For the past couple of years, I’ve been feeling like a deer in the headlights of a Mack truck, so overwhelmed by environmental and political awfulness that I don’t know which way to turn. I’m writing and publishing poetry—some of it about the current political situation—but even the most powerful poem cannot change the course of events as I wish it could. I’m besieged by requests for money from political and environmental organizations, over e-mail, in the snail mail, on the phone—as many as thirty requests a day—and the thing is, all of them are legitimate, all of them are important, but they cancel each other out. Click . . . click . . . ; I erase them. Rip . . . rip . . . ; I recycle them. I flinch when the home phone rings, refusing to answer lest it be another robocall. I’m spending way too much time watching Netflix detective shows, playing Words with Friends, and working my way through the five-hundred-puzzle New York Times crossword book that I inherited not long ago from my beloved hoarder sister. My attention span is frazzled. Every time I pick up a book that might lay claim to my intelligence, antsiness and exhaustion besiege me. Sometimes when I try to write, I am paralyzed by self-mistrust and self-condemnation: Given the present state of affairs, who am I to have anything to say? 

I would not be surprised if many of us are feeling this way. 

It began before Trump of course, this callousness toward human lives, this devastation of so much in the natural world that we hold dear—but it has been escalating, and by now we face the possibility of chaos and loss far beyond our imagining. I direct the Environmental Studies program at the University of Mississippi, and every spring I teach a required gateway course, ENVS 101, Humanities and the Environment. When I started teaching this class, I could tell my beautiful, fresh-eyed students, “Studies indicate that if we do not do A, B, or C, within the next twenty-five years, X, Y, and Z will be the result.” Now, I have to tell them, “within ten years. Or maybe five years—because in fact the studies reveal that the situation is worse, and is progressing faster, than had previously been reported.” I have six grandchildren, eight months to twelve years old. At seventy-one, I won’t be around forever to see what happens to the world. But what will life be for our students, our children, our grandchildren, facing this future? 

~ ~ ~

Still, paralysis is useless, and despair, I was taught when I studied medieval literature, has long been considered one of the gravest sins against the Holy Spirit. Though I do not belong to any church, I have always experienced existence as shot through and through with the holy—a spirit that lies far deeper than the anxiety and dread that seem to characterize many aspects of our present times. And for me, perhaps another name for that is deep beauty.

Once I saw a dogwood tree in full bloom at the edge of a forest. I have seen hundreds, thousands, of dogwood trees—but this was different in that, for the first time ever, something in me opened to the strange deep otherness of nature. Perhaps it was different because the tree was the only thing flowering against an intricate wall of green, and so it pulled my attention toward it. Perhaps it was different because I was newly in love and my heart was stripped raw to everything around me. Whatever the cause, it offered itself fully to my field of vision. For a moment, I wanted to leave everything else behind and wander off into whatever realm of consciousness could leap over the barriers between human and other-than-human forms of existence. As if such a thing could be.

In her book of essays Madness, Rack, and Honey, the poet Mary Ruefle writes: “What beauty is is the ability to apprehend it. The ability to apprehend beauty is the human spirit and it is what all such moments [of being surprised by beauty] are about, which is why such moments occur in places and at times that may strike another as unlikely or inconceivable, and it does not seem far-fetched to say that the larger the human spirit, the more it will apprehend beauty.” 

Ruefle describes a certain kind of poet who wanders about in “a diffuse religious awe . . . forever in a stupor.” I don’t want to be that poet. I don’t want to be that person. But I want to speak up for the enduring beauty that lies deeper than despair—that surprises us when we least expect it. Experiencing it reminds me that the world is infinitely larger, deeper, and stranger than I ordinarily perceive it to be. I am briefly spellbound. And that gives me courage to love and protect it. 

~ ~ ~

This call for essays about “deep beauty” could not come at a more important time. It is, I think, a call to look beneath or beyond exhaustion and devastation, to rediscover what gives freshness and value to our individual lives—not only for ourselves but so that we may be heartened to act energetically out of justice and compassion. It is a call to eschew the feeling of defeat. 

