Recomposing Ecopoetics

North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene

Lynn Keller

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813940632
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

In the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene, " a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics analyzes work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets--including Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, and Jena Osman--all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. Drawing as often on linguistic experimentalism as on traditional literary resources, these poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does. This interdisciplinary study not only brings cutting-edge work in ecocriticism to bear on a diverse archive of contemporary environmental poetry; it also offers the environmental humanities new ways to understand the cultural and affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.

CHAPTER 1

“In Deep Time into Deepsong”

Writing the Scalar Challenges of the Anthropocene

Early in 2014 I attended a talk by the noted American environmental historian Donald Worster, titled “Second Earth: Thinking about Environmental History on a Planetary Scale,” in which Worster considered the implications of several chronologically distinct maps of the globe. He identified a 1587 Mercator map of what he called “Second Earth” as the founding document of an era in which Europeans, inhabiting a world where many of the natural resources were depleted, turned to pursuing the seemingly infinite abundance of the New World. That age of abundance, he observed, is now coming to an end. Resource depletion is undermining the foundations for manufactured abundance. The Second Earth is shrinking, and we humans are entering “the age of limits,” in which we face unprecedented resource constraints. At the end of the talk, Worster introduced photos of the earth taken from space—going from the iconic “blue marble” image taken from a distance of forty-five thousand kilometers from the earth by the crew of Apollo 17 on their way to the moon in 1972, to the “pale blue dot,” taken less than twenty years later, in 1990, by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it exited the solar system, at about 6 billion kilometers from the earth. In these representations, the earth’s size diminishes dramatically as advancing space exploration enables views from increasingly vast distances. Worster used these images to demonstrate both that our conception of the earth, which expanded with the discovery of “Second Earth,” is now contracting, and also that our understanding of the earth’s boundaries now comes not from cartographers but from scientists. The sciences tell us not just of the depletion of specific resources but of the perturbation of whole systems on which human survival and the survival of myriad other life forms depend. Following a rhetorical pattern common in recent environmental writing, he turned from describing recent changes to calling for corresponding changes in thinking and behavior that might enable human survival. We need, he proposed, a post-Mercator revolution of the mind to deal with the perceptual, moral, and economic transformation that is under way.¹

Worster’s presentation exemplifies an emergent environmental discourse that emphasizes currently changing or divergent scales of phenomena and of perception, and that stresses the importance of learning to think across multiple scales. Although Worster didn’t mention the Anthropocene, he was participating in the current discourse of Anthropocene scales and the challenges they pose. For fundamental to the concept of the Anthropocene is its bringing together—and even into collision—vastly discrepant scales, especially of time and space, but also of technology. The scales involved are at once material and conceptual, including concepts of the human and of human agency. Multiple types of scales are often intertwined. The very rapidity of current environmental alterations, evident, for instance, in a rate of extinction known to have precedent only five times in planetary history, suggests that environmental change itself is occurring on scales that are, for humans, unprecedented and verging on unimaginable.

In the poems to be examined here, Juliana Spahr, Forrest Gander, and Ed Roberson grapple with the challenges of thinking in scalar terms appropriate to the Anthropocene as they attempt to help readers grasp what is happening to nonhuman nature and to planetary systems on nearly unimaginable scales, both vast and minute. Their different strategies imply differing visions of poetry’s role in fostering conceptual and cultural change, while the poetry of all three reveals an instability, a dance between the desire to locate in poetry useful resources for changing perception and understanding, and a counter-recognition of the limited powers of both language and the human mind, particularly in the face of environmental disruption of a scale and complexity previously unknown.

While Spahr in “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” approaches Anthropocene awareness as a largely emotional challenge, one that produces an affective confounding that is also an ethical, conceptual, and political quandary, the works I will consider by Gander and Roberson treat the challenges of scale as more perceptual than emotional. Perhaps because their early training in the natural sciences makes imagination at extreme scales come more easily, they find scalar dissonance less problematic, and their poems model possible strategies for apprehending processes and phenomena at suprahuman scales. Both imply that poetry’s ability to help us grasp the colliding scales of the Anthropocene could prove a crucial resource for humans now, although even with that resource in place, hopes for meaningful change remain tentative. Being able to grasp scalar challenges—something that Gander guides his readers to do and that Roberson presents as already among their perceptual resources—lays the groundwork for the complex processes of identifying and instituting changes that would be effective in responding to the planet’s energy needs and in minimizing global warming.

