Nature Culture Dispute: An Ecopoetic Study of American Fiction and Nonfiction

A Proposal

Submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science of

Tribhuvan University in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

In

English Literature

By

Ram Chandra Binadi

TU- Reg No. 27348-89

Tribhuvan University Kathmandu, Nepal

March 2014
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Abstract

Nature verses culture stand differently in the sphere of their affiliation. They existed

dependently, independently and interdependently since creation. Nature and material world

existing independently of human activities in their original, natural and uncivilized condition

of humankind precede human origin. As nature precedes and determines human biological

development, it is the sole source of human awareness simply for the reason that mental

awareness has links with biology. Biology is obviously dependent on the earth. Thus, human

knowledge consists of the awareness of physical world. Human knowledge of the world has

not been determined by human desires, tastes, and interests, but the real facts received from

the world of nature. Environmental study, therefore, attaches significance to understanding

and knowing the spiral connectivity between the earth and culture.

The idea of interdependency is bio-centric and it places human and nature on

horizontal plane where as the anthropocentric world view ascribes human at the vertically

higher position and gives rise to the notion of exploiter exploited. This notion of exploitation

invites on ongoing dispute between nature and human beings. This conflict appears as the

cause of ecological disharmony and creates the environmental hazards. The world has faced

tremendous environmental hazards in recent years. Threats to earth are mounting as the result

of the consumerist tendencies of human population. Congestion of people on the surface of

the earth, extensive use of the earth for the industrialization, intensive use of the natural

resources leading to unpredictable climate changes and superiority that assumes mastery over

the universe have promoted the researches working on ecocriticism to think over the relation

of nature, culture and literature.

Thus, the research has aimed to explore the fundamental roots of nature and culture

dispute in American literary writing in complementary and contesting circumstances with the

attempt of evoking the feeling of natural harmony in the readers of the dissertation.
Introduction

This research work will explore the concept of nature culture dispute with reciprocal

complementarily and contradictory attitude depicted in American literary writings through

environmental prospective. Nature is conceptualized not as a void or an isometric plane or a

kind of container that hold land, non-living things and living beings, but it will be explored in

terms of more experimentally based understanding of connectivity between nature and

culture. The main concern of this study will be to examine the reciprocity between nature and

culture in their complementarities and contradictory relationship. While explaining the

relationship between nature and culture, Arthur Schopenhauer views, “Everything is entirely

in nature and nature is entire in everything. She has centre in every brute. It has surely found

its way to existence, and it will surely find its way out of it” (397). This assertion embraces

the notion that nothing in the world can be outside of the nature and furthermore, nature does

not have its isolated existence. The connectivity among dynamic and constant things is very

strongly associated to support each other. To highlight this relationship Barry Commoner

writes, “Everything is Connected to Everything Else” (33) on this earth.

Describing the integration between nature and culture through environmental

perspective, Aldo Leopold states that environment is sum total of biotic and abiotic factors

affecting an organism. There is a continuous interaction of each and every organism with

biotic and abiotic factors. “Things and thingsness, substance and quality, matter and mind are

inseparable entities. They do not have independent existence and ontological value in

isolation” (42). This notion shows that the interrelated and independent living organisms and

non-living psycho-chemical surroundings maintain the earth’s ecosystem. As long as the

ecosystem remains balanced certain continues unhindered and the moment imbalanced is

seen in one life form or physical component of the earth, effects can be clearly sand seen on
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other life forms of physical components. Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, rightly points out

how important is the connection between natural elements and states:

Water, soil and earth’s green mantle of plants make up the world that supports

the animal life of the earth. The earth’s vegetation is the part of a web of life in

which there are intimate and essential relationship between plants and earth,

between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. (63)

Carson sees an intricate relationship between the earth and humanity and between humans

and plants. She feels that understanding that relationship and shaping the action will greater

amount of humanity that can help humanity to retain their existence on earth. Human beings

and earth, like other living and non-living psycho-chemical surroundings that have appeared

with earth’s evolution, are as intricately interrelated as are other phenomenal beings, objects

and things. Nature determines not only our external lives but also our inner selves and

patterns of thought. It is assumed that the very notion of human self is inseparable from the

physical world upon human imagination.

Nature is the phenomena of physical world including plants, animals, the landscape

and other biotic and abiotic forms of the earth. Culture, on the other hand, is a full range of

learned behavior and patterns. Culture refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art

and food. Edward B. Tailor says, “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge,

belief, art, law, morals customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by a man as a

member of society” (3). In this view, culture is the central focus of anthropology and

powerful human tool for survival. Culture is constantly changing and easily lost because it

exists in our mind.