Once I watched a baby being born who did not breathe, who lay white and still on the little table where the nurses rushed to give her oxygen. Thankfully, after no more than a few seconds, she turned pink, moved, cried—and we who loved her so much could welcome her into the world of the living. But just briefly, I saw her there as if at the edge of a great forest, and I saw her slipping away from us into woods that stretched forever, that place of vanishing that we call death. I had lost my own first child forty years before. She floated dead in me for five days between Thanksgiving and the end of a bleak November, and is buried on a hill in California, at my father’s feet. When my own baby was born, I had no sense of vision—only brutal, unending grief. Seeing this baby, who had brushed against that infinity into which my child had gone, but who turned away toward life, healed something in me. In that room, there was awe, there was silence.

~ ~ ~

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. 

—William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”  

Come, my beautiful vulnerable people, tell me your story and I will tell you mine. 

We are so heavy-hearted, facing the loss of all that we hold dear. 

We schlep and groan, our feet hurt, our hips hurt, our ribs and necks and backs hurt, we’re only a 

few decades for this world.  

It’s disheartening, like a sink full of mud, the thought of pulling this carcass through one more 

day. 

And what, when the birds are gone? When the last spring peepers have cheeeeeeeee-ed in the 

marshy fields? 

But what if we started listening again to the voices that instruct us. Treat each other gently, love 

the earth and love each other. Wave your arms and spin with joy, like the angelic midges, for music streams from the leaves, hallelujahs in the sunlight, and you are wide-eyed, visionary, and the day like flame.

~ ~ ~

Lately I have been trying to take hold—and one way I have been doing it is to focus on my yard. I no longer think of Voltaire’s dictum at the end of Candide, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” as simply escapist or defeatist. Instead, I see it now as one way of making contact, sinking back into fruitful labor, finding and honoring the ground. 

In Mississippi in summer, bamboo, wisteria, and privet grow faster than you can say “jackrabbit”—and though it is still technically spring as I write this, global warming has given us an earlier, longer, hotter summer each year. I traveled a lot during the past few months, and the yard became completely neglected. By May, when my school year ended, the yard was a jungle and the raised bed garden in which I used to take such joy was a mass of dead soil, reeds, and weeds. I hired two graduate students to help me, and over the course of several mornings we licked it into shape, mowing, weeding, pruning the hedges, cutting back privet, untangling wisteria that twined up the Peace rose, hacking bamboo that grew eighteen inches a day, creating a pile of rubbish as high as my hips for the city to collect. Pruning the spirea enabled two spindly, blood-red rose bushes to bloom again. Weeding a couple of areas opened up room for the Japanese irises that I thought had been dead for years. Then my husband hauled compost and mulch, and I planted tomatoes, basil, hostas, ferns, impatiens, marigolds, dianthus—some for shade and some for sun. Who knows what will thrive, what will sicken, and what will feed the bugs and deer. Between ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, insidious poison ivy, and the heat that wrings you out, it’s hard to get outside and keep things in shape. But that’s okay. I putter around, trimming some wisteria here, pulling a vine there, wondering how to keep the rose leaves from blackening with fungus yet again. It centers me. It gets me out of my head. It’s my carnal meditation on birth and death and time. And it shows me how, when the heart and imagination are alive, beauty resides in every moment.

~ ~ ~

Once my husband and I wandered into the chapel of the Cistercian Abbey outside Fribourg, Switzerland, at Hauterive. We had happened upon this abbey on a five-hour get-lost walk during the year we lived in Switzerland, and every time we returned to visit we made the walk again. Usually the place was silent and we saw no one except a large friendly dog; we’d walk around the grounds for a few moments, then circle the outside of the walls, and start back up the mountain trail. This time, though—a hot June afternoon—the doors to the chapel were open, so we went inside and sat down alone in the profound darkness. As we rested from the heat, monks began to slip silently into the chancel one by one, soon becoming invisible behind the screen. Nothing happened. Then a voice rose in Gregorian plainsong. Other voices joined, rising and falling in the darkness for what seemed nearly an hour. Then, as silently as they’d come, they departed. And we departed—back out to the sun, the shaggy abbey dog, the mountain’s shadows over the river.

We never gathered the Japanese persimmons
ripening in the upper branches those long autumns

 
my mother and I lived alone. She liked
their red-orange opulence against the sky. 

For my nineteenth birthday you joined us
at Norman’s. The walls were hung with surreal nudes. 

We spooned our cream of chervil soup, the same
pale green as that bare haunch above her head. 

That night she came to my room: I think you’re sleeping
with him. The way you two looked at those pictures. . . 

I’m not, I protested. I couldn’t bring myself
to say, I want to but you told me not to. 

