Chapter 13 Questions of scale
The local, the national and the global
There is one way in which environmental issues patently encompass and largely determine the politics and cultures of colonialism and post-colonialism. Over the past three centuries colonisation – and now global capitalism – has invariably expressed itself in the supplanting of local biota in favour of an imported portmanteau of profitable
species: cattle, wheat, sheep, maize, sugar, coffee, palm oil, and so on. Thus it is that most of the world's wheat, a crop
originally from the Middle East, now comes from other areas – Canada, the United States, Argentina, Australia – just as people of mainly European descent now dominate a large proportion of the earth's surface.1
This huge shift in human populations, including slaves as well as domesticated animals and plants, has largely determined
the modern world. It is still widely reflected in kinds of racial and cultural prejudice linked to modes of food production.
In Australia and North America the obliteration or displacement of indigenous ways of life by pastoralism and the growing
of cereal crops justified itself in assertions that such farming was ‘superior’ to hunting and gathering. As a result of such
processes the Caribbean, for instance, with its plantations of sugar cane, coffee and so on has become ‘one of the most radically altered
landscapes in the world’. ‘The forced transplantation of peoples, plants and animals to the primarily island species of the
region created a complex layering, a hybridization of diverse cultural and environmental forms’,2 a condition that may soon become a global norm.
There is a close connection between destructive monocultures in food production, exploitative systems of international trade
and exchange and the institution of the modern state. In this context, the social and political movement known as bioregionalism remains challengingly subversive of the institution of the modern nation state and the legal systems of international trade in which it is embedded. Bioregionalism proposes that human societies, their modes of production and cultures should reform themselves
from the bottom up, decentralising to become communities with close and sustainable relations to their local bioregions.
Long centuries of environmental globalisation are to be put into a qualified reverse. The ideal is to reduce to a minimum the physical, cultural and psychological
distance between the consumers and producers of food and other essentials. This would also be to let the geographical, climatic
and biological nature of a region become once more a crucial agent in human identity and social organisation. Kirkpatrick Sale writes of a region as a ‘life-territory, a place defined by its forms, its topography and its biota, rather
than by human dictates’.3
Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann's pioneering definition of bioregionalism in the 1970s referred ‘both to geographical terrain and a terrain
of consciousness – to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place’.4 Unlike other political movements, bioregionalism accords the non-human a decisive place in conceptions of human polity: ‘For
a genuinely contextualist ethic to include the land, the land must speak to us; we must stand in relation to it; it must define us, and not we it.’5
The world-wide bioregional movement is also an instance of globalisation ‘from below’. Mike Carr claims that it is the only environmental movement to combine ‘many of the features and concerns of social ecology, deep ecology, and ecofeminism as well as a number of other radical movements’.6 Bioregionalist campaigns and practice also offer a positive alternative to what has been criticized as the largely oppositional,
repetitively negative emphasis of post-colonial readings, ‘their panoply of rhetorical flourishes in which “unsettling”, “disrupting”, “decentering”, “displacing”,
“resisting”, become the only possible way of opposing “modes-of-production” narratives’ (Priyamvada Gupal).7 In former settler colonies like Australia or United States bioregionalism involves a rapprochement with the original cultures.
Methodological nationalism
‘Methodological nationalism’ is a term taken from A. D. Smith and used by Ulrich Beck.8 It refers to modes of thought still dominant in the public sphere and intellectual life but which are arguably anachronistic
in the contemporary globalised reality, including the planetary environmental crisis. ‘While reality is becoming thoroughly
cosmopolitan, our habits of thought and consciousness, like the well-worn paths of academic teaching and research, disguise
the growing unreality of the world of nation-states.’9 That is, we often still work and think as if the territorial bounds of the nation state act as a self-evident principle of
overall coherence and intelligibility within which a history and culture can be understood, ignoring anything that does not fit such
a narrative. One might also inflect Beck by observing that, ecologically, national borders have always been unreal. Even so
innocent a title as ‘regional novels in the United States’ may instantiate methodological nationalism in proportion to the degree in which the national and its cultural
agenda serve to enframe, contain and shape the analysis. For a long time, even a large body of environmental criticism remained pigeonholed as part of ‘American studies’, a situation now in the process of being reversed.