For a long-run harmonious relationship, nature and culture are not always appearing

in complementary terms. They sometimes carry on antagonistic relationship. In this sector,

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human beings and natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and

often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. Glotfelty says,

“Human actions are damaging the plants’ basic life support system” (xx). Dire prediction of

sizzling temperature, floods, landslides, droughts, acid rain and tropical diseases are the

counter attack of human nature upon culture. Human beings attempt to control the nature and

nature’s reactions for their mischievous activity have created an ongoing debate between

them. Jhan Hochman shows such reciprocal connectivity between nature and culture. He

states that, “Nature and culture cannot be willed together by glibly naturalizing culture, by

culture simplistically proclaiming itself part of nature, or by stupidly world nature into an

appendage of culture, world nature into a culturally constructed product” (192). In this

remark culture is not separate entity though nature is found separateness independence and

liberation. Therefore, nature and culture, these two entities, function separately to set their

controlling force upon one another.

While going through these literary texts, I have noticed the more profoundly nature

and culture argue, the stronger will be their relation to maintain ecosystem. This reason leads

me to select writers and the literary texts as primary text for my research work.

Statement of the Problem

Nature and culture discourse as dialectically structured in human environmental

imagination has been explored very little in literary texts so far. The dispute mainly leads

contradiction to establish one’s existence upon another rather than harmonious

complementary. This is assumed that human presence is the gradual absence of nature. In

fact, without destroying nature to some extent culture progress and human civilization is quite

impossible. Without similar feelings and consciousness, one would find difficult to explore

civilization between nature and culture.

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Research Question

The research has tried to raise the questions why and how human beings interact and

dispute in various contexts and how nature and culture are dialectally structured in human

beings interact and dispute in various contexts and how nature and culture are dialectically

structured in human environmental experience. Are human languages, thoughts and

knowledge independent or free from the awareness of the environment or dependent on it? Is

mind an autonomous entity involved in the intellectual and imaginative pursuit transcending

the body and becoming independent of its earthborn limitation. How does nature play an

integral part in the lives of human beings? How do our metaphors of nature influence the way

we treat it? In what ways has literacy affected humankind’s relationship to the natural world?

What effect is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary literature and popular

culture? The research endeavors to explore these questions after the intensive study of

ecocritical American literary writings.

Objective of study

The study aims at exploring nature and culture dispute in American literary writings;

analyzing complementarities and contesting situation and activities for nature and human

beings; revealing the roles of nature as an integral part of human civilization; and evoking the

feeling to regard nature through literary writings.

Hypothesis

Interdependencies between nature and culture have been subsisting in nature and

human world since creation, but conflicts exist side by side. This conflict, I assume roots in

human hubris and desire to rule over nature. This conflict is the cause of ecological

disharmony that creates environmental hazards.

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Limitation of the Study

The research work will be based on the major American fictions, non-fictions and

poems. In fictions Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), Jack London’s the

Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and The Valley of the Moon (1913), Willa

Cather’s My Antonia (1918), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned 1992) will

be analyzed in the dissertation. In the same way, some remarkable non-fictions such as

Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Ralph

Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1936), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), will be selected for

the research work. All the nature poems composed by Gary Snider and Theodore Roethke

will be the primary sources for this project.

Review of Literature

The review of literature of literature in this research work has two prongs: theory and

practice. So far as the theory of environmentalism is concerned, many research works have

been carried out to indicate nature and culture reciprocity.

Anthropologist and naturalist have been interested in the connection between nature

and culture. Environmental ethics, deep ecology, ecofeminism and social ecology have been

emerged in an effort to provide an ethical and conceptual foundation for right relation with

nature. In this connectivity Cheryll Glotfelty depicts that “All ecological criticism shares the

foundational premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and

affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the inter connection between nature and

culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature” (xix).Nature’s affecting

and affected movements show the interconnection between nature and culture. Furthermore,

Glotfelty talks about language and literature which are byproduct of human culture. In such

human and nature relationship, Lawrence Buell adds his experience of Native American

study in the context of nature. In Native American culture , “The sense of the individual as
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inseparable from tribe and bonded to place in relationship in which nature is not “other” but

part of continuum with the human” (19). In nature, especially land is taken as an identity

marker and the foremost condition of survival for human beings. Wendell Berry indicates, “If

you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are” (qtd. in Anderson, Slovic and

O’Grady 163). Therefore, shaping of human identity Anderson, Slovic and O’Grady view,

“Place determines not only human external lives but also inner selves and thoughts,” (164). In

this remark, nature shapes and develops human being’s physical, mental and intellectual

personality.

