University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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The Lush and the Barren: Nature in William Bartram’s Travels and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Get PDF“The Lush and the Barren: Nature in William Bartram’s Travels and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” seeks to understand the connections between these two seemingly disparate texts. The works exist on binaries of the environmental paradigm – Travels presents a fecund landscape; The Road envisions a scorched one. “The Lush and the Barren” considers these works as being two faces on the same coin of the southern American terrain. Positioned between each text, haunts the environmental destruction of a small town in East Tennessee called Copperhill. Destroyed by copper smelting in the early twentieth century, the land surrounding Copperhill for many years resembled a moonscape. The desolate ground of Ducktown Basin looms and has become more than a razed corner of Tennessee; it possesses symbolic resonance and serves as crossroads between two moments in the history of America: Travels looks back beyond the age of written memory to a time when the land was flocked in so-called virgin wilderness, and The Road that points ahead to an apocalyptic future, where the countryside is completely destroyed and burned to cinder. If Copperhill provides a glimpse into two worlds, an echo stone from which the imagined and the unimaginable commingle, then two literary works, William Bartram’s Travels and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, function as mythical road maps from out of the garden and into the desert of our own destruction. “The Lush and The Barren” holds up these three landscapes and muses on the possible destiny of America
Ecocritical Reading and Robert Duncan's Bending the Bow
Get PDFThis essay presents an argument for the benefits of using an ecocritical perspective to read a poet who is not easily included in the canon of environmental literature—Robert Duncan. First surveying the state of ecocritical approaches to poetry, the essay focuses on Duncan’s Bending the Bow, a volume widely seen to be about the war in Vietnam, and argues that Duncan is substantially engaged in reflecting on the relationship of the subjective to the natural. In readings of three poems, the essay takes up questions of the human voice and the natural world, the role of nature in the construction of homosexuality, and the impact of environmental awareness on the shape of an organic form poem
Shifting Mandates and Climate Change Policy Capacity: The Forestry Case
Get PDFThe original hypothesis is that forests will be a
policy subsector in which the challenges of climate change
adaptation lead to broader policy mandates but that the
declining role of the industry in the Canadian economy will
cause departmental resources to be stable or decreasing. The
result will be ineffective policy capacity, leading to adaptation
policies that are poorly designed, incomplete or missing
altogether. This paper provides some evidence to support
this hypothesis, though the situation is complicated by the
dominant role played by the provinces in both ownership
and jurisdiction. While the leading federal department,
Natural Resources Canada, has shed other mandates to focus
on climate change, provincial agencies are already caught
between the added costs of addressing climate change impacts,
notably wildfire, and the need to plan for and implement
long term adaptive policies with stable or declining
resources. Much will depend on coordination between First
Nations, the provinces and the federal government in a
policy subsector with a history of conflict between the different
orders of government
The Importance of Apocalypse: The Value of End-Of-The-World Politics While Advancing Ecocriticism
Get PDFThis essay argues that successful ecocriticism must focus on the tangible political consequences of environmental policy that are undoubtedly destroying the planet. I begin with an overview of how some ecocritics use poststructuralist thought to minimize apocalyptic rhetoric and its subsequent call to arms. Afterwards I outline how ecocriticism can become effective in influencing people to abandon environmentally destructive practices in coalition with the thinkers I take issue with. They may do so by not giving up on images of collective omnicide. I conclude by showing how metaphors of apocalypse enable ecocriticism to forge a tethering principle of interconnectedness that overcomes the risk of co-optation. Embracing such interconnectedness goes beyond the idea of the individual self and awakens a sense of collective responsibility that can truly change our world
Eco-Dystopia: Reproduction and Destruction in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Get PDFThis essay argues that Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake participates in a vibrant debate among scholars of science, animal, and feminist studies. Though traditional readings of Oryx and Crake emphasize the novel’s critique of capitalist science, this essay demonstrates the ways in which the novel criticizes ecotopianism. By critiquing both capitalist science and ecotopianism, Oryx and Crake highlights the complexity of knowledge production and cautions the reader against sweeping plans for the elimination of suffering, regardless of whether those plans are driven by economics, science, or environmentalism
A Modern Interpretation of Machiavelli's Political Cycle.
Get PDFIn the Discourses, Machiavelli refers early on to Polybius' cycle of regimes; however, he will not make much use of it afterwards. He still refers to a particular cycle, but one implicit in his writings and substantially different from Polybius. I propose in this paper to reconstruct Machiavelli's own political cycle, using the modern language of rationality and emotions in an agent-based model. Our starting point will be a list of individual motivations, their interplay in political action, and their effects on the regime. We will find in Machiavelli's work a model founded on three types of regimes -- tyranny, principality, and republic -- and a cycle of foundation, succession, degeneration, corruption, and refoundation of the regimes
Nurturing the "Right" Nature: Environmental Poetics and Pedagogies
Get PDFRecent British and American nature writing guides and exercises have prescribed approaches to writing poetry on the environment from various political and ecological perspectives. By grouping these diverse approaches to writing the environment (such as urban realism, sensory concentration and modes of estrangement) within the context of green issues such as conservation, waste-control and the use of technology this paper interrogates the intentions and potential effects of these exercises. By exploring the moral and philosophical arguments behind such literary guides it is possible to gain an insight into how future nature writing could awaken, if not change, society’s consciousness of natural and built environments