THE COLLIDING SCALES OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS ANTHROPOCENE

In the self-conscious Anthropocene, Homo sapiens not only emerges as the planet’s dominant species, but also acquires the status of an immensely powerful geological force. The very name Anthropocene points to how very big humans have come to seem, as our vastly expanded population transforms earth’s surfaces through agriculture, mining, and urbanization, as we take control of the global nitrogen cycle through manufactured fertilizers, as we alter the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and acidify the oceans by burning fossil fuels. Our impact and technological powers seem immense. But humankind also appears very small, as humans do not control the effects of anthropogenic changes, many of which have been unintentional. Ultimately, human powers are dwarfed by the nonhuman laws and powers of nature, whose inexorable effects could, at elusive but perhaps imminent tipping points, emerge in full force, perhaps eliminating the human species and many other species that humans have not already managed to destroy.

Just as humans now seem at once vastly more significant and more insignificant than ever before,² we are now challenged to understand the world at both much larger and much smaller scales than before. Recognizing the significance of current planetary changes requires us to extend our restricted anthropocentric vision to think in scales of deep time and space. Simultaneously, we must shrink our gaze to attend to the surprisingly grand significance of microbes and microfauna and small pollinating or disease-carrying insects, of energy released by subatomic particles, of the health effects of minute amounts of toxic chemicals, or the vast significance of what might seem small changes in the composition of the earth’s atmosphere. Moreover, we feel called upon somehow to address as individual consumers and private citizens of distinct nations complex global problems that can be solved only by political, scientific, and corporate collaboration on an international scale.

Different scalar perspectives often exist in tension or conflict with one another. Thus, while we may regard the time period since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as a substantial one, and the period since humans began killing nonhuman animals as very long indeed, in the scale of geological time human habitation of the planet occupies a tiny blip. Thinking in terms of geological time encourages us to acknowledge the planet’s indifference to the survival of Homo sapiens and to the maintenance of the atmospheric conditions on which the survival of many Holocene species depends. As such, it may encourage species humility (though perhaps not for those who place all their faith in our technological powers). Yet humankind’s impact on the planet, however carelessly enacted, promises to extend into the vast temporal distance of the planetary future. Our minds, moreover, have difficulty grasping either that vast future our behavior is altering or the past of deep time before we evolved, let alone thinking those together with our familiarly scaled present. Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, who speaks of the “poignant contrast between time as we experience it in our everyday lives and the incomprehensibly greater scale of Deep Time,” describes the latter as “like an endless, dark corridor, with no landmarks to give it scale.”³

Thinking about the Anthropocene with an eye to addressing its problems demands that we bring these discrepant time scales together—or that we focus clearly on their discrepancies and the impact of those discrepancies. Among those concerned that our thinking take into account the Anthropocene challenges of scale, I discern two positions: the first, an aspirational one, calls for us to somehow think through the incomprehensible and bring the varied scales together; the other, a skeptical position, emphasizes scale variants and scale effects to suggest that we cannot meet current environmental challenges simply by trying to scale up or scale down our thinking, just as we cannot scale up many of what we might want to regard as problem-solving technologies.