The two communities, the human and the nature, can coexist, cooperate, and flourish

in the biosphere. In biological and spiritual periphery, nature is perceived as a builder of

constructer of thoughts. Describing nature and social perception Terry Gifford writes:

Nature is the way of thinking. Notions of nature are, of course, socially

constructed and determine our perception of our direct experiences, which, in

turn, determine our communication about them. I see and hear the rain through

my window, but already its meaning for me will be framed by my socialized

perception of it. It may signify the source of life, or the pollution of life. (174)

In this context, Gifford’s remarks justify the fact that Nature and human mind are the integral

part of the construction of biosphere. Human perception and experiences are determined and

directed by nature. Furthermore, he shows that African American and Indian American

cultures look at the earth with the sense of interconnection. “We are the part of the earth and

it is the part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the dear, the house, the great eagle,

these are our brothers,” (170).Gifford claims that the earth and the earthly things are site of

human physical, spiritual, social and emotional interaction.

Nature and culture relationship does not always follow in the same positive

harmonious direction. Sometimes nature and culture confront and such confrontation leads to
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apocalyptic fear. In Nature Culture Imperialism David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha view

that, “ The relationship is reciprocal one, for man more than any other living organism also

alters the landscape, fells trees; erode soils, dams, streams, kills off welcome plants and

predatory animals, installing favoured species in their stead,” (3). In such degradation it is

assumed that, “human mind is superior to nature” (Bate 9), so human beings try to control the

nature without sympathizing apocalypse. Such nature culture debate invites the problem of

“green house effect and the depletion of ozone layer, the destruction of tropical forest, acid

rain, the pollution of sea, and more locally the consorting the green pleasant land” (Bate 9).

Primitive environmental destruction was taken was taken as human basic need, but later on it

is on shifted into luxury. People living in Agrarian culture love to respect the unity of biotic

and abiotic worlds where as industrial anthropocentric civilization manipulates the nature and

ecosphere to satisfy immediate thirst for materialistic grain. Exposing the exploitation of the

nature through the runway technology, Barry Commoner writes, “The affluent society has

become an affluent society” (7). Commoner clarifies the fact the rich people poison air,

revenge soil, strip forest bars, and pollute water resources and corrupt human as well.

“Affluent people are ecologically poor and harmful where as ecologically poor people are

ecologically rich, friendly and sound” (Commoner 9). People have started to destroy the

nature more than they need. Contest results into very dreadful consequences on cultural

periphery. Norman Myers remarks the consequence of deforestation in human surrounding.

“As the forest are eliminated by burning, they serve as an anthropogenic source of carbon

dioxide, thus contributing to the green house effect, a phenomenon that may transform our

planet to a profound degree within just another few decades” (24). Human conscious and

subconscious activities have singled to the great disaster like loss of wild life, ozone layer

depletion, and green house effect. In the same way, Paul K. Conkin provides a

comprehensive analysis of the many environmental hazards that humans must face in this
 8

still-young century in The State of the Earth. He explains that our activities have threatened

the survival of many plants and animals, created scarcities in cultivable soils and water

needed for irrigation, used up a large share of fossil fuels, polluted air and water, and most

likely created conditions that will lead to major climate changes. If human beings and nature

continue their conflict without giving the feelings of realization, they will not able to avoid

their possible doom.

Highlighting the consequences between nature and culture contesting Timothy W

Luke remarks, “People are nature, and nature is, at least in part, people. To harm nature, then,

is to commit slow suicide or engage in self- mutilation. When humans technologically

intervene in nature, it means that we assault, abuse, or murder other significant selves from

river systems to animals to rainforest” (9). Human beings’ tremendous destructive power in

environment based technology treats nature and other natural subjects not as a means but as

ends. Destruction of nature is slow poison for human civilization. He further says, “Inwards

and outward direction, there are two aspects of the same process. We are not alone; we are

the part of parcel of the larger community, the land community. Each life in its own sense is

heroic and connected. In the words of Bodhisattva, “No one will be saved until we all are

saved” (25). This perspective encompasses all notion of saving anything, whether it is an

endangered species, the community, or our own self. Each life is heroic quest. Contesting

between nature and culture loses this harmonious balance and invites a grim tale.

About an eco-literary survey many philosophers attempt to establish their livies from

different perceptive. The Modern Tradition edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson

talks about the public world of the relist and the imaginative world of the symbolist or the

imaginative mind surround by the natural world. The creative and critical texts focus on the

fact that the idea of nature prominently occupy the modern consciousness even through

immediate contact of the modern world with nature has dramatically reduced. Included in this
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book there are similar writings of Charles Darwin, Schopenhauer, and A.N. Whitehead,

Rilke, D, H. Lawrence and others. Darwin depicts a biological nature where in species of

living things arise in fantastic profuseness to disappear or persists depending upon their

adaptability to the condition of life. In this view, all living creatures are engaged in endless

struggle with their physical environment, including other creatures; and it is total economy of

nature, not some intrinsic value in the individual or the species, that determines the outcome

of their battle to survive.

