Shangrila Joshi
In 2017, while planning to teach together, Leonard Schwartz and I explored some areas where our individual interests in eco-poetics and political ecology might overlap. In reviewing the body of his work at these intersections, I was moved to reflect thus on his work.
The Poetics and Politics of Nature:
Schwartz’ Eco-poetics through the lens of Political Ecology
In his creative work, Schwartz has been committed to a certain genre of eco-poetics—one that refuses to take for granted a particular treatment of ‘nature’ that pervades much ‘nature poetry,’ in which the writer assumes a positionality that situates her/himself outside of and voyeuristically experiencing the beauty of the natural world one seeks to reproduce in the writing. Schwartz’s form of avant-garde eco-poetics instead seeks to write from the position of the object he is writing about. In this essay I discuss this style and strategy of creating literary art by examining Schwartz’s book-length poetry IF and At Element as a means of destabilizing hegemonic forms of representing the natural world, and reflect on the implications of this artistic strategy for critical geographers who are interested in problematizing hegemonic practices that shape contemporary nature-society interactions. Of interest here is also the way in which literary art of this kind operates as a political space in and of itself, a performative space for the embodiment of argument and counterhegemonic politics which are enacted by exploiting poetic form and the language itself.
Eco-poetics beyond Nature Poetry
Schwartz prefaces his book At Element by stating this:
We can only write a Nature Poetry worthy of the ecological imperative when we realize
we are inside both nature and poetry, vulnerable to the encounter, able to surrender
a certain control.
Not above Nature, not positioned so as to write about Nature, but speaking from inside it,
as if Nature were the Unconscious.
This poem may not even resemble a nature poem.
As in sleep, bereft of the capacity to dominate, lost in the forest of language, guided by
elements seemingly in dialogue with one another... (Schwartz 2011: preface)
Schwartz, who typically prefers to let his art speak for itself, and is not keen on explaining its motives and logic, offers this rare glimpse into the logic of his writing in this preface. The impetus here seems to be to challenge both the presumed superiority of humans over nature and the nature-culture binary that are implied when one seeks to write about nature from a position outside it.
In his writing, Schwartz is quite deliberate about moving back and forth fluidly between the human and the more-than-human worlds, as a way of questioning this binary; and about offering agency to non-human entities, as a way of challenging the presumed hierarchies implicit in societies shaped by Enlightenment thinking. Further, his writing forces/invites the reader to see the world (including humans) from the point of view of the non-human object, bringing about a blurring of boundaries even between subject and object.
If geese stare at us, appalled,
As if we were aliens, as we are (Schwartz 2012: 61)
Thinking of oneself as ‘other’—or rather, being forced to do so—appears to be an effective way to rid humans of the hubris they have become accustomed to, especially when there is no anthropomorphizing involved in the representation of the goose. Although I suspect that it is not possible to not anthropomorphize, being humans, imagining how a non-human might experience us and other aspects of the world, the hypothetical ‘if’ helps ward off those liabilities. The following verse similarly seeks to imagine agency and subjectivity without assuming it, by way of framing a question:
Does the rushing water
Pleasure the rocks?
As the sound seems to suggest
If one listens attentively to the roar
And attributes to the rocks
A sensation to match their smoothness? (Schwartz 2012: 63)
In another poem, “Capitol Forest”, Schwartz writes of humans thus:
...
Appearances really are
Mere appearances and
A thermos of water
Imagines itself
Superior to rain. (Schwartz 2013: 10)
If the thermos of water here is an analogy for the human body, scientifically understood to be comprised substantively of water, mocking human hubris may be an effective way to point to its falseness. The writing here invites the reader to be reflective about their place in the world, by pointing to blatant contradictions in how they have been socialized to think of themselves vis-à-vis other fellow living and non-living beings, and how they really are, as Schwartz presents them, as just one of many object-subject configurations that are juxtaposed with one another, both in the space of the poem, and in the space of the world outside it. So instead of neatly organized sections of text dealing with one subject at a time, one encounters a range of seemingly unrelated subjects interspersed with one another throughout the book(s)—conveying the sense that everything is interconnected: our mundane everyday lives, work, relationships, the cosmos, the plants and the animals around us, technology, commerce, the elements. A related work that his writing seems to be doing is to suggest that the space of the poem is not all that divorced from the space of the world outside it, and in fact, Schwartz argues that language (or the literary art form) offers us the space and the opportunity to produce counterhegemonic realities. Furthermore, by enacting the contradiction, the poem does the work of embodying the critique, without presenting it as such. Schwartz refers to this as the ‘Trojan horse’ strategy that may very well be more effective at changing minds than more proselytizing forms of critique that much scholarly writing (including in critical geography) might be guilty of.