The aspirational camp, with which I suspect Worster aligns, calls for extending our thinking to include scales beyond those of everyday human experience in order to conceptualize “human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.”⁴ The quoted words are Derek Woods’s characterization of the position of historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose influential article “The Climate of History: Four Theses” advances this way of thinking with the aim of bringing reason fully to bear in responding to climate change. Chakrabarty proposes that “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” Historians have previously assumed that, beyond its repetitive changes associated with cycles like the seasons, the natural environment changed so slowly “as to make the history of man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all.” This would correspond with the sense of timeless nature that I noted in poems by Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver in my introduction. Even environmental historians, Chakrabarty claims, “looked upon human beings as biological agents,” a very different kind of agency from the geological agency proposed by climate scientists. “To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human,” he observes: “There was no point in human history when humans were not biological agents. But we can become geological agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself.” He claims that historical understanding of the crisis of climate change “requires us to bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital.”⁵

Historians are wary of thinking in the monolithic terms of species, and Chakrabarty raises the question of whether such generalizing talk simply obscures “the reality of capitalist production and the logic of imperial . . . domination that it fosters.” He acknowledges that much responsibility for the current crisis lies with the rich nations and rich classes rather than all of humankind. (Chakrabarty is pointing to a common critique of the Anthropocene concept—to be explored in chapter 6—that, in framing humans as a species, it elides issues of environmental justice.) He nonetheless argues that the history of capital alone is insufficient to explain climate change. He proposes that the combined resources of geology, archeology, and history are needed to explain the current catastrophe—that is, the combined resources of disciplines that work in divergent time scales. We are called upon “to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history.”⁶ Precisely because he believes an (otherwise unlikely) awareness of pan-human collectivity arises from the shared sense of catastrophe prompted by climate change, Chakrabarty does not dismiss this as impossible, though it requires working at the limits of historical understanding. In a more recent essay, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” he has elaborated on three of the “rifts” that he sees us necessarily straddling as we think or speak about climate change. These inject, he acknowledges, “a certain degree of contradictoriness in our thinking, for we are being asked to think about different scales simultaneously,”⁷ but he embraces those tensions as sites of productive possibility.⁸ The essay explains why it’s necessary to bring together different scales—for instance, why economists, politicians, and others thinking in terms of risk management need to understand scientists’ uncertainties about exact climatic tipping points and “safe” levels of greenhouse gases.

In Chakrabarty’s view, the climate crisis requires us to meet the challenge of “mov[ing] back and forth between thinking on these different scales all at once,” bringing human-centered thinking into play with a planetary perspective.⁹ Given that paleoclimatologists, evolutionary biologists, and other natural historians think in terms of far larger time scales than historians, Chakrabarty positions himself as championing a kind of thinking that is unfamiliar to historians and humanists, but by no means ungraspable. He concludes another essay on essentially the same issues by advocating “multiple-track narratives so that the story of the ontologically-endowed, justice-driven human can be told alongside the other agency that we also are—a species that has now acquired the potency of a geophysical force, and thus is blind, at this level, to its own perennial concerns with justice that otherwise forms the staple of humanist narratives.”¹⁰

If Chakrabarty articulates an aspirational approach to the problem of scale in the Anthropocene, Derek Woods’s critique of Chakrabarty represents the second, skeptical position on this issue. Woods does not believe that we can in fact “scale up our imagination of the human,” as Chakrabarty proposes, because of what are called scale variants, which create scale effects. As Woods explains in “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” “at its most general, scale variance means that the observation and the operation of systems are subject to different constraints at different scales due to real discontinuities.” For example, while insects can walk on the ceiling and fall from it without damage, because surface forces have more impact on them than the force of gravity, insect bodies could not be dramatically scaled up and have that remain true. Insects “inhabit a different regime of scale constraint from that of larger vertebrates.”¹¹ Global climate change, he asserts, does not operate like the familiar cartographic scale where one can smoothly zoom in and out (think Google Maps). Non-cartographic concepts of scale introduce discontinuities, and scaling up or down may introduce contradictions or failures.

In relation to current global climate change, nature’s response to multiple anthropogenic changes of the Anthropocene, this has powerful implications for human agency and responsibility. Timothy Clark, on whose work Woods draws, points out that “with climate change . . . we have a map, its scale includes the whole earth but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history, culture, etc., the map is often almost mockingly useless.” Clark explains:

Scale effects in relation to climate change are confusing because they take the easy, daily equations of moral and political accounting and drop into them both a zero and an infinity: ...