Schopenhauer considers both organic and inorganic nature as the manifestation of the

“Will” and the “Will” to be reality behind all the phenomenal object of which we have ideas.

Whitehead sees organisms in the relation to their environment. He takes and perception of

things and as events and modes of interaction with other events in the space and time. He

renders nature everywhere and alive.

D. H. Lawrence proposes to treat people as in organic solid energies than personal

“mind”. William James and Dewey think that nature is one of the large world that can stilled

be trusted. All the writers in this selection have thus given importance to the interrelation of

the human and physical world.

The Ecocrttical Reader: Landmark in Literary Ecology edited by Cheryll Glotfelty

and Harold Fromm is a canonical text on ecocriticism-a branch of study that looks into

apparent connection between literature and environment. The introduction by Cheryll

Glotfelty maps the history and ecocritical studies. She opines that ecocriticism addresses

environmental consideration which “includes ecological theory, environmentalism,

conceptions of nature and their depiction, the human/nature disharmony and related

concern”(xviii). Ecocriticism is also studies how ecology and ecological concepts apply to

the study of literature.

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With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new

ways to understand nature and humanity’s relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell

takes up in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and Formation of

American Culture. It is the most ambitious study to date which tells which tells how literature

represents the natural environment. With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a

far reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of

western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a

more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of

Thoreau’s achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of literary and cultural

reflection on nature.

The green tradition in American writing commands Buell’s special attention,

particularly environmental notification from colonial time to present. In the works by the

writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to

Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he exclaims enduring environmental themes

such as dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, the attentiveness to

environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible

ecocatastrophe.

At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest greater

environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of

environmental writing seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human

imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate challenging

in its argument, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a

major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for the reading nature writing.

Buell is a major figure in contemporary ecocriticism. In Writing for an Endangered

World; Culture and Environment in the U.S. and beyond, he considers everything from the
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environmental Whaling Commission Chernobyl to watershed aesthetics to ecological ethics.

He blurs the usual distinction between natural and built environments. Romantic Ecology:

Wordsworth and Environmental Tradition published in 1990 is his major work that makes an

in-depth analysis of ecocritical tradition adopted by romantic poets from an ecological

perspective and tried to show the importance of place in Romantic imagining.

In Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology, James C. McKusick discusses issues

ranging from the myth of the American Wilderness and Clean Water Act to Super Mice and

Terminator Seeds. To McKusick, major Romantics appear as prophets and he finds them

radically innovative in their concern for the preservation of traditional rural ways of life. The

Green Studies Reader: from Romantic to Ecocriticism edited by Laurence Coupe provides a

comprehension selection of critical texts which address the connection between ecology,

culture and literature. It aims to offer a complete guide to the growing area of “ecocriticism”

from Romantic period to the present covering important aspect in detail.

So far as the primary texts of this research are concerned, different critics have

analyzed these texts from different perspectives. Presenting ecocritical reading of My Antonia

Xiaohui Xue argues Willa Cather in My Antonia explores:

How Antonia, daughter of an immigrant family from Bohemia, overcomes

hardships in her life and triumphs in the American frontier in the early 20th

century…Antonia’s harmonious life with nature that provides her with vitality

and integrity, which is crucial to her survival and prosperity, concluding that

happiness is returning to nature. (34)

Discussing modernist space and Willa Cather’s environmental imagination context, Reynold

observes My Antonia and argues:

Antonia’s sense of environment is strongly linked to a need for sheltered

privacy. The novel began with a very private enclosed space…It needs with a
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similar kind of exchange between Burden and Antonia, as they talk in an

enclosed space fashioned from natural materials. In both cases the openness of

the prairie landscape produces an equal and opposite human reaction, as

characters seek out inward looking, private, womblike space. (8)

Love points out in Practical Ecocriticism that a great deal of world literature deals with the

pastoral and with the relationship between humans and animals. For anyone interested in this

line of research, Love’s book is an excellent resource. Scott Slovic’s Seeking Awareness in

American Nature Writing has several meanings. For a critic, the idea of seeking awareness is

a topic that can be traced “in “written words about nature. The other four writers Slovic’s

study are all the in cultural wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the ecological

movement. Still, they differ, and it is a pleasure to follow Solvic as he examines their uses of

perception and teases out in their attitude.