When you came by the next evening, under the tree
you stooped in the wet leaves and raised me 

on your shoulders. We were so young. The persimmons
hung just out of reach. Tightening my thighs 

around your neck, I strained up and loosened
the smooth fruit. One by one they dropped into my hand— 

chill, heavy-fleshed, burning in their thin silk slips. 

—Jennifer MacKenzie

This is a poem my sister wrote long ago about something that had happened still earlier, in 1967; it is a love poem for the man who became her husband. She published the poem and I read it at the time, but she pretty much stopped writing poetry not long thereafter. It captures that time so well—my mother’s kind but strait-laced anxiety, my sister’s dutifulness, the passion growing between a young man and woman who would be in love with each other for the next fifty-plus years.

My poem “Persimmons” is haunted by this poem just as my life is haunted by my sister. In April 2019, as my husband and I were en route to Greenwood, Mississippi, for a poetry event, my phone rang and in a tiny voice, my sister said, “It’s cancer.” She had had some bleeding, which seemed not to be a problem, but when it happened again, her doctor did further tests and discovered she had a Stage 4, rare, fast-growing uterine cancer. An immediate hysterectomy revealed that it had seeded throughout her abdomen. She began radiation and chemo under the supervision of a brilliant gynecological oncologist, then more chemo, then a more brutal chemo, but each time it failed to stop the progress of the disease. Finally, her oncologist did tests to see if there was any drug that would match her DNA. But there was none.

My sister and her husband Bruce lived outside St. Louis, and my husband and I live in Oxford, Mississippi, so I couldn’t see her every day. We drove up in May, they drove down between chemo bouts in July, and I went up in September. In May, she took the jewelry she had made out of their gauzy bags, laid it on her bedspread, and let me choose four stone and bead necklaces and a handful of delicate bead bracelets. In July, she and I lay on my bed and I wrapped my arms around her. She said, “I’m afraid.” And she—ever the lover of medieval literature—told me that “health” and “whole” have the same derivation, from the Old English hal. She said, “It’s not that I want to be well; I want to be whole.” We went to Magnolia Grove Monastery, opened by Thich Nhat Hanh outside Batesville, Mississippi, and walked among the shrines and trees. Everywhere, my sister was greeted with love by the nuns who, like her, had shaved their heads. In September, she slept most of the time. I stroked her feet. Her husband and I coaxed her to eat even a few bites of chicken noodle soup, half a pot gummy. The night before I left, we sat on their little white couch, my arm around her, and watched an episode of The Great British Baking Show. I took pictures of every room in their house, of her asleep, of her with Bruce—everything I could think of, to hold on to this time so desperately fleeting. As I bent to kiss her goodbye, she said, “Every time…every time…” and I knew it gave her joy to see me, to be my sister. Then she said, “One time will be the last time.” 

One week later, on October 1, 2019, she died. She is buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis; by chance, her grave is near persimmon trees.

* * *

A month after Jennifer’s death, I had the dream my poem “Persimmons” speaks of, when my sister came and walked with me.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Virchow at 200 and Lown at 100,” discusses the ways in which physicians Rudolf Virchow and Bernard Lown viewed physicians as compelled to “fill the leadership void and fulfill their roles as advocates for the sick and the poor,” in a world of “vast inequality in the distribution of wealth, racial and socioeconomic inequities in health and health care, catastrophic global dangers, and astounding failures of leadership” (292). The article’s authors, Salvatore Mangione, M.D., and Mark L. Tykocinski, M.D., state in the context of the Covid crisis, “We believe that indifference in times of challenge and controversy is akin to complicity,” and that “an essential competency of medical trainees should be advocacy and activism.”

What does poetry have to do with this?

As the poet/doctor William Carlos Williams said long ago, the calling for the poet is the same as that for the doctor: to diagnose and to heal. Not all poetry, of course, but an important body of poetry, seeks to examine “symptoms”—in the individual, in the social body—and thereby arrive at the sense of the un-ease, the “disease.” For instance, think of Titania’s speech to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as not just about two quarreling fairies, but about eco-disaster:

 . . . with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine-men’s-morris is fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here:
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown,
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original. (Act II, scene 1)

And what has led to this disaster? As symbolized by the quarrel between the king and queen of fairies, the rupture in social harmony has led to dis-ease in nature. What may heal this dis-ease? A recognition of suffering, and a return to love, harmony, natural magic?

