In 1982 a single book turned my attention toward the study of nature-oriented literature, which in turn has become the major field of study throughout my teaching career. That book was The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which coincidentally enough I began discussing in a course on modern American literature the day before I began revising this chapter for publication. At that time during my M.A. course work at California State University, Northridge, a visiting professor from Humboldt State offered the English department course on the American novel and ended the semester with Kerouac’s roman à clef focused on Gary Snyder. Rather than exciting me about Kerouac’s career, the novel excited me about Snyder’s, and once I learned that he stood behind Kerouac’s character, Japhy Ryder, I began reading everything I could find by him. That reading turned up the collaboration and exchanges between Snyder in those days and Wendell Berry. Their interaction led me to the topic of my M.A. thesis, a comparative study of the two men’s poetry. My interest in Snyder, in turn, attracted the attention of the doctoral program at the University of California, Davis, when I applied there. In what may be one of those moments of cosmic irony, after arriving in Davis in September of 1983, my wife and I drove up to Nevada City, California, to see the landscape in which Snyder lived, and learned that the very next weekend Snyder and Berry would be doing a joint new book signing at Grimblefinger’s. So, we returned the following weekend and met both of them there. Over twenty years later, I continue to write about and teach the works of both of these environmental activist authors. So, while one can only hope that nature-oriented literature will be bought and read by individual readers on their own without any prodding or requiring, I also know that a nudge in that direction through assigning a book or teaching an entire course in such literature can, to echo Robert Frost, make all the difference.
LOWER DIVISION COMPOSITION
From first-year composition through advanced doctoral seminars, I have included or focused on environmental literature in a wide range of offerings over these past twenty years. My theoretical work and research have focused on notions of international and multicultural environmental literature, ecofeminist dialogics, interdisciplinarity, and genre configurations across poetry, fiction and nonfiction, as should be evident by the previous chapters in this book. In the following paragraphs, I will link these research areas to a variety of courses in order to demonstrate some of the myriad ways that anyone wishing to present to students nature writing, nature-oriented literature, environmental writing, or whatever else one might like to call it, can do so either as part of a larger topic or as a focused course subject.
First- and second-year general education composition courses generally work with the premise that for students to write well they must have a serious topic about which to write. Nature as a topic often seems too static or too vague for many students, but environmental issues frequently have more immediate meaning, especially when linked to specific local issues. As a result, I regularly teach a composition course titled either “Toxic Topics” or “Everybody Lives Downstream,” and have recently emended it to a local/global emphasis with the energy crisis and global warming. With the first topic, instructors can run into the problem of students quickly finding the subject matter uniformly depressing, especially if all of the readings focus on disasters, such as Love Canal. Hence, I usually include a book such as Ted Bernard and Jora Young’s The Ecology of Hope (1997). There students can read positive examples of American community accomplishments, which in turn encourage them to write about actions being taken and possibilities for future improvements rather than just defending the status quo or painting doom-and-gloom scenarios. Or one might use Bill McKibben’s Hope, Human and Wild (1995), for an international rather than national emphasis The second topic title for the course comes from Sandra Steingraber’s, Living Downstream (1998), which teaches students about collecting evidence and arguing from data. Students can learn much from attending to the way in which it is written and discussing and writing about how they might adapt or adopt structures and strategies from this text. Of particular benefit for students is an assignment that calls on them to analyze the differences in strategies employed when Steingraber is building an argument based on data and when she is building an argument based on personal experience. One could also use her more recent book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2001), especially if teaching students majoring in human and health services. These kinds of books and upbeat journal articles provide more effective models of nonfiction environmental writing for students than relentless exposés that students tend to dismiss as “downers.”
Invariably, I find that students tire quickly of litanies of negative critique and long to hear about possible solutions and implemented actions. I found that particularly the case with the recent incarnation of this course using David Goodstein’s Out of Gas and James Gustav Speth’s Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. Students praised both of these books for recommending solutions. In a summer course I varied the readings a bit and tried this research writing course with Stephen Leeb’s The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel (2006), and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006). In this way, I can compare a version of the course using academic books versus one using nonacademic, but well-researched books. Leeb is a well-respected investment analyst with interesting credentials: a B.A. in economics, an M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in psychology. Kolbert worked as a reporter for the New York Times before becoming a staff writer for the New Yorker, and won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award for the articles she used as the basis for her book. In the latest iteration of this course, I substituted Richard Heinberg’s PowerDown for the Leeb book, since I knew most of the students would be engineering or molecular science majors. This small class split evenly between those who preferred the more personal and affective way that Kolbert used and the more logic-driven, impersonal style that Heinberg chose.
