Environmental Literature, Arts, & Media: Environmental Studies 165 CRN 14236 Spring 2021 Course Syllabus
Environmental Literature, Arts, & Media: Environmental Studies 165 CRN 14236 Spring 2021 Course Syllabus
Environmental Literature, Arts, & Media: Environmental Studies 165 CRN 14236 Spring 2021 Course Syllabus
ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE,
ARTS, & MEDIA
COURSE OBJECTIVES
1. Students will gain exposure to creative work and key themes and debates in the environmental arts and
humanities, including environmentally themed literature, visual art, music, and film and media
production.
2. Students will be introduced to conceptual and analytical tools for understanding contemporary cultural
practices through an ecocritical lens, as these are found within such fields as environmental
communication, environmental cultural and media studies, ecocritical literary studies, ecomusicology,
ecomedia studies, and environmental humanities writ large; and will be given opportunities to use these
tools in analyses of representations of humans and nature, experiences intended and elicited, and
materiality in the production of creative and communicative works of art and literature.
3. Students will gain experience in personally and/or collectively engaging the creative process to produce a
work of eco-art, literature, music, or media, to be shared with others and in the UVM community.
TEXTS
1. Most required readings will be made available electronically via Blackboard. Please stay up-to-date with these
readings by checking the Blackboard course page regularly.
2. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2012). This will be our key theoretical text in the course. It
is strongly recommended that you have your own copy of the 2012 edition, which should be available at the UVM
Bookstore, on library reserve, and from online booksellers.
3. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke U. Press, 2020). We will read this later in the course.
4. Recommended, not required: Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco-Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Univ. of
California Press, 2013). See also the author’s web site, http://lindaweintraub.com/ and esp. /teaching-
guides/20th-century-ecoart-pioneers and /teaching-guides/21st-century-ecoart-explorers. While we will be
consulting this work, only a small proportion of it will be required reading and those sections will be made
available online. Artist-specific sections will be recommended for specific topics in the course. The book will
also be available on 2-hour reserve at Bailey Howe Library.
5. EXTRA CREDIT (up to 1 pt. per review, for a maximum of 3 pts.; these are added to your class grade out of
100)
You may attend extracurricular events and speakers related to environmental literature/arts/media topics or
view related videos for extra credit. These may be announced over the course of the semester. For unannounced
events, please clear it with me first and then write up a 1.5 to 2 single-spaced page paper summarizing (a) what
the event was about (one page), and (b) your critical response to it (one page).
TOPIC READINGS for this topic (introduced this week ASSIGNMENTS &
and to be discussed in class the following week) ACTIVITIES
Feb 2
Introduction to the 1. Ivakhiv (with Abatemarco), “Introduction,” 1-minute place/identity talk
Environmental Humanities, from Ecocritique Across the Arts (accompanied by one image,
Eco-Arts, & Eco-Critique 2. Garrard, Ecocriticism, ch. 1-2 to be shared on BB)
Introduction to the ERM
(Experience-Materiality-
Representation) triad
Student introductions
Feb 9 1. Whitman, “I think I could turn and live with Reading response 1
Theme #1: ANIMACY animals”
2. Killingsworth, “‘As if the beasts spoke’: The Artist profile
Life Force, Instinct,
animal/animist/animated Walt Whitman” ideas/suggestions
Elementality, Animality,
Metamorphosis, the Hunt 3. Plumwood, “Being Prey”
4. Garrard, Ecocriticism, ch. 7
5. Poems by Ross Gay and others; details TBA.
Feb 16 1. Merchant, “Eve as Nature”
Theme #2: GROUND 2. Roach, “Loving Your Mother” Reading response 2
Roots, Fertility, Mother 3. Griffin, “Woman and Nature”
4. “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Artist Profile proposal due
Earth, Land, Tree of Life,
Earth” on Fri. Feb. 19
Women/Weaving
5. Rogers, “Knot”
Mar 2 No class
Town Meeting Day Recess
Apr 6 1. Weintraub, To Life!: pp. 5-16 (“Eco Art Is,” “Eco Reading response 8
Visual Art, Film/Media, & Art Is Not”), 43-50 (“Eco Art Materials”)
Artist