Political Ecology
The kind of eco-poetics that Schwartz practices clearly resonates with the approach taken by political ecologists and other critical geographers who study nature-society dynamics. An apparent commonality in their approach is that they refuse to take for granted the apolitical and ahistorical view of ‘nature’ that pervades much ‘nature writing’ as well as mainstream green environmentalism. From a political ecology perspective, what is commonly understood as non-human nature or the natural environment is inevitably always laden with power. Discourses about what constitutes nature, and who it should be protected from, are always political questions that involve decisions about access to and control over resources (see for instance Robbins 2012; Castree 2001). The project of ‘protecting nature from humans’ on one hand as well as that of protecting vulnerable populations from ‘natural’ disasters on the other, are also rife with contradictions, ranging from imposed ideological separations between humans and nature, to the disconnect between forces driving large-scale ecological destruction and groups targeted for environmental protection. Well-meaning but ill-devised environmental imperatives ranging from nature conservation to climate adaptation have been implicated in processes of neocolonialism and the exacerbation of vulnerabilities (see for instance Peluso 1993; Stevens 2013; Taylor 2014).
Universalistic tropes of ‘protecting nature from humans,’ or calls to restore contemporary environments to a state closer to pristine nature are therefore met with suspicion. Such problematic tropes are guilty of treating humanity as a monolithic entity, when in fact human groups across space have starkly different practices in relation to the natural world. Erasing such difference not only fails to acknowledge that the current ecological crisis is an outcome of problematic social relations rather than of absolute numbers of humans on earth, it serves to perpetuate and exacerbate those social relations (Harvey 1974). Likewise, assuming that vulnerable populations should be helped in adaptation to natural disasters emanating from climate change often precludes the understanding of ‘natural’ disasters as well as vulnerability as co-produced by society (Taylor 2014).
Rejecting neo-Malthusian and neoliberal tropes of environmental crisis or protection, political ecology looks to explanations of the underlying drivers of the current predicament in analyses of political economy, specifically contemporary forms of economic globalization that have successfully diffused neoliberal and capitalist economic rationalities across the globe, as a key driver of environmental degradation, including the annihilation of species diversity as well as the climate crisis. Yet, the most well-funded and popular approach to addressing biodiversity loss around the world is to follow the approach of establishing parks and other protected areas regarded as havens of biodiversity, important for human survival. Not surprisingly, although the idea of setting aside immense tracts of land deliberately for preservation or conservation (the fortress conservation model), originated in the US in the form of the national park, its current manifestation is observed and actively practiced in much of the Third World where many of the world’s biodiversity ‘hotspots’ have been identified (Stevens 2013). Similarly, the dominant approaches in helping the most vulnerable populations to the impacts of climate change preclude an understanding of the phenomenon that has been created by the consolidation of overlapping processes of industrialization, modernization, colonialism and capitalism on a grand scale, creating entrenched divisions between the more and less powerful; seeking instead to identify less powerful groups as needing protection from ‘nature’s’ random bouts of fury rather than from a structure with in-built production of social vulnerability.
For political ecologists, a significant problem with these apolitical approaches is that they normalize a universalized environmental imaginary of ecological sustainability that has evolved out of and in response to Western ways of being, particularly in relation to hegemonic property regimes (i.e. privatized property and profits) and inappropriately imposes this norm or metric on landscapes and peoples that have historically practiced quite different ways of knowing, being, and property regimes (i.e. common pool resource regimes) (Hardin 1968; Ostrom 1999). More problematic, this ‘tragedy of the commons’ myth is perpetuated even as ever more of the global commons are actively transformed into private property (since neoliberal solutions to contemporary environmental problems such as climate change have become de rigueur, or rather the only available alternative by way of TINA (there is no alternative) rationalities), essentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy (Bumpus and Liverman 2011). Notwithstanding the problematic nature of such environmental solutions, they have become effectively institutionalized into the fabric of much environmental governance practice, in no small part due to the political and economic clout of their adherents. Not surprisingly then, one of the subjects political ecologists study has to do with how such practices of eco-governmentality are established, how particular environmental subjects and identities are created in the process, and how they alter or perpetuate existing social dynamics (Agrawal 2005).
Eco-poetics as a method for Political Ecology?