THE HONORS SEMINAR
When an opportunity came along for me to teach an upper division interdisciplinary seminar in the honors college where I previously worked, I took the basics of my composition course and enlarged and developed it. Knowing that the students would come from a cross section of disciplines, I wanted books and topics that could engage people in dialogue across their differences. “Other and Another: Ecology, Gender, Culture” became the title of this course, allowing me to mix together environmental issues, gender issues, cultural studies, and applications of the theory of dialogics developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. This course began with reading and discussing Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather (1969). Set in Botswana it includes attention to environment, gender, and culture a few decades and a continent removed from my students’ experiences. This distancing allowed for less defensive discussion of gender issues and students got to know each other in the class. The novel allows for students to talk about scientific issues in relation to agricultural experimentation and to social science and humanities issues in relation to the depiction of social interaction. It also lets the students see the different terms of the course title working out in an interactive environment, including the distinction between “other” and “another” in terms of alienation, familiarity, and difference.
Other readings for this course have varied over time, but include Ecofeminism and the Sacred (1993) edited by Carol Adams, The Circle of Simplicity (1998) by Cecile Andrews, Reflections on Gender and Science (1985) by Evelyn Fox Keller, and All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999) by Winona LaDuke. The course allows for students to tackle a wide variety of assignments, ranging from creative writing, theatrical performances and short films to debates, from reading journals to formal research papers, from community activism outings to gender and environmental critiques of students’ career plans.
UNDERGRADUATE ETHNIC LITERATURE
Undergraduate and graduate literature courses have provided me with the greatest opportunities and greatest variety of teaching environmental literature. With courses in minority and ethnic American literature, one can incorporate individual works of nonfiction nature writing or novels about environmental justice. With Native American literature, this is so easy it is hardly worth mentioning. With Chicano literature, one can use a novel such as Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1994) or Edna Escamill’s Daughter of the Mountain (1991). Certain poetry volumes fit in well, such as Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín (1987) or Pat Mora’s Borders (1986). With Asian American literature, a significant portion of the writings about Asian American experience are set in Hawai’i, as with the poetry of Juliet Kono in Hilo Rains (1988) or Kiana Davenport’s novel Shark Dialogues (1995). There is also the environmental justice fiction of novelist Karen Tei Yamashita, whether one uses the magical realist black comedy, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), or the postmodern multinarrated novel set in Los Angeles, Tropic of Orange (1997). Environmental justice fiction and poetry can be paired with overviews of the field, such as The Environmental Justice Reader, edited by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein; The Quest for Environmental Justice, edited by Robert D. Bullard; and New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, edited by Rachel Stein.
REGIONAL LITERATURE
Other areas in the undergraduate English curriculum would be regional literature and nature writing. Various ways exist to define the word “regional,” but virtually any of them allows for a course that will focus on human relationships with the natural world. The one time I was able to teach “regional American literature,” I chose agrarian and ranching prose as my terrain, treating rural farm and ranch life as an American region out of which develops consciousness and social-nature interaction affected by geographical location but determined more by the intensity of human relationships with land, animals, crops, and climate.
Using a chronological approach, I began with Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and then turned to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913). Students noted how little attention Cather gave to the details of farming compared with Norris’s attention to the entire process of crop production and marketing. Frank Waters’s People of the Valley (1941) allowed me to introduce students to Southwest fiction and a neglected author they probably would otherwise never read. This novel immersed them in the geography that was also the setting for a contemporary nonfiction work, Stanley Crawford’s Mayordomo (1988). While strongly satisfied with the balanced attention given to people and place in Waters’s work, students felt that Crawford skated over the surface of character portrayal in his book. They did, however, appreciate the representation of water rights issues and the communal acequia culture that still survives in New Mexico.
We then moved northeast to Massachusetts and another nonfiction work, Jane Brox’s elegiac Here and Nowhere Else (1995). This book reinvigorated discussion of the dynamic tension between agricultural life and gender roles, particularly in the nuclear farming family. This issue of gender was augmented by attention to race when we read Dori Sanders’s Her Own Place (1994), the fictional story of an African American woman making a life out of farming in the post–World War II South. Curiously enough, as with Cather’s novel, the actualities of farming fall far into the background in Her Own Place as the novel progresses. The class concluded with two works of nonfiction devoted to ranching life, Teresa Jordan’s Riding the White Horse Home (1994) and Linda Hasselstrom’s Going Over East (1987). The former is a reminiscence focusing on childhood memories and the eventual loss of the family ranch. The latter makes a striking contrast because it focuses on a woman who comes into ranching as an adult and is very much a part of a viable economic family activity. This focus on farming and ranching ranging over a hundred years of literary production reminds students that a large portion of this country is neither totally wild nor totally domesticated, and remains very much part of the present and not just a matter of reminiscence.
NATURE WRITING
Many college English departments have nature writing courses. When initially worked into the curriculum, they usually focused on the then-neglected genre of literary nonfiction. These courses tended to emphasize wilderness experiences undertaken by lone white males, such as Thoreau, Burroughs, and Muir. There continues to be a place for such courses, but if students may get introduced to only one course in nature writing, I would prefer they experience it from a multigenre, multicultural perspective.