Works cited:

Salvatore Mangione, M. D. and Mark L. Tykocinski, M. D., “Virchow at 200 and Lown at 100—Physicians as Activists.” New England Journal of Medicine 385;4, July 22, 2021.  

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, scene 1.

It has been a hard year and a half, beginning with my sister’s illness and death from cancer, and continuing through Covid, one of our children’s divorce, and my own worsening arthritis, which will take me to the hospital for a total hip replacement next week. But recently I have been realizing that this time has been not only hard and frightening, but also precious. I feel lucky to have had the chance to think a lot about death and the fragility of time. And lucky to have lived through these days, which have made me aware how much I love my life, my family, friends, teaching. Now that I’m in my 70’s, I am relatively more serene than I was in my earlier, more turbulent days—and though some of that is due to age (!), and a lot of it is due to the wisdom and support I receive from my husband and kids, a lot of it is also due to decades of yoga, meditation, and pranayama, or yogic techniques for breathing.

For years I taught Gentle Yoga at Southern Star Yoga Center in Oxford, Mississippi. For months recently, though, the studio was closed—and by the time it partially opened again, my hip had deteriorated to the point where I could no longer get up and down without lumbering and groaning, or do most of the poses—Sun Salutations, Eagle, Warrior, Tree, Lord of the Fishes, all the hip openers—that used to be so dear to me. So instead, I’ve started offering free yoga nidra sessions once a week by Zoom to anyone who wants them. We begin with about 20 minutes of simple stretches, poses, and some pranayama, and then, after each person silently sets an intention and finds a blessing to hold and to offer to those they love, we move into yoga nidra, which is deep relaxation, or waking sleep; it involves nothing more arduous than lying on your back with your eyes closed, and following a guided meditation, which ends with some time in Savasana, then the blessing of peace—Shantih—and finally the phrase that ends all yoga classes, Namaste.

Yoga nidra helps to alleviate stress and anxiety, which are so prevalent among us these days—but I have found it to be even more powerful, too. My sister died on October 1, 2019, after a five-month fight against a brutal uterine cancer that was only discovered when it had already spread through her abdomen. I had gone up to St. Louis to see her ten days earlier, and I knew it would be the last time; already, she was mostly unconscious. On September 29, I took a yoga nidra class at Southern Star that a friend was offering, and as I lay there at the beginning, I couldn’t stop sobbing, trying to be quiet, but completely devastated. Eventually, I passed out—that’s the only way I can say it—I entered a darkness deeper than sleep. And when at last I regained consciousness, I knew that I had found her, found my sister in that darkness, that place beyond identity, where though we do not know it, we are one. That was the only place I could find her any longer, but it was there, beneath all things, and while I am still part of time, that knowledge inexpressibly comforts me.

Until my retirement in 2022, I directed the Interdisciplinary Minor in Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi; I was also an English professor and a yoga teacher. One mandatory course for the minor is ENVS 101, Humanities and the Environment. When I taught it, it was actually as demanding as a 400-level class but listed at the 100 level so freshmen and sophomores could take it. In this class, we read a variety of books, which, in a given semester, might include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Lester R. Brown’s Full Planet, Empty Plates, David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen, Richard Power’s novel The Overstory, Thich Nhat Hanh’s The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, and excerpts from Pope Francis’ Encyclical, Laudato Si’. Students also kept nature journals and reading journals, attended talks and/or films, took part in Earth Day activities, completed and presented research projects, and participated in field trips. Some of the students had declared a minor in Environmental Studies, but the course was open to anyone. Some were majoring in the natural sciences, mostly biology—but we also had students with a wide variety of other majors, including public policy, art, history, international studies, English, psychology, and anthropology. Some began the class with a firm knowledge of environmental issues and the environmental crisis. However, Mississippi is a conservative state, and environmental education is not part of many schools’ general curricula. As a result, many Mississippians have little awareness of or interest in environmental issues, and that includes some students when they would begin the course. What was so rewarding is that they quickly became involved. Our class emphasized discussion, and by mid-semester, every one of the nineteen students was passionately engaged. Witnessing this engagement with a course called “Humanities and the Environment,” it occurred to me: What a perfect group to help me consider how the environmental humanities can confront the implications of our dire climate emergency. So, we took some time in class to talk about it.

