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November 22, 2002
Viewing
Nature with a Colorful Lens
Many
associate American nature writing with narratives describing solitude
in wild landscapes—Henry David Thoreau's Walden,
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, and Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for instance. Those in tune with
environmental problems might also name writers who address harm
to the landscapes we live in: Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, Barbara
Kingsolver, and others. Most, however, would be hard-pressed to
offer the names or messages of even a few nature writers outside
the Euro-American tradition, says associate professor of geology
Lauret Savoy, who found herself asking, "What is the American
Earth to people of color?" Savoy and colleague Alison H.
Deming present a variety of answers to this question in their
new anthology, The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and
the Natural World (Milkweed, 2002).
"As a teacher,
I try to expand the definition of geology, meaning knowledge of
the Earth, to include the diversity of cultural experiences on
the land," says Savoy. A project to expand the definition
of nature writing was a natural extension of that teaching goal,
and it developed soon after Savoy met poet and essayist Alison
Hawthorne Deming at an environmental writing conference. Like
Savoy, Deming regards nature as "the marriage of a place
with the lives that have lived in it" and was eager to learn
what America's silenced voices would say about it. The two
solicited original work from prominent writers, thinkers, and
policymakers, then selected seventeen personal essays united by
their emphasis on cultural perspective as a lens through which
to see nature, environment, and place.
In "In History,"
Jamaica Kincaid reflects on Christopher Columbus's "discovery"
of a "New World" that "had a substantial existence,
physical and spiritual, before he became aware of it." In
"Belonging on the Land," third-generation Japanese American
David Mas Masumoto describes his family's dream of owning
farmland in California, a dream shattered in 1942 when the Masamutos
were exiled to Gila River Relocation Center south of Phoenix.
Louis Owens, of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish descent, remembers
in "Burning the Shelter" his work as a ranger in northern
Washington in the 1970s. "I felt very good, very smug in
fact, about returning the White Pass meadow to its 'original'
state," writes Owens of disassembling and burning a log shelter
at the foot of Glacier Peak. "It was part of a Forest Service
plan to remove all human-made objects from wilderness areas,"
Owens explains. Hiking out after completing his work, Owens meets
two elderly Native American women whose father had built the shelter
near the mountain he called Dakobed, "the place of emergence."
"We been coming up here each year since we was little,"
the women tell Owens. "A long time ago, this was all our
land. All Indi'n land everywhere you can see. Our people
had houses up in the mountains, for gathering berries every year."
Nature writing, Savoy
remarks in her introduction, "includes more than reflections
on the 'natural world' in terms of intimacy with or separation
from it, more than issues of wilderness preservation, ecology,
and other scientific concerns, and more than concepts of social
and ecological responsibility within the frame defined by Euro-America.
In this America the lived experience bears the colonial legacies
of conquest and dispossession, slavery, and denial of language,
life-ways, and generational connection to the land." Connection
to place is not just what it's like to be in a place, she explains,
but the legacy of that place in our history. Savoy will sign copies
of her book at the Odyssey Bookshop Thursday, December 5, at 4
pm.
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