Slovic argues that Abbey’s lush description in Desert Solitaire and the extravagant

dialogue and puns of The Monkey Wrench Gang alert readers to the wilderness in themselves

and open their controversial assumption that hide otherness of the world. In a chapter on

Annie Dillard, the focus is on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood. Solvic

sees Dillard as primarily interested in the process of her own consciousness, more like a

psychologist exploring varieties of mental experience than an advocate of greater mystical

awareness in nature.

The Monkey Wrench Gang is about freedom and commitment that ignited the flames

of environmental activities of mental experience that have now taken hold across the nation.

Throughout the vast American west nature is being civilized by Big Government/Big

Business Conspiracy of dams, bridges, and concrete. Edward Abbey states:

Great river…greater dam. Seen from the bridge dam presents a grey sheer

concave face of a concrete aggregate implacable and mute. A gravity dam,

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eight hundred thousand tons of solidarity, countersunk in the sandstone

Navajo formation, fifty million years emplaced, of bed the bedrock and

canyon walls. A plug, a block, a fat wedge, the dam wedge, the dam diverts

through penstocks turbines, the force of puzzled river. (4)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau emphasizes the importance of solitude, complementation,

and closeness to nature in transcending the “desperate” existence that he argues, is the lot of

most people. The book is not a traditional autobiography, but combines autobiography with a

social critique to contemporary Western culture’s consumerist and materialist attitudes and its

distance from destruction of nature.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson has been attacked on the ground that restriction on the

use of DDT has indirectly caused millions of deaths by preventing its use against malaria.

Carson carefully explains what the balance of nature is. Silent Spring exposes the destruction

of wild life through the wide spread use of pesticides. She has created a new public

awareness of the environment which has led to change in government policy and inspired the

modern ecological movement. She describes the balance of soil, water and other organism of

the earth. She states, “The layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents

controls our own existence and of every other animal of the land. Without soil, land plan as

we know them could not grow, and without plant no animals survive” (61). In this view, she

is not merely taking about poisons; she is discussing about ecology or the relation of plants

and animals to their environment and to one another.

In the study of The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Valley of the Moon

Rothberg explores London’s attitude and sympathy toward animal characters and detest to the

human characters who possess the feelings of antipathy towards the animals. In this context,

Rothberg says:
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London was not only treating animals like human beings, but treating human

beings like animals, recognizing no essential differences between man and

animal. In the Call of the Wild, he equated men with dogs and wolfs and

equated with the harness of trail with the harness of society, implying that

force, savagery and cunning were equally the ways to success in both areas

(Rothberg 1).

Animal characters in London’s narratives are regarded as conscious, meaningful and sensitive

heroic figures. London tries to fetch out civilized human like quality and consideration in the

wolf and dog the protagonist. The presence of animal praise is the absence human regard.

Some of the animals qualify themselves to accept human like consciousness and

foresightedness to challenge human superiority in the sector of reasoning. Some of the human

beings lose their grasp on reasoning and fall on the level of animal. This sort of contest to

sustain the underlying quality is found in nature/ culture relationship.

In this way, the primary texts of this research work have been studied from different

perspective. The issue of nature culture dispute commonly in all these texts in one research

work has not been studied from ecopoetic perspective yet. Therefore, the researcher claims

that this nature of study is innovative one and hence it will have great significance in the

academia and for the academics.

Research Methodology

This library- based research work is inspired by ecocritical analysis and it will imply

elective and qualitative methodology. Environmentalism is the main theoretical modality that

shall be applied in the preparation of this dissertation. A critical school, which started

flourishing with the publication of Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Eromm’s The Ecocriticism

Reader: Landmark in Literary Ecology in 1996, will be received a wide recognition in

academic discussion. Different insights of environmentalism namely Edward Ralph’s concept

 15

of deep ecology, a radical version environmentalism conceived by Arne Naess and

ecofemnism developed by K. Warren, V. Davison etc. will be applied to analyze the primary

text of this research work to reveal nature culture dispute in American literary writing.

Organization of the Study

The tentative organization of the study shall be as follows:

Chapter 1: Introduction: Nature and Culture in Literary Imagination

Chapter 2: Envisioning Nature and Culture through Ecocritical perspective in American

Literary Writing

Chapter 3: Representation of Nature and Culture in American fiction and Non-Fiction

Chapter 4: Nature and Culture Dispute in American Literary Writing

Chapter 5: Environmental Degradation as a Consequential Outcome of Ecological Dispute

Chapter 6: Conclusion: Resolving Nature Culture Dispute and Ecological Disharmony

Appendices

Works Cited
 16

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 18

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