Beck writes:
Globality means that from now on nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world, and we must reorient and reorganize our live and actions, our organizations and institutions, along a ‘local–global’ axis.10
Given the all-embracing power of international capitalism, it may not be surprising that, in practice, bioregional programmes almost always exist as isolated modes of resistance
or as correctives to the previous misuse of a natural resource. A bioregional stance also remains stronger in outlining the
dangers, shortcomings and destructiveness of existing arrangements than in modelling fully an alternative kind of society,
bar a programme of the decentralisation of power and a limitation of destructive practices. The bioregionalist is also challenged
by the question of how far reference to the authority of local ‘nature’ can be a sufficient guide for political decisions
(‘a region is governed by nature, not legislature’ [Kirkpatrick Sale]).11 For instance, would the bioregional ideal involve reintroducing dangerous predators long vanished, or the removal of invasive
foreign species, something that may be prohibitively expensive and could, after all, also include such useful things as poultry
and wheat? Daniel Berthold-Bond asks: ‘But what if there is no “natural design” to be uncovered and followed? What if values are not “intrinsic”
or “discoverable”, there to be “found”, in nature (or anywhere else, for that matter!)’12 What a ‘region’ is can also remain rather vague: a look at work in the so-called ‘new geography’ of the past twenty years shows how a ‘region’ may be more determined by human actions and culture than might at
first be thought.13
Literary ‘reinhabitation’?
A writer, Derek Walcott affirms, is essentially provincial. ‘If you took [Thomas] Hardy out of his countryside and [William] Faulkner out of his, you would have a different person.’14 The bioregional idea seems very suited to such traditional conceptions of literature as a mode of communicating the particular,
affirming the specific and otherwise untranslatable nature of life worlds as opposed to modes of language more complicit with generalisation
and commodification. If ‘reinhabiting’ a land or region means ‘learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past
exploitation’,15 then a bioregional literacy may also provide a useful reorientation for assessing a whole range of regional writers, as well
as offering students skills that feed into local activism.16 Elsewhere, Walcott surmises that ‘If the fusion had been possible between industry and, say, the American Indian idea of nature, then that would have been America.’17
Walcott's own Caribbean is particularly suited as a testing ground of the force and coherence of bioregional ideas, as well as their practicability
in the current world. In an archipelago whose indigenous population has all but vanished, victims centuries ago of the genocide
and diseases of European colonisation, appeals to the native and indigenous as standard can have little force. Just like the
people, arriving either as colonisers, slaves or workers, the crops that formed the basis of the plantation systems in the
Caribbean were transplants. Island economies were established on the eradication of native island flora in favour of large
plantations of sugar cane, coffee, mangoes, bougainvillea and breadfruit. Divisions between human beings, in terms of gender,
class and economic status, both reflected and helped perpetuate the work of the plantation economy. Ironically, it is nowadays as the image of a pristine ‘paradise’ – white beaches and palm trees – that
the Caribbean is commodified and demeaned in so many tourist images. In either case, the given landscape of the islands is
supplanted, literally or culturally, by the violent effects of global trade.
Bioregional thinkers are wary of their thinking lapsing into a merely atavistic idealisation of some lost organic community.
Martinican writer and theorist Édouard Glissant sees such romantic notions of community as implicated in discredited forms of nationalism, the notion of a proper, exclusive territory, of this land for this people. He criticises those environmental thinkers who would sacralise the indigenous or the local as a basis of ideas of rootedness. Such thinking, he argues, is ‘untenable in the Caribbean’ – and undesirable, for
such would-be sacred rootedness all too often means a territorial intolerance of others. Glissant endorses another ‘ecology’, which would be a politics of relation, questioning ethnic and cultural purism and stressing interdependence and
interrelation across the earth.18
Caribbean thought and writing tend to be anti-essentialist. As a place in which several belief systems, languages and cultural
traditions coexist, ‘Caribbean everyday discourse is engaged in an extensive use of multiple logics, code-switching, and artistic
and satiric solutions of possibly not resolvable contradictions and paradoxes.’19 With history and ancestry of limited guidance for people of such mixed descent looking to affirm an identity, atavism is
a less practicable and less acceptable option than Glissant's celebration of créolité or Walcott's affirmation of the Adamic possibilities of the archipelago, of new cultures that can name things again or as if
for the first time (‘the exultation of the landscape…no one has done justice to it’).20 This stance contrasts strongly with, for instance, Aimé Césaire's dated idealisation of negritude as closer to ‘nature’ than the artificial constructs of white colonialism.21 Ecocritical essays from or concerning the Caribbean have been more open than others to modern developments in ecology, their
stress on ecosystems as ‘dynamic, unstable, and open…in which new species are incessantly settling, intermingling, and crossing
with earlier species’.22
Glissant's novels in relation to Martinique form a strange and fascinating case study from a bioregional point of view. Incorporated in 1946 as simply an integral
part of mainland France, Martinique is a peculiar case of what Glissant sardonically calls ‘successful colonization’.23 It has become a relatively prosperous but oddly purposeless place, with little sustainable work of its own, supported by
money from Paris, importing almost all its food. In this strangely second-hand culture there is little real productive work,
and, inverting bioregional aims, no ‘creative link between nature and culture…vital to the formation of a community’.24 Glissant describes Martinicans as forming perhaps the world's most alienated community, living the cultural dissolution of
the ‘happy zombi’.25 The newly emerged middle class emulate the consumerism and lifestyle of modern French society, while the urban and rural poor live in deprived conditions, dependent
on the welfare that ‘perversely, renders them grateful to the very system that deprives their lives of real productiveness,
and makes them at once passive and resentful, spiritually and psychologically destitute yet pathetically fearful of change’.26 The island's remnant Creole culture drifts towards being a folksy vestige of the past, something for tourists and self-caricature.
