitly prospective stance brings the extinction narrative of one species squarely into the contemporary drama of current species in decline in the North. As such, the documentary draws on the full force of the anticipatory ecological elegy. This set of texts thus culminates with one that explicitly solicits outsiders to protect the region's threatened bio-uniqueness while it inadvertently disengages them. One is left wondering, then, about the efficacy of the mode, given the history and geopolitics of the region. A more detailed review of each text will demonstrate my arguments.
Last of the Curlews (1955)
Like many extinction narratives, Bodsworth's novel Last of the Curlews is constructed around a flagship species, in this case one that was once abundant, numbering by some accounts in the millions, and was capable of especially grueling feats of migration. To heighten the reader's concern for the species, the narrative focuses on one of its last remaining males — if not the last — as he attempts to find a mate. Over the course of a yearlong cycle, he migrates from the North to the southernmost tip of South America and back. In the warmer climes of the South, he finally locates the elusive female — perhaps the last remaining one — and heads North in the hope of mating with her. A farmer shoots her before they make it to the arctic breeding grounds. She succumbs to her wounds, the male protectively at her side, the mating cycle never completed. Driven by instinct, he returns to the Arctic to stake out his territory and await a new mate.
The chronologically told migratory narrative of this largely solitary male, accompanied only partway by a female, is intercut with excerpts from historical texts, each titled "The Gauntlet." These succinctly but effectively document the massive slaughter to which the Eskimo curlew as a species was subjected in its past migrations, particularly in late-nineteenth-century North America. The tightly constructed novel thus relentlessly insists that this single male curlew is solitary mainly because humans engaged in the deliberate destruction of the species over a brief span of decades. Along much of the curlews' migratory route, the descendants of settlers wantonly hunted them down and, when the opportunity presented itself or their shot was depleted, clubbed exhausted migrants to death. The demise of the female at the hands of the farmer hints at two other major reasons for the collapse of the species' population, one not directly addressed in the novel: that is, the supplanting of native prairie, the source of the species' natural food supply during its northerly migration, by cropland, and the annihilation of the Rocky Mountain grasshopper. The pair's need for sustenance in what was once native prairie brings them too close to humans; the birds follow plows churning up the grubs they need to carry on, inciting, for nebulous reasons, the farmer's lethal attack.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Critical Norths by Sarah Jaquette Ray, Kevin Maier. Copyright © 2017 University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS.
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