The double-edged sword of new world pastoral writing: How do we truly “see” nature? (Weekly Reading Response #1)

As I sit down to write my findings for this week, I had to fight the urge to walk two blocks down and take pictures of the Crane family that frequents the retention pond near my apartments.  I am pretty sure they are Snadhill Cranes, and the little brown baby that stands only half the height of his parents’ legs is adorable. 

After writing this post, I had to go out and snap a shot of the crane family (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/ says they form mated pairs).  I was excited to find that there are actually two babies.  I worry about them living so close to a busy street, but aparently they have a long fossil record.  The crane family was across the street from their normal pond looking for what might be bugs, roots, or worms to snack on. 

Does it matter what humans call the animals around us? Certainly not to the animals.  So, it is harmless then for humans to use the power of language to name, divide, and classify the natural worlds around us—well, not really.  Buell describes the genre of New World pastoral writing as prose that “promotes the idea of vast territories of the actual globs subsisting under the sign of nature” (54).  This again sounds like a harmless thought that might even inspire ecocritical thought.  We live in nature.  However Buell says New World pastoral writing also, “lays the groundwork for developing the myth of the land as properly unspoiled, a myth that can give shape and impetus to more recent environmental restoration projects” (54).  Buell goes on to say that “contemporary new world pastoralists,” or modern environmentalists are challenged by needing to overcome this myth, the “green world, a dream, a concept” (55).   Basically, the danger of new world pastoral is that the colonizers of early America used it to describe the American landscape as a form of cultural capital, and this lead to the writers not seeing the actual environment that was there but instead what they imagined was there; Buell calls this “the aesthetics of the not-there” (68). 

Laura commented on my post from last week that it seems like William Bartram never actually saw the gators that he sketched.  I think her instincts were right on.  Bartram, who Buell says was writing settler pastoral travel non-fiction, imposed his imagined green dream on the landscape and his dragon-like vision emerged. 

There is a doubled edged-sword that seems to characterize new world pastoral writing though.  The writers are appreciating nature and lauding its beauty, but because they are looking at the world through colonizers’ eyes they see new lands as “empty” and ready to be filled by their classifications and interpretations.  The world is non-existent until the colonizer looks upon it and names it. 

Photo of William Bartram's drawing “View of the Alegator [sic] Hole,” 1790. Bartram’s note:

“Location of this sink was near the ancient Indian village and trading station of Talahasochte”

Image from www.floridamemory.com

So, yes writers like Bartram appreciate nature, but they are trapped in the colonizer’s ideology.  Bartram thought he was doing a good thing by categorizing and naming the Florida fauna, flora, and animals, but wasn’t he just colonizing it with his words?  Buell says that Bartram’s Travels in Florida, “is conquest in the guise of passive observation” (62).  I am not sure I would describe killing alligators as passive.  I still need to read the full text to make my final judgment.  Does Bartram kill other animals because they were in his way?  Buell mentions a snake that he had to kill, but I get the feeling that scholars who view Bartram as a one of the more sensitive, eco-friendly early American travel writers have excused some of his behavior toward nature because he was writing trapped in the colonial ideology.  But why excuse him and make excuses?      

I have personally been sucked in by the modern pastoral myth of a sublime, pure, green world unspoiled by humans.  However, I am beginning to try to see the “real” nature beyond this modern environmental rhetoric—though if it convinces people to be more responsible I am not sure it is a bad thing like Buell seems to suggest.  Is the crane family any less “natural” or pure because they like to fish and nest in the local retention pond?  I don’t think so. 

The retention pond that the crane family frequents most often.  They also like the park across the street and another pond next to a Walgreens.

This brings me back to Bartram and his Alligators.  I was surprised as I read more of Buell that he uses Bartram’s text as an example of early American non-conquest oriented pastoral writing. He claims, “Bartram’s excitement by the sense that the country in which he finds himself really seems like a pastoral Eden (despite mosquitoes and alligators) converts his intellectual ambitiousness into a defense of the region’s integrity, not an apologia for conquest” (63).  Buell focuses on how Bartram describes the Creeks and Seminoles with the same respect as the while settlers.  Ok, I see that, but what about how he describes the land, the animals?  He seems to have that “man is greater than nature; so, I have a right to be master of it” attitude.  Buell offers Bartram’s non-conquest pastoral writing and ingenious pastoral writing (used “as a weapon against cultural dominance” as alternate examples to the colonizing potential of new world pastoral writing.  I am just not ready to accept this until I explore the text more.  I fell that Bartram has an instrumentalist attitude (nature is to be used as an instrument for man’s benefit) that needs to be acknowledged.  I am not sure what this means for the text as a whole, or how scholars should look at new world pastoral writing differently.

Oryx and Crake Tangent

While reading Buell, I could not help but think of Oryx and Crake.  I have a feeling this will happen often because I spent last semester writing three lengthy papers on the novel and giving two presentations on it.  Anyway, I am now convinced that Crake’s problem is that despite his mathematical, scientific mind he wholeheartedly believes in a green dream, of nature unspoiled by humans and that is why he is driven to do what he does (I won’t give spoilers).  Also, I think this is why he insisted that the “perfect” humans that he created should all have green eyes.  It is a symbolic gesture—a  message that he wants them to see the world with green sight.