Glissant's novels, especially after the 1960s, depict and enact the formal, cultural, aesthetic and psychic disruptions of
this peculiar French colony. The disorientation of the novels may also be read in relation to the constraints that would currently
suffocate any realisation of a bioregional ideal in the Caribbean. Glissant advocates Martinican independence from France
as part of some Caribbean federation of islands. Nevertheless, with Martinique's current levels of population, Glissant can
only envisage a realistic post-French future as one in which the island would survive by producing expensive food to export
to the emerging niche market for organically grown produce.27
The experimental Malemort [The Undead] (1975) was the third of Glissant's novels, reconstructing a version ‘from below’ of Martinican history from colonisation
to the present day. Martinique is seen as a place whose people lack the secure cultural resources to be able to affirm themselves.
All the characters, as Celia Britton argues, show a peculiarly displaced, intentionally or unintentionally parodic or quasiparodic relation to the
French they speak.28 The mayor's secretary, Lesprit, for instance, speaks such an elegant and self-consciously ‘good’ French that it seems a vehicle
of sarcasm, though it is in fact a kind of unknowing parody, for Lesprit talks in this way about matters of which he approves.
In this novel speech is not connected to an expressed identity in the way most people assume, but is a kind of theatrical
behaviour adopted with varying degrees of self-awareness and yet to which there is no secure or ‘natural’ alternative. In
Caribbean Discourse Glissant mocks the weird habit of some Martinicans, living in the tropics, of referring to their environment in terms of
the four seasons of the temperate zone: ‘At the window in an administrative office, on 21st March 1978, a pleasant sixty-year-old
greets me heartily: “So, M. Glissant, it is spring!”’ (56). This is the language of a community ‘lost in the unreal’ (56).
In Malemort three unrelated agricultural workers, named Dlan, Médellus and Silacier, struggle to come to terms with unemployment after
the collapse of the plantation system. Lack of a secure sense of any cultural past deprives people of ways to engage in meaningful or viable activities
directed towards the future. At first the three figures are associated with each other so closely that they are referred to
simply as ‘Dlan Médellus Silacier’. Dlan takes psychic refuge in millenarian religion, Silacier in a stance of intellectual
refusal, but Médellus tries to set up a utopian agricultural community. Its site is seemingly protected by the desolated land
that surrounds it, though in fact the scheme is doomed in advance, for the commune is living on land already purchased for
development by a construction company. Becoming mad, speaking a peculiarly private language, Médellus ends up only creating a kind of psychic refuge for himself from an intolerable space.
In this way, the weird, almost despairing disorientation of language and identity in Glissant's novels, with their strong
attention to place and landscape, forms a kind of literary bioregional practice in extremis. They may be aligned here with
the texts of the post-colonial theorist Franz Fanon (also from Martinique), who argued that in colonial contexts the distinction
between sane and insane, normal and abnormal, ceases to work, for it is the overall context that is abnormal.29 In the twenty-first century such a challenge to normality may now extend beyond the topic of overt colonialism, to the effects
of environmental disruption on a continental or planetary scale. Médellus, watching a huge yellow and red tractor tear up his dream of agrarian reform with a din like thunder,30 becomes brother to the narrator of Christa Wolf's Accident, tending her garden in rubber gloves as a protection against radiation from the Ukraine.