While Schwartz and I were planning our 17-18 program we were contemplating pursuing a joint interdisciplinary investigation into the poetics and politics of nature in the context of national parks and other areas where wild nature is understood to thrive. I learned an interesting lesson in what not to do when engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations through this exercise. Originally, my vision was to utilize poetry and other written and oral literary representations among the local populace to seek to understand how nature was conceptualized outside of the influence of international environmental organizations and their imaginaries of ‘nature’. Literary arts would be reduced to a research method or tool in this schematic that I, the social scientist, had devised.
From a postcolonial political ecology perspective, of interest to me was the possibility of decolonizing knowledge about ‘nature’ and the practice of managing it for particular ends. Addressing the question raised by Spivak ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ as well as the response she offers to it, that the subaltern can speak, but whether the Western(ized) scholar is willing to hear him or her is the real question (Spivak 2010); the logic was to engage in a research project designed to seek to actively ‘hear’ the voices and ideas of local populations either displaced by national parks or otherwise brought into the sphere of neocolonial governance of spaces deemed ‘natural’ through various forms of education or outreach, or lured with ‘development’ benefits. My impetus was to ask if poetry and other literary art forms might provide an effective avenue for getting at understandings unadulterated by the introduction of international conservation organizations serving as the neocolonial authority and subsequently the internalization of their messaging.
Schwartz’ response to how I unilaterally conceptualized how the literary arts could be of service to my critical social scientific pursuit is encapsulated in this statement derived from our correspondence: “As a poet of course I want to avoid any instrumental use of poetry. If the poem becomes exclusively a tool for communicating some higher order truth of scientific, moral or political provenance, it cedes its own imaginative end to the means of a particular intellectual position, just the way scientific inquiry turns into technology once the turn towards utility is made. Poetry is not a method but an imaginative space. This imaginative space is of course not a pure wilderness, any more than is the wild, such that scientific, moral and political imperatives are also felt in the field of the poem, in ways both reflective and pre-reflective, conscious and unconscious.”
If conceptualizing avant-garde eco-poetry as method for political ecology is passé, then perhaps there are other ways in which the two can meet, for instance, as a pedagogical implement for illustrating complexity in nature-society relations. Certainly the sophisticated and complex treatment of the nature-society interface renders literary works produced in this genre to be excellent supplementary texts for students of political ecology. By embodying the critiques and contradictions that might be discussed in scholarly texts, a well-written book of poetry can very well serve as an excellent text for seminar discussion, or to invite reflexive engagement with the material. Postcolonial political ecologists strive to be evermore reflexive in their analyses and writing. A work of literary art that invites humans—including the scholar or artist – to see themselves necessarily as part of and embedded in a much larger whole definitely produces a conducive environment for self-reflection, discussion, and nuanced analysis.
Beyond this, we find that many students who gravitate towards courses and programs with ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ content, arrive in our programs with varying degrees of intellectual development and exposure to ideas about the environment. Most students arrive with fairly simplistic notions of nature, motivated by their desire to ‘save the earth’ or to ‘fix or resolve the environmental crisis’ apparently gleaned from the kind of ‘green environmental mainstream’ messaging we always need to be vigilant of. Inasmuch as an accurate diagnosis of the problem is the starting point, no one should be critiqued for wanting to adopt a problem-solving mentality when pursuing their interests in environmental studies. The trouble (or problem) arises only when the wrong problem has been prematurely diagnosed, that either displaces the actual source of the problem and/or, worse, creates a slew of new problems in the wake of ‘solving’ the wrong problem.
The approach that political ecologists tend to take in their pedagogical practice is to strive to move students’ understanding beyond problematic simplistic (or narrow, i.e. Eurocentric) depictions of the environmental crisis (i.e. beyond neo-Malthusian and neoliberal explanations and solutions), and towards approaches that draw connections between seemingly unrelated social elements such as environmental degradation and consumerism, technological modernization, colonialism, imperialism, geopolitics, and the military-industrial complex (and to a lesser extent at the current time but hopefully increasingly in the future connections can also be drawn with racism and sexism). A text such as IF can be an effective way to illustrate the idea of such interconnectedness, and therefore a strategic pedagogical device). As Schwartz muses, “… what if the "problem solving paradigm" is itself a problem? What if the poem teaches us to listen, and to live in a complex field of possibilities? When I think about a poet such as Raul Zurita I realize I'm thinking about a poet who attempts the impossible, as opposed to offering a concrete solution.”
