The western border of the Miami suburb where I grew up was the deep, straight Ludlum Canal. It cut a surveyor’s line south to north, connected at its top end to another waterway, the Miami Canal, the northwest-to-southeast diagonal sluiced out of swamp by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which straightened part of the Miami River to shunt Everglades waters into Biscayne Bay. When I rode my bike 11 blocks west, I hit the canal. Across it, a mysterious industrial area loomed, and beyond that lay the Everglades itself, the river of grass.
To my mind, I lived near the edge of a vast wilderness. But borders are spectral demarcations, and I did not know then how subtly human ideas and development policed this one, guarding the line between civilization and the wild. To cross over was to enter a place of danger, wonder, mystery, and duress, the realm of water moccasins and anhingas, gumbo-limbo trees and sawgrass. I found it beautiful, alluring, vast, and forbidding. I might find orchids and owls there, but it loomed unfriendly. I could not flit my bicycle on its shallow, slow-moving waters.
Ludlum Canal was no mere line on a map; it was a physical manifestation of the boundary ideal, reifying nature as one domain and civilization another. The Everglades was distant, pristinely separate, a space preserved for all time where alligators laid their leathery eggs and roseate spoonbills whisked low over wide waters. The canal’s margin etched a track in my own brain, a borderline between natural and unnatural. Its line reinforced another fantasy, the loss of which I mourn: the thought that the Everglades thrived apart, untouched, far away from anything we as human beings could do to it.
Environmentalists debate the use and effects of the term “Anthropocene,” but it has become clear that human interventions in the world’s ecosystems have become so extensive as to change the very nature of earth. So many dams worldwide as to alter the earth’s rotation. So much warming that glaciers will be gone, the seas will rise, and the Gulf Stream current may break apart, leaving Northern Europe in the grip of a frosting it hasn’t seen in millennia.
We can argue about whether the word “Anthropocene” makes sense as a scientific denominator or what it means for conservation and wilderness-preservation initiatives, but we desperately need new conceptions both to stem environmental destruction and to live wisely in the new ecological order we have unleashed.
At a talk the nature writer Gretel Ehrlich gave in 2008, she considered how those whose task it is to record the comings and leavings of Blackburnian warblers and the skyward evanescence of sequoias write in the knowledge of climate cataclysm. She speaks of the need “to write out of what’s left,” the ecological flotsam of global warming. “We once wrote,” Ehrlich says, “in a trance of beauty, the beauty of the world.” But now the task is “to write in a trance of the beauty of the death of the world.” And to do this, “we need to develop, to work to develop, a sacred perception of the world, which means there is no skin between us, between sacred and secular, between us and animals, us and trees, trees, rocks, and carpet. ...”
This is daunting, a devil’s bargain of a task. To write the beauty of the death of the world is to embrace thorns, to kiss coal ash. What does such a task mean for those of us who teach?
We must rub away the self-serving fantasy of human boundary lines, enter the knowing of the watershed.
How do I teach, especially how to write and how to read, in the Anthropocene? What does it mean to lead students to knowledge at a moment in time like no other, a moment in which the terra-reforming activities of a single species have disrupted the earth’s processes?
I fret at sitting in a classroom, parsing the ambiguities of Keats’s “Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?,” when island nations will soon be under water. The irony appalls of flying across the rising Atlantic, over the melting of Greenland, to attend a conference and give a paper about the end of nature.
In part, at least, I must teach what’s left: tornadoes, hurricanes, wild thunderstorms, and the ash fall of massive boreal forest fires. Seventy million acres in Russia cindered in 2012, five million in Alaska in 2015, and in spring 2016 a fire devastated Alberta. The burning of the boreal forest creates a doubled-down, ice-wrecking feedback loop by releasing carbon that’s been sequestered in pine, spruce, and larch and wafting that dark soot over to the Greenland ice sheet, prompting even more melting there. But how do I teach in the knowledge that what we once thought fixed and unchanging — the dependable cycles of nature — is up for grabs?
Perhaps “the end of nature,” to use Bill McKibben’s phrase, ushers in a new conception of the natural world. I’m thinking here of “No nature” in the sense Gary Snyder might mean in his poem “Ripples on the Surface.” He conjures images of both “the vast wild” and “the little house,” the human abode, dissolving into a single thing: “Both together, one big empty house.” The clear boundary between the human and the natural disappears — we accept the natural in us and the natural around us as a necessary wholeness. “Nature” is no longer an antonym for “human.”
Perhaps “end of nature"/"no nature” allows me to un-etch the canal border I grew up behind, erasing both of the false senses it reinforced, of security for nature and separateness for me. Perhaps such erasure aids my teaching, in a small way, in the course I call “Animal Stories of the Cape Fear River Basin,” in which we explore natural-history accounts of central North Carolina across four centuries, go see bald eagles nesting at a lake 15 minutes from campus, and sample the macroinvertebrates living in and test the pH of the water flowing down the stream that empties the college lake.