Over one hundred years ago, the novelist Joseph Conrad (1953) wrote, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything” (107). And this, in general, is what my students cited as the power of the environmental humanities: to engage the senses, to make us more attentive to the world around us, to stimulate the heart and the imagination. “To a large population,” one biology major said, “sciences are meaningless without a story, an emotionally driven story, that is fact-based. By nature, science is devoid of sympathy. The humanities bring emotion and therefore empathy.” Another, also in biology, concurred. She harkened back to what Pope Francis (2015), in Laudato Si’, calls the “technocratic paradigm”—the dominant attitude in our culture that science can solve all problems and there can be a technological fix for everything. “The humanities supplement scientific understanding,” she said; “they incorporate questions of value, ethics, and history.” They present facts in a form that engages readers; whereas science gives statistics, “the humanities make instances real.” And because the instances are made real, people are made to care. 

One woman pointed out, though, that many people don’t care about the climate emergency, including plenty of students at the University of Mississippi. In Mississippi, President Trump easily won his bid for re-election, and carried the state, though now-President Biden won the election. It’s a Republican state, and one in which many elementary and high schools do not offer environmental education. Some public figures, of course, flatly refuse to accept the notion of climate change; they do not believe there’s any emergency. This ignorance of the issues is made possible by the fact that, in our technologically advanced first-world nation, until the coronavirus hit, we mostly were sheltered from environmental realities. Again and again, I have heard over the years, “The economy’s good.” Everything seems accessible, everything seems limitless. In my class, one student said, “Until now I didn’t even know what a food desert was. And I didn’t know that, growing up in the Mississippi Delta, I lived in one.”

“So then, why do you care?” I asked my class. “It’s in our nature to care,” one said— “To care for the self and those you love.” Another, who had traveled to China and India, expanded this: “I live a comfortable life in a wealthy nation but lots don’t, so it would be reprehensible not to care.” And another took it beyond the human: “Because this is the world I live in. There is an intrinsic, healing value in our relationship with the environment. And art that expresses that awareness enables us to know and experience it.” 

On my campus, outside the Student Union, there is a huge catalpa tree, other names for which are Shawnee wood, cigar tree, and bean tree. In herbal medicine, teas and poultices are made from the bark and leaves, and used for various ailments, thought the roots are highly toxic. The Southern catalpa, Catalpa bignonioides, which is what we have in Mississippi, has heart-shaped leaves, frothy white flowers, and long, slender seedpods. It can grow up to fifty feet tall, and its lifespan is said to be between fifty and one hundred fifty years.

I had seen and admired the tree on my campus for years. One day, passing by on my way to class, I heard a biology professor tell her students, who were standing around taking selfies with it, that it probably predated Columbus—that, instead of being possibly 150 years old, it was probably more than 500. Suddenly the tree, which I had loved, became truly numinous, and various bits of knowledge coalesced to become this prose poem:

Catalpa

This tree is older than Columbus. Ten years ago my honors students standing in a ring could barely get their arms around it. I took their picture—hands joined, cheeks against the rough wood. Mostly they loved it but one guy told my friend who supervised his lab, She made us hug a tree. It was the worst class ever.

When I think of the tree as a sapling, my mind enters a great quiet. Before the Depression, the yellow fever, before the burning of Oxford, before the University Greys left their classrooms for the battlefield and died or were wounded to a man at Pickett’s Charge, and before Princess Hoka of the Chickasaws set out with her people on the Trail of Tears, this tree sank its roots deep and deeper into the nurturing ground. Generations moved about beneath its boughs, spoke and loved and died as it grew. 

And here it is, still, in the clattering present.

Ten years ago I could walk around it, smell it, stroke the lichens on its bark. If I put my hand into the hollow in its trunk right near the ground, it was always cold, always comforting, no matter how brutal the summer, as if some dark, mysterious lungs kept serenely breathing.

Now fences surround it, stakes hold up its branches. No longer do art majors loll on the benches and smoke at the little table under its big-leaf shade. A sign warns NO CLIMBING: KEEP OFF. Still, every spring, wet tender leaves unfurl on branches jagged as broken bones, and the tree bursts out in a froth of white petals. 

And every spring, the preachers line the sidewalk near the tree, and thrust their Bibles as we pass by. Repent and be saved, they say. Turn or burn. I want to tell them, Turn around, turn around, and look at the tree.

I’d like to think that this prose poem offers an example of a fruitful relationship between science and environmental humanities. The tree never would have claimed my attention so dramatically had I not overheard the scientific remark about its age, which triggered my musings on time and history, all that the tree has seen and all the ways in which the ground it inhabits has been altered. But the tree would not claim your attention, whoever and wherever you are, if you did not have the prose poem. It lives, and lives anew in language. It is seen.