When teaching this course in the fall of 1990, I began with John Muir and then turned to Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces (1987), enabling a contrast between traditional nonfiction works in which the first focuses on the heroic actions of the author while the latter focuses on the heroic and nurturing actions of others. In contrast to their traditional style, Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) introduced students to a postmodern text that has been used mostly as a critical work, even though it is a fundamentally creative, innovative text demonstrating the power of double voicing. From there students read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1986) and developed team projects around it. After her novel, we focused on poetry by Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, and Gary Snyder. We then looked at another science fiction novel, Strieber and Kunetka’s bleak Nature’s End (1987), which is written as a pseudo-documentary piece. After the Thanksgiving holiday we studied an anthology of Native American poems and Linda Hogan’s collection, Savings (1988). We ended the course by returning to Le Guin and reading her mixed genre collection, Buffalo Gals (1990). I particularly wanted to end with this volume because so many of the pieces treat shifts in perspective and narration by nonhuman entities. Through this type of eclectic reading, students can be introduced to the variations among genres of nature-oriented literature and still have an opportunity to treat one author’s work with some depth and sustained attention, rather than engaging solely in whirlwind survey-style study.
GRADUATE STUDIES
At the graduate level, courses often have vague, general catalog descriptions allowing instructors enormous leeway in topic and title selection. For example, in teaching “Topics in Women’s Literature,” which would be taken by both M.A. and Ph.D. students, I have taught “Woman and Nature in 20th Century U.S. Poetry and Prose” and “Literature of Inhabitation and Travel.” In the former, I began with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (written and serialized in 1915) and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) and concluded with Joy Harjo’s poetry volume In Mad Love and War (1990). In the latter, I included Sharon Doubiago’s book-length poem, South America Mi Hija (1992), and Molly Gloss’s science fiction novel of homecoming to a new planet, The Dazzle of Day (1998). A book included in this course that works well for undergraduates and graduates addressing the issues of homecoming is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1991). Also included was Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1999), which is written in a documentary style and provides an excellent example of how to blend plot, character development, and a strong environmental theme into a well-crafted work of fiction.
At a more advanced level of theory-based seminars open only to doctoral students, I combined a heavy dose of theory with many of the same texts I have used in other courses. With “Ecofeminist Dialogics and Environmental Literature,” I introduced students to the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and some of the key foundational essays on ecological feminism. I again used works by Snyder, Le Guin, and Hogan, and added in Robinson Jeffers, including his book-length poem, “The Double Axe,” written in the 1940s. Jeffers’s pessimism contrasts nicely with Snyder’s general sense of optimism. A more popular advanced doctoral course, however, turned out to be “Dialogic and Cultural Constructions of Self and Community in 20th Century American Poetry.” Here we began with a mixture of Bakhtinian theory and essays on the concept of the “self,” including feminist philosophy. The readings started with Edgar Lee Masters’s critical look at American community at the start of the twentieth century, Spoon River Anthology (1915), then continued with some agrarian poetry by Wendell Berry, conflicting images of the search for identity and community by Native American poet Chrystos in Not Vanishing (1988), Snyder’s poetic sequence Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), and Simon Ortiz’s massive poetry collection Woven Stone (1992). We wrapped up with Cathy Song’s School Figures (1994), which is set in Hawai’i and addresses the issues of self as they pertain to a multiracial, multigenerational extended family.
While I have often worked science fiction novels into many of these courses, I did have the opportunity in 1999 to focus an advanced doctoral course on that genre exclusively. “The Irruptive Ground of Contemporary SF: Ecocritical Theory and American Science Fiction” took students through various works on science fiction theory, particularly essays by Darko Suvin. We also read literary theory about ethical criticism and a small group of essays on ecocritical theory. The course included some classic novels, such as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1975) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1977), but also included Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994), which creates a highly ecological model of a future San Francisco Bay woven into a weak plot line, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1993, 1995, 1997). While the most sophisticated discussion of ecological issues of which I am aware, the trilogy comprises 2,000 pages of small print and is not to be recommended for undergraduate courses unless it were the sole text for a class—which might work very well in a course geared toward science majors who could do a variety of scientific research papers in relation to topics raised in the trilogy.
GLADLY LEARN, GLADLY TEACH
I have tried in this brief survey of actual courses to indicate the freedom and the range of possibilities available to anyone who wants to take up nature-oriented literature as a course topic or to inject it into other courses, both writing and literature ones. Many literary works can do double or even triple duty in different courses, where various aspects might be emphasized in one course and not another. In composition courses, the right text can be studied as much for its style as for its content. Such is also the case for many novels, where authors have used innovative narrative, character, or setting techniques. I also have tried to emphasize that one need not be restricted by narrow definitions of nature writing as nonfiction; while entire courses can be built around nonfiction, they can also be built around poetry, novels, and mixed genre subjects. Also, nature need not be the topic of the course to have it be devoted to nature-oriented literature; homecoming, inhabitation, travel, community, identity, self, future societies, gender relations, alienation, and otherness all work equally well to generate a compelling and stimulating course of study. For me the possibilities for course development continue to expand and unfold, and I hope the same will be the case for my students and readers.