I began teaching “Animal Stories” two years ago, a transdisciplinary historical and research-based first-year composition course. It fulfills a general-education requirement and is part of our broader Cape Fear River Basin Studies program, which commences with an orientation before the first year. We travel with the students to the North Carolina coast, where they participate in environmental-service projects like replanting marsh grass; hear presentations on topics like sea-turtle protection; visit a North Carolina Aquarium; and learn how to surf. It’s an excellent way for students to start college. They learn about their new location in a profoundly visceral manner: riding down waves, camping in oppressive heat, seeing ospreys and Venus flytraps, fending off mosquitoes.
What knits all these disparate activities together is our focus on a single place, the Cape Fear River Basin, the watershed that extends over 9,164 square miles of central North Carolina. It is the largest of the four river basins within the borders of North Carolina, includes 6,584 miles of rivers and streams, has 24,472 acres of estuary, and provides water to a population of more than two million human animals living within its boundaries.
The students learn the basic geography of the river basin; write their own natural history of a native nonhuman animal; and then study, mainly through independent research projects, various forms of human impact on the river basin, whether dams or biosolids application on farm fields. Given that North Carolina is a major hog-producing state, and that the bulk of that production is located in a few counties within the Cape Fear River Basin, we learn a lot together about the environmental impact of concentrated animal feeding operations. It’s not pretty.
We use the term “nonhuman animals” to reinforce the fact that human beings are animals, a species that has been particularly adept at shaping its own environment toward its own ends, an apex predator that has none of its own (apart from other humans). The academy as we know it was founded by humanists, promoters of all things human-centric, and speciesism runs rampant in it. Think of how many courses, programs, centers, colleges, and entire institutions devote themselves exclusively to the study and benefit of human animals. Despite our sometimes holier-than-thou attitude, we have entrenched in the academy as much self-serving human pride as populates Wall Street, Walmart, and Hollywood. In my course, I seek a kind of post-humanism, an attitude that acknowledges and celebrates more than a single animal species.
The course is transdisciplinary out of necessity. To understand the complexities of the hog-waste problem in North Carolina, students need to know some things about geography, history, hydrology, agriculture, disease, sociology, and race. We go broad instead of deep so that students begin to comprehend the interpenetration of ecological relationships. We focus on natural history because it is observational, not experimental, transdisciplinary to its core, and includes a wealth of fine descriptive writing.
Near the beginning of the course, we read an essay by Thomas Lowe Fleischner titled “The Mindfulness of Natural History,” which reminds us that the center of that enterprise is paying careful attention. “We are what we pay attention to,” Fleischner writes, and “paying heed to beauty, grace, and everyday miracles promotes a sense of possibility and coherence that runs deeper and truer” than much of what contemporary culture has to offer. When some students recall this mindfulness at the end of the semester, remarking that seeing minuscule caddisfly, mayfly, and damselfly larvae for the first time crystallized for them the value of paying attention, I think something might just be working.
A few years ago, I let my subscription to the nature-writing magazine Orion lapse. Reading many of the articles had left me deeply saddened. It was often depressing, if not terrifying, to read, yet again, about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the loss of nonhuman animal habitat, and our human inability to take responsibility and make significant, collective change. Letting the subscription go was a passive decision, rationalized by the cost savings, but my unwillingness to confront the sharp, dark realities of environmental degradation has haunted me.
The larger question here is this: In the fullness of knowledge of the world as it is, what is my task? To be passive changes nothing or, worse, warrants silently the changes others make. One thing I can do is teach in a manner that honors nonhuman animals and our ecological relationships, that resists the trend toward greater and greater specialization, and that scrutinizes deeply entrenched human constructs that misconstrue the nature of this world we share with other living beings.
If we are to teach, honestly, out of what’s left, we must confront the essential facts of what remains and what may come anew. And painful as it is, we must also choose somehow to honor the loss of what has been. Perhaps in doing so, we may move closer toward “a sacred perception of the world.”
We must rub away the self-serving fantasy of human boundary lines, enter the knowing of the watershed, nest in the paradox of death rising into new life. “Keenly observed, the world is transformed,” writes Gretel Ehrlich. Her words remind me that teaching the beauty of the death of the world — which has always been with us in the primordial tales of leaves that fall and die to nourish trees they sprouted on, of sea turtles clawing out of sandy nests to feed rapacious gulls, of earthworms mining in the garden to banquet moles — that teaching our own hubris, to alter its trajectory, may be a calling.
James W. Hood is a professor of English at Guilford College.