Questions of scale
The fragility of some bioregional ideas relates to the prior and crucial question: at what scale or scales should one think and work in environmental
politics? For instance, ‘Think globally, act locally’, the famous slogan of the Sierra Club, involves work on at least two scales at the same time. It says, in effect: try to understand ecological systems
on the largest possible scale and then take action locally in accordance with that understanding. Its inherent logic is also,
paradoxically, that one cannot only act locally, that any action affects the whole world, however minutely.
The issue of climate change also undermines the very possibility of acting only locally. Environmental slogans urge us ‘eat less meat and
help save the planet’, or they follow horrifying predictions of climate chaos with injunctions, no less solemn, not to leave
electrical appliances on standby or overfill the kettle. Such language would have seemed surreal or absurd to an earlier generation
and enacts a bizarre derangement of scales, collapsing the trivial and the catastrophic into each other. At the same time,
to focus solely on individual behaviour and consumer choice risks projecting the crisis as the result merely of bad shopping or lifestyle decisions, evading deeper engagement
with those national and global structures of economics and forms of government that are ultimately more responsible.
Disconcertingly, engaging climate change may also suggest that many ecocritical arguments are taking place on the wrong scale,
or will now need to think on several scales at once. Essays affirming regional agrarianism and the wisdom of indigenous management
are being published within a broader context that is already starting to erode their very conditions of possibility. Successes
in reform environmentalism in one country may be negated by the lack of such measures in others or simply by increased prosperity
elsewhere. In sum, just as ‘we have no politics of climate change’ (Anthony Giddens),31 so we still have little sense of how so overwhelmingly global an issue must affect methodologies of reading and interpretation.
Ursula K. Heise is one of the very few ecocritics to address climate change at length in relation to literary criticism. She challenges
the cult of localism in environmental circles, including the bioregional ideal that one's life and sense of self should be as intimately
formed by the local environment as possible. Is
Figure 10 Disorientation: luxury and pollution (the author)
not a new environmental cosmopolitanism more suitable to a world in which environmental effects so immediately disregard borders?
Rather than focussing on the recuperation of a sense of place, environmentalism needs to foster an understanding of how a
wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the world, and how
human impact affects and changes this connectedness.32
Heise criticises almost all literary representations of climate change for falling short of its peculiar, counterintuitive
demands, redeploying instead either trite clichés of apocalypse, as in the film The Day after Tomorrow, or inherited modes of narrative inadequate to the challenge of working on several scales at once, of linking individual
lives with global transformations across multiple cultures, with counterintuitive jumps between the normal and the catastrophic.
David Brin's Earth (1991) is accorded mixed success with its fantasy science fiction plot of global disaster (the earth being consumed by a
black hole from within) conveyed through a multiplication of fragmented narrative viewpoints and through various generic modes
– myth, epic and allegory – techniques, that is, previously associated with the urban modernist novel (James Joyce, John Dos Passos).33
Gary Snyder's late modernist poetry works, like the novels Heise cites, use multiple scales of space and time to form a critique of the destructive, one-dimensional and ultimately fragile
sphere of the modern neoliberal state. Snyder is perhaps the best-known bioregional writer, turning it into an environmental cosmopolitanism informed by both Buddhism and modern science. For Snyder,
the more powerful environmental reading is not to satirise the human city for being ‘cut off’ from the natural world, but
to take a perspective whose spatial and temporal scale can encompass even Los Angeles as only a very peculiar and fragile
part of nature. Spatially, Snyder's poem ‘Night-Song of the Los Angeles Basin’ depicts the city as a set of intersecting pathways,
with the sweeping lights of the cars passing oblivious over the ancient tracks of the small creatures who preceded the city
and who will survive it, as well as over the unobtrusive and abused watercourse on which all finally depend.34 Like much of the sequence Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), the poem projects a global context that embraces human beings of the Palaeolithic and those of the present and recorded
history, with jumps to the points of view of animals and birds. Structures of human construction or order are seen in relation
to huge ecological cycles of water, air and geology, those vast, long-term cycles of energy transfers in which humanity must
live, even if they distort or deny them for a time. Such ecological literacy informs the poem's seemingly sudden or counterintuitive jumps in scale and perspective, that is, from
the ‘calligraphy of cars’ in one line to the ‘Vole paths. Mouse trails worn in / On meadow grass’ in the next. There are corresponding