The Black of the Page and the Production of (Literary) Space:
Language as an imaginary or transformative space
In Ear and Ethos as well as in The New Babel: Towards A Poetics of the Mid East Crises, Schwartz used an interesting strategy for composition that in his disciplinary practice is referred to as a constraint. The constraint he used was to only use words in the contemporary English language that were derived from Arabic. The motive here was to argue against the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ prevailing in the erstwhile public discourse that threatens to divide societies apart based on preconceived notions of inherent differences among cultural and regions groups, even today, if one pays attention to the discourses around the war on Islam, predicated on notions of fear and insurmountable otherness. The strategy employed in Ear and Ethos and The New Babel was not to make an explicit claim or argument against such a problematic notion, but to simply demonstrate its falsity, by way of embodying or performing the critique in the prose.
For literary artists such as Schwartz that do political work in their creative practices, language is more than a medium of expression or communication. Words are more than merely tools to convey ideas. They are instead a space of resistance or protest, not simply a vessel to carry the message about one that may be carried out in the streets. This is a fascinating way to think about the saying, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’ For geographers that engage in discourse analysis as a method, the notion that language does political work in framing discourses (ascribing meaning, delineating practices as good or bad, etc.) is hardly new. Nonetheless, the idea of altering the discourse through the strategies one uses as a writer is a novel and compelling one for the discipline. The strategies a writer can employ to make a statement through the text extend beyond manipulations of language. As I have learned from Schwartz, poets often make deliberate choices about how the verses appear on the page, such that spaces between lines, use of punctuation marks, etc. take on particular meanings. So in addition to language, form is also an element of the literary arts that lends itself to producing meaning.
Some writers believe there is a white to the page. But the idea of the black of the page is that metaphorically there is always already writing there, black as ink. The power of the page, what appears on it and in what form, suggests a compelling new realm of investigation and praxis. Writing always intervenes upon the writing that preceded it. If one were to use Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space to understand different facets of our social practices that generate particular spatial configurations, then writing can very well be also examined through such a lens to explore the possibilities of the kinds of worlds that can be imagined into being through the texts that are produced. This is an argument for considering literary spaces and cultures as a worthwhile realm of practice and investigation for the role they might play in envisioning and creating the kind of world we would like to inhabit.
The possibility of enacting/embodying/performing the argument by manipulating language or form is extraordinarily appealing due to the promising possibilities it offers, particularly in challenging the nature-society binary, and in engendering the notion of nature as socially co-produced. Towards this project, Schwartz has already made substantial contributions, especially in complicating the nature-society binary, and more is hopefully forthcoming, in helping make sense of the (social production of) climate crisis.
If I were to speak of an essential characteristic of Schwartz’ brand of eco-poetics, it would be to say that each of his works I have had the pleasure to read embodied or performed a resistance to the predilection for rationality that the Enlightenment has bequeathed to the modern world. In his poetry, one encounters and has the opportunity to dwell in a blissful state of suspension from the cold calculations and creations of the rational human mind, and one then has the ability to begin to imagine a world where the boundaries between nature and culture are rendered irrelevant. In Schwartz’ own words, “What if the poem teaches us to listen, and to live in a complex field of possibilities?”
References
Agrawal, A. (2005). Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Duke University Press.
Bumpus, A. and Liverman, D. (2011) ‘Carbon Colonialism? Offsets, greenhouse gas reductions, and sustainable development.’ In Peet, R., Robbins, P. and Watts, M. (eds) Global Political Ecology. Routledge, pp. 203-224.
Castree, N. and Braun, B. (2001) Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics. Wiley-Blackwell.
Hardin, G. (1968) ‘The Tragedy of the Commons.’ Science, 162, pp. 1243-1248.
Harvey, D. (1974) ‘Population, resources, and the ideology of science.’ Economic Geography, 50(3), pp. 256-277.
Ostrom, E. (1999) ‘Coping with tragedies of the commons.’ Annual Review of Political Science, 2, pp. 493-535.
Lefebvre, H. (1992) The Production of Space. Trans. Nicholson-Smith, D. Wiley-Blackwell.
Peluso, N. (1993) ‘Coercing conservation?’ Global Environmental Change, 3(2), pp. 199-217.
Robbins, P. (2012) Political Ecology. Wiley-Blackwell.
Schwartz, L. (2012) IF. Talisman House.
Schwartz, L. (2013) ‘Capitol Forest.’ Or. Otis College of Art and Design.
Schwartz, L. (2011) At Element. Talisman House.
Schwartz, L. (2016) The New Babel. The University of Arkansas Press.
Spivak, G. (2010). ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In Morris, R. (ed) Reflections on the History of an idea: Can
the subaltern speak? Columbia University Press, pp. 21-78.
Stevens, S. (2013) ‘National Parks and ICCAs in the High Himalayan Region of Nepal: Challenges and
Opportunities.’ Conservation and Society, 11(1), pp. 29-45.
Taylor, M. (2014). The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation: Livelihoods, Agrarian Change and
the Conflicts of Development. Routledge.
The Poetics and Politics of Nature:
Schwartz’ Eco-poetics through the lens of Political Ecology
In his creative work, Schwartz has been committed to a certain genre of eco-poetics—one that refuses to take for granted a particular treatment of ‘nature’ that pervades much ‘nature poetry,’ in which the writer assumes a positionality that situates her/himself outside of and voyeuristically experiencing the beauty of the natural world one seeks to reproduce in the writing. Schwartz’s form of avant-garde eco-poetics instead seeks to write from the position of the object he is writing about. In this essay I discuss this style and strategy of creating literary art by examining Schwartz’s book-length poetry IF and At Element as a means of destabilizing hegemonic forms of representing the natural world, and reflect on the implications of this artistic strategy for critical geographers who are interested in problematizing hegemonic practices that shape contemporary nature-society interactions. Of interest here is also the way in which literary art of this kind operates as a political space in and of itself, a performative space for the embodiment of argument and counterhegemonic politics which are enacted by exploiting poetic form and the language itself.
Eco-poetics beyond Nature Poetry
Schwartz prefaces his book At Element by stating this:
We can only write a Nature Poetry worthy of the ecological imperative when we realize
we are inside both nature and poetry, vulnerable to the encounter, able to surrender
a certain control.
Not above Nature, not positioned so as to write about Nature, but speaking from inside it,
as if Nature were the Unconscious.
This poem may not even resemble a nature poem.
As in sleep, bereft of the capacity to dominate, lost in the forest of language, guided by
elements seemingly in dialogue with one another... (Schwartz 2011: preface)
Schwartz, who typically prefers to let his art speak for itself, and is not keen on explaining its motives and logic, offers this rare glimpse into the logic of his writing in this preface. The impetus here seems to be to challenge both the presumed superiority of humans over nature and the nature-culture binary that are implied when one seeks to write about nature from a position outside it.
In his writing, Schwartz is quite deliberate about moving back and forth fluidly between the human and the more-than-human worlds, as a way of questioning this binary; and about offering agency to non-human entities, as a way of challenging the presumed hierarchies implicit in societies shaped by Enlightenment thinking. Further, his writing forces/invites the reader to see the world (including humans) from the point of view of the non-human object, bringing about a blurring of boundaries even between subject and object.
If geese stare at us, appalled,
As if we were aliens, as we are (Schwartz 2012: 61)
Thinking of oneself as ‘other’—or rather, being forced to do so—appears to be an effective way to rid humans of the hubris they have become accustomed to, especially when there is no anthropomorphizing involved in the representation of the goose. Although I suspect that it is not possible to not anthropomorphize, being humans, imagining how a non-human might experience us and other aspects of the world, the hypothetical ‘if’ helps ward off those liabilities. The following verse similarly seeks to imagine agency and subjectivity without assuming it, by way of framing a question:
Does the rushing water
Pleasure the rocks?
As the sound seems to suggest
If one listens attentively to the roar
And attributes to the rocks
A sensation to match their smoothness? (Schwartz 2012: 63)
In another poem, “Capitol Forest”, Schwartz writes of humans thus:
...
Appearances really are
Mere appearances and
A thermos of water
Imagines itself
Superior to rain. (Schwartz 2013: 10)
If the thermos of water here is an analogy for the human body, scientifically understood to be comprised substantively of water, mocking human hubris may be an effective way to point to its falseness. The writing here invites the reader to be reflective about their place in the world, by pointing to blatant contradictions in how they have been socialized to think of themselves vis-à-vis other fellow living and non-living beings, and how they really are, as Schwartz presents them, as just one of many object-subject configurations that are juxtaposed with one another, both in the space of the poem, and in the space of the world outside it. So instead of neatly organized sections of text dealing with one subject at a time, one encounters a range of seemingly unrelated subjects interspersed with one another throughout the book(s)—conveying the sense that everything is interconnected: our mundane everyday lives, work, relationships, the cosmos, the plants and the animals around us, technology, commerce, the elements. A related work that his writing seems to be doing is to suggest that the space of the poem is not all that divorced from the space of the world outside it, and in fact, Schwartz argues that language (or the literary art form) offers us the space and the opportunity to produce counterhegemonic realities. Furthermore, by enacting the contradiction, the poem does the work of embodying the critique, without presenting it as such. Schwartz refers to this as the ‘Trojan horse’ strategy that may very well be more effective at changing minds than more proselytizing forms of critique that much scholarly writing (including in critical geography) might be guilty of.
Political Ecology
The kind of eco-poetics that Schwartz practices clearly resonates with the approach taken by political ecologists and other critical geographers who study nature-society dynamics. An apparent commonality in their approach is that they refuse to take for granted the apolitical and ahistorical view of ‘nature’ that pervades much ‘nature writing’ as well as mainstream green environmentalism. From a political ecology perspective, what is commonly understood as non-human nature or the natural environment is inevitably always laden with power. Discourses about what constitutes nature, and who it should be protected from, are always political questions that involve decisions about access to and control over resources (see for instance Robbins 2012; Castree 2001). The project of ‘protecting nature from humans’ on one hand as well as that of protecting vulnerable populations from ‘natural’ disasters on the other, are also rife with contradictions, ranging from imposed ideological separations between humans and nature, to the disconnect between forces driving large-scale ecological destruction and groups targeted for environmental protection. Well-meaning but ill-devised environmental imperatives ranging from nature conservation to climate adaptation have been implicated in processes of neocolonialism and the exacerbation of vulnerabilities (see for instance Peluso 1993; Stevens 2013; Taylor 2014).
Universalistic tropes of ‘protecting nature from humans,’ or calls to restore contemporary environments to a state closer to pristine nature are therefore met with suspicion. Such problematic tropes are guilty of treating humanity as a monolithic entity, when in fact human groups across space have starkly different practices in relation to the natural world. Erasing such difference not only fails to acknowledge that the current ecological crisis is an outcome of problematic social relations rather than of absolute numbers of humans on earth, it serves to perpetuate and exacerbate those social relations (Harvey 1974). Likewise, assuming that vulnerable populations should be helped in adaptation to natural disasters emanating from climate change often precludes the understanding of ‘natural’ disasters as well as vulnerability as co-produced by society (Taylor 2014).
Rejecting neo-Malthusian and neoliberal tropes of environmental crisis or protection, political ecology looks to explanations of the underlying drivers of the current predicament in analyses of political economy, specifically contemporary forms of economic globalization that have successfully diffused neoliberal and capitalist economic rationalities across the globe, as a key driver of environmental degradation, including the annihilation of species diversity as well as the climate crisis. Yet, the most well-funded and popular approach to addressing biodiversity loss around the world is to follow the approach of establishing parks and other protected areas regarded as havens of biodiversity, important for human survival. Not surprisingly, although the idea of setting aside immense tracts of land deliberately for preservation or conservation (the fortress conservation model), originated in the US in the form of the national park, its current manifestation is observed and actively practiced in much of the Third World where many of the world’s biodiversity ‘hotspots’ have been identified (Stevens 2013). Similarly, the dominant approaches in helping the most vulnerable populations to the impacts of climate change preclude an understanding of the phenomenon that has been created by the consolidation of overlapping processes of industrialization, modernization, colonialism and capitalism on a grand scale, creating entrenched divisions between the more and less powerful; seeking instead to identify less powerful groups as needing protection from ‘nature’s’ random bouts of fury rather than from a structure with in-built production of social vulnerability.
For political ecologists, a significant problem with these apolitical approaches is that they normalize a universalized environmental imaginary of ecological sustainability that has evolved out of and in response to Western ways of being, particularly in relation to hegemonic property regimes (i.e. privatized property and profits) and inappropriately imposes this norm or metric on landscapes and peoples that have historically practiced quite different ways of knowing, being, and property regimes (i.e. common pool resource regimes) (Hardin 1968; Ostrom 1999). More problematic, this ‘tragedy of the commons’ myth is perpetuated even as ever more of the global commons are actively transformed into private property (since neoliberal solutions to contemporary environmental problems such as climate change have become de rigueur, or rather the only available alternative by way of TINA (there is no alternative) rationalities), essentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy (Bumpus and Liverman 2011). Notwithstanding the problematic nature of such environmental solutions, they have become effectively institutionalized into the fabric of much environmental governance practice, in no small part due to the political and economic clout of their adherents. Not surprisingly then, one of the subjects political ecologists study has to do with how such practices of eco-governmentality are established, how particular environmental subjects and identities are created in the process, and how they alter or perpetuate existing social dynamics (Agrawal 2005).
Eco-poetics as a method for Political Ecology?
While Schwartz and I were planning our 17-18 program we were contemplating pursuing a joint interdisciplinary investigation into the poetics and politics of nature in the context of national parks and other areas where wild nature is understood to thrive. I learned an interesting lesson in what not to do when engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations through this exercise. Originally, my vision was to utilize poetry and other written and oral literary representations among the local populace to seek to understand how nature was conceptualized outside of the influence of international environmental organizations and their imaginaries of ‘nature’. Literary arts would be reduced to a research method or tool in this schematic that I, the social scientist, had devised.
From a postcolonial political ecology perspective, of interest to me was the possibility of decolonizing knowledge about ‘nature’ and the practice of managing it for particular ends. Addressing the question raised by Spivak ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ as well as the response she offers to it, that the subaltern can speak, but whether the Western(ized) scholar is willing to hear him or her is the real question (Spivak 2010); the logic was to engage in a research project designed to seek to actively ‘hear’ the voices and ideas of local populations either displaced by national parks or otherwise brought into the sphere of neocolonial governance of spaces deemed ‘natural’ through various forms of education or outreach, or lured with ‘development’ benefits. My impetus was to ask if poetry and other literary art forms might provide an effective avenue for getting at understandings unadulterated by the introduction of international conservation organizations serving as the neocolonial authority and subsequently the internalization of their messaging.
Schwartz’ response to how I unilaterally conceptualized how the literary arts could be of service to my critical social scientific pursuit is encapsulated in this statement derived from our correspondence: “As a poet of course I want to avoid any instrumental use of poetry. If the poem becomes exclusively a tool for communicating some higher order truth of scientific, moral or political provenance, it cedes its own imaginative end to the means of a particular intellectual position, just the way scientific inquiry turns into technology once the turn towards utility is made. Poetry is not a method but an imaginative space. This imaginative space is of course not a pure wilderness, any more than is the wild, such that scientific, moral and political imperatives are also felt in the field of the poem, in ways both reflective and pre-reflective, conscious and unconscious.”
If conceptualizing avant-garde eco-poetry as method for political ecology is passé, then perhaps there are other ways in which the two can meet, for instance, as a pedagogical implement for illustrating complexity in nature-society relations. Certainly the sophisticated and complex treatment of the nature-society interface renders literary works produced in this genre to be excellent supplementary texts for students of political ecology. By embodying the critiques and contradictions that might be discussed in scholarly texts, a well-written book of poetry can very well serve as an excellent text for seminar discussion, or to invite reflexive engagement with the material. Postcolonial political ecologists strive to be evermore reflexive in their analyses and writing. A work of literary art that invites humans—including the scholar or artist – to see themselves necessarily as part of and embedded in a much larger whole definitely produces a conducive environment for self-reflection, discussion, and nuanced analysis.
Beyond this, we find that many students who gravitate towards courses and programs with ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ content, arrive in our programs with varying degrees of intellectual development and exposure to ideas about the environment. Most students arrive with fairly simplistic notions of nature, motivated by their desire to ‘save the earth’ or to ‘fix or resolve the environmental crisis’ apparently gleaned from the kind of ‘green environmental mainstream’ messaging we always need to be vigilant of. Inasmuch as an accurate diagnosis of the problem is the starting point, no one should be critiqued for wanting to adopt a problem-solving mentality when pursuing their interests in environmental studies. The trouble (or problem) arises only when the wrong problem has been prematurely diagnosed, that either displaces the actual source of the problem and/or, worse, creates a slew of new problems in the wake of ‘solving’ the wrong problem.
The approach that political ecologists tend to take in their pedagogical practice is to strive to move students’ understanding beyond problematic simplistic (or narrow, i.e. Eurocentric) depictions of the environmental crisis (i.e. beyond neo-Malthusian and neoliberal explanations and solutions), and towards approaches that draw connections between seemingly unrelated social elements such as environmental degradation and consumerism, technological modernization, colonialism, imperialism, geopolitics, and the military-industrial complex (and to a lesser extent at the current time but hopefully increasingly in the future connections can also be drawn with racism and sexism). A text such as IF can be an effective way to illustrate the idea of such interconnectedness, and therefore a strategic pedagogical device). As Schwartz muses, “… what if the "problem solving paradigm" is itself a problem? What if the poem teaches us to listen, and to live in a complex field of possibilities? When I think about a poet such as Raul Zurita I realize I'm thinking about a poet who attempts the impossible, as opposed to offering a concrete solution.”
The Black of the Page and the Production of (Literary) Space:
Language as an imaginary or transformative space
In Ear and Ethos as well as in The New Babel: Towards A Poetics of the Mid East Crises, Schwartz used an interesting strategy for composition that in his disciplinary practice is referred to as a constraint. The constraint he used was to only use words in the contemporary English language that were derived from Arabic. The motive here was to argue against the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ prevailing in the erstwhile public discourse that threatens to divide societies apart based on preconceived notions of inherent differences among cultural and regions groups, even today, if one pays attention to the discourses around the war on Islam, predicated on notions of fear and insurmountable otherness. The strategy employed in Ear and Ethos and The New Babel was not to make an explicit claim or argument against such a problematic notion, but to simply demonstrate its falsity, by way of embodying or performing the critique in the prose.
For literary artists such as Schwartz that do political work in their creative practices, language is more than a medium of expression or communication. Words are more than merely tools to convey ideas. They are instead a space of resistance or protest, not simply a vessel to carry the message about one that may be carried out in the streets. This is a fascinating way to think about the saying, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’ For geographers that engage in discourse analysis as a method, the notion that language does political work in framing discourses (ascribing meaning, delineating practices as good or bad, etc.) is hardly new. Nonetheless, the idea of altering the discourse through the strategies one uses as a writer is a novel and compelling one for the discipline. The strategies a writer can employ to make a statement through the text extend beyond manipulations of language. As I have learned from Schwartz, poets often make deliberate choices about how the verses appear on the page, such that spaces between lines, use of punctuation marks, etc. take on particular meanings. So in addition to language, form is also an element of the literary arts that lends itself to producing meaning.
Some writers believe there is a white to the page. But the idea of the black of the page is that metaphorically there is always already writing there, black as ink. The power of the page, what appears on it and in what form, suggests a compelling new realm of investigation and praxis. Writing always intervenes upon the writing that preceded it. If one were to use Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space to understand different facets of our social practices that generate particular spatial configurations, then writing can very well be also examined through such a lens to explore the possibilities of the kinds of worlds that can be imagined into being through the texts that are produced. This is an argument for considering literary spaces and cultures as a worthwhile realm of practice and investigation for the role they might play in envisioning and creating the kind of world we would like to inhabit.
The possibility of enacting/embodying/performing the argument by manipulating language or form is extraordinarily appealing due to the promising possibilities it offers, particularly in challenging the nature-society binary, and in engendering the notion of nature as socially co-produced. Towards this project, Schwartz has already made substantial contributions, especially in complicating the nature-society binary, and more is hopefully forthcoming, in helping make sense of the (social production of) climate crisis.
If I were to speak of an essential characteristic of Schwartz’ brand of eco-poetics, it would be to say that each of his works I have had the pleasure to read embodied or performed a resistance to the predilection for rationality that the Enlightenment has bequeathed to the modern world. In his poetry, one encounters and has the opportunity to dwell in a blissful state of suspension from the cold calculations and creations of the rational human mind, and one then has the ability to begin to imagine a world where the boundaries between nature and culture are rendered irrelevant. In Schwartz’ own words, “What if the poem teaches us to listen, and to live in a complex field of possibilities?”
References
Agrawal, A. (2005). Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Duke University Press.
Bumpus, A. and Liverman, D. (2011) ‘Carbon Colonialism? Offsets, greenhouse gas reductions, and sustainable development.’ In Peet, R., Robbins, P. and Watts, M. (eds) Global Political Ecology. Routledge, pp. 203-224.
Castree, N. and Braun, B. (2001) Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics. Wiley-Blackwell.
Hardin, G. (1968) ‘The Tragedy of the Commons.’ Science, 162, pp. 1243-1248.
Harvey, D. (1974) ‘Population, resources, and the ideology of science.’ Economic Geography, 50(3), pp. 256-277.
Ostrom, E. (1999) ‘Coping with tragedies of the commons.’ Annual Review of Political Science, 2, pp. 493-535.
Lefebvre, H. (1992) The Production of Space. Trans. Nicholson-Smith, D. Wiley-Blackwell.
Peluso, N. (1993) ‘Coercing conservation?’ Global Environmental Change, 3(2), pp. 199-217.
Robbins, P. (2012) Political Ecology. Wiley-Blackwell.
Schwartz, L. (2012) IF. Talisman House.
Schwartz, L. (2013) ‘Capitol Forest.’ Or. Otis College of Art and Design.
Schwartz, L. (2011) At Element. Talisman House.
Schwartz, L. (2016) The New Babel. The University of Arkansas Press.
Spivak, G. (2010). ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In Morris, R. (ed) Reflections on the History of an idea: Can
the subaltern speak? Columbia University Press, pp. 21-78.
Stevens, S. (2013) ‘National Parks and ICCAs in the High Himalayan Region of Nepal: Challenges and
Opportunities.’ Conservation and Society, 11(1), pp. 29-45.
Taylor, M. (2014). The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation: Livelihoods, Agrarian Change and
the Conflicts of Development. Routledge.