We humans are destroying the world. Anthropogenic change is causing what has come to be called the sixth mass extinction, in which, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Elizabeth Kolbert (2016) reports, “one third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion,” and the mass extinction rate for amphibians—“the most endangered class of animals” —may be “as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate” (17–18). The earth is in a state of what, in a private conversation, the activist and writer Janisse Ray described to me as “global climate disruption,” with abnormal and unstable weather patterns, including violent storms. NASA reports that 2016 was the hottest year on record, followed by 2019, and The Guardian reports that this past July was the hottest month reported globally for the past 150 years. Aquifers are being depleted; rivers are running dry; desertification is spreading; clearcutting, including the clearcutting of rainforests, proceeds, with the consequent release of enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; air is polluted; water is polluted; ocean dead zones are expanding; and the list goes on and on. Crop yields decrease as temperatures rise; as GeoEngineering and other sources report, photosynthesis stops at 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The consequences for human suffering are enormous. The World Health Organization reports that worldwide, around a billion people lack access to an improved water source, and 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation [https://www.who.int/heli/risks/water/water/en/]

As many as 25,000 people die from hunger every day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; that adds up to around 9.1 million people a year. Over 3 million children die of hunger and undernutrition (which makes children more vulnerable to illness) every year. 

It seems to me that the environmental arts and humanities play two major roles in confronting the implications of this. The first is simply that they enable us to articulate anxiety, shock, and sorrow. “Solastalgia,” a neologism coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2007), combines the words “solace” and “nostalgia,” and refers to the existential anguish felt at the knowledge of the loss and suffering caused by climate change. Much work being done in the arts these days is solastalgic—and this expression of grief is important, both in itself, and because such a “timely utterance,” in Wordsworth’s phrase, can give our thoughts “relief” and enable us once more to become “strong”. And despair leads only to inaction. Second, environmental arts and humanities engage with living beings, not just statistics. Toward the end of Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1854; 2004) writes of listening to a bird, “O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig” (254) And because of the passionate specificity of this image, the bird and its song are alive for us 170 years later. 

“Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out,” write the authors of the article “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” (Ripple et al. 2020, 1028) “We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home.” (1028) When we stop denying the reality of ecological death, and when we become aware of the beauty and meaningfulness of earth and all its creatures, they reveal themselves as unutterably precious. Gus Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has said, 

I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. [Interview with Steve Curwood]

But the environmental arts and humanities do.

—

References

Albrecht, Glenn, Gina-Maree Sartore, Linda Connor, Nick Higginbotham, Sonia Freeman, Brian Kelly, Helen Stain, et al. 2007. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australas Psychiatry 15, no 1 (February): 95–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288. 

Brown, Lester R. 2012. Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity. New York: W.W. Norton.

Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Conrad, Joseph. 1953. Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. In Joseph Conrad: Tales of Land and Sea. Garden City, New York: Hanover House.

Fisher-Wirth, Ann. “Catalpa.” In Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023).

Francis. 2015. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

Haskell, David George. 2012. The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature New York: Viking.

Kenyon, Georgina. 2015. “Have You Ever Felt ‘Solastalgia’?” BBC, November 2. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151030-have-you-ever-felt-solastalgia

Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2016. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt.

Lynn, Audrey. “The Average Age of a Flowering Catalpa.” SFGate. https://homeguides.sfgate.com/average-age-flowering-catalpa-87247.html

Nhat Hanh, Thich. 2004. The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology. Berkeley: Parallax Press.

Power, Richards. 2018. The Overstory. New York: W. W. Norton.

Ripple, William J., Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Mauro Galetti, Mohammed Alamgir, Eileen Crist, Mahmoud I. Mahmoud, and William F. Laurance. 2017. “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.” BioScience 67, no. 12 (December): 1026–28.

Speth, Gus. 2015. “‘We Scientists Don’t Know How to Do That’ . . . What a Commentary!” Interview by Steve Curwood. WineWaterWatch, February 13, 2015. Audio, 14:28. https://winewaterwatch.org/2016/05/we-scientists-dont-know-how-to-do-that-what-a-commentary/

Thoreau, Henry David. (1854) 2004.  Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Reprint, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Citations refer to Houghton Mifflin edition.

Click here to view.