jolts of connection between the meal thrown to ornamental carp in their ‘frenzy of feeding’ and those ‘platters / of tidbit
and wine, / snatch of fame’ being presented to human celebrities in buildings high above. The ‘Marmot lookout rocks’ of line
21 are followed directly and in parallel by the ‘Houses with green watered gardens’ of line 22, and these precariously ‘Slip
under the ghost of the dry chaparral’. ‘Slip’ is in the present tense, under only the ‘ghost’ of the formerly dominant ‘dry
chaparral’, but this is a ghost whose referent seems as much in the future as in the past. The time when the chaparral will
return is already at work there. The poem ends with the calling owl with which it opened, as if once more in long-term, non-human
cyclical time:
The calligraphy of lights on the nightfreeways of Los Angeleswill long be remembered.Owlcalls;late-rising moon.p. 64; emphasis added
The poem refuses to think on normal human scales of space or time. The song is ‘of’ the Los Angeles basin and seems to cover a time span beyond the likely duration of the ultimately self-destructive human city. The grass, viewed
over a long enough time, becomes more significant than the geometry of roads and buildings. The unnamed animals, simply by being there, form in their very indifference a satire on notions of ‘importance’ and status connected with
the celebrity culture. A cosmopolitan bioregionalism of this kind gestures towards a redefinition of human identity, a rejection of the individualism of the liberal property- and rights-holding tradition in favour of the need to recognise that ‘our place is part of what we are’,
and that that place is both local and global at once.35
Ecopoetry
Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End is often described as an example of ‘ecopoetry’, but what kind of poetry is that, a whole new subgenre or just a name for
any poetry with a vaguely green subject matter? At present, in a critical anthology such as J. Scott Bryson’s Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (ed., 2002),36 the term ecopoetry still has an opportunistic feel. It is hard to see this particular coinage becoming as useful as critical categories like
‘postmodernism’ or ‘ecofeminism’. What is referred to in Bryson's collection of essays is a distinctive though largely American
tradition of modernist poetry with often strong romantic elements. Poets who have been called ecopoets at some time include:
Robinson Jeffers, Wendel L. Berry, Linda Hogan, Ted Hughes, W. S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, Seamus Heaney, Arthur Sze. The English poet Charles Tomlinson voices a characteristic challenge, in his ‘Song’:
To enter the real,how farmust we feel beyondthe world in which we already are.It is all herebut we are not.37
As with Heise's affirmation of the technique of the urban modernist novel as a way to engage the challenges of representing climate change, a loosely ‘ecological’ poetic emerges in the development and extension of modernist techniques that had been initially pioneered in the first four decades of the twentieth century. At issue is an aesthetic interested in formal experimentation and the
conception of the poet or poem as forming a kind of intellectual or spiritual frontier, newly coupled with a sense of the
vulnerability and otherness of the natural world, distrust of a society dominated by materialism and instrumental reason, and sometimes giving a counteraffirmation of non-western modes of perception, thought or rhetorical practice. The
poem is often conceived as a space of subjective redefinition and rediscovery through encounters with the non-human. What
was taken to be in the romantic lyric an aggrandisement of the personal ego, the appropriation of natural forms and encounters as a too easy source of personal meaning and endorsement
(see Hess's reading of William Wordsworth in Chapter 10), gives way to a more chastening ethos of personal, bodily finitude and respect. Some texts move beyond the conception of the poem as the dramatisation of individual consciousness
to create a space of multiple voices or stances, such as Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. The stance is ‘ecological’ both in a loose sense of affirming interrelationship and possibilities of reading that work in several directions
simultaneously (rather than in the straight line of an unfolding narrative), and, in Snyder's case, the modernist technique
of juxtaposition and cutting (‘parataxis’ and ‘ellipsis’) also serves some strictly ecological points, as in the jumps between
human and other animals, between Palaeolithic and modern realities, or between a human perspective and those of various mythical
or religious agencies expressive of the deeper natural systems in which all life unfolds.
Sometimes, however, ‘ecopoetry’ does just mean work with a vaguely green message. In response, some critics, most notably
John Elder (who introduces Bryson's anthology), push hard the notion of a poem itself as forming a kind of ‘ecosystem’, an
interesting if forced analogy to name kinds of poetic presentation that invite readings in terms of a non-linear interrelation
and illumination of image and theme, a process taking place both within the text and in relation to other texts, contexts
and places.
There is also an online journal, Ecopoetics, which describes itself as ‘a (more or less) annual journal dedicated to exploring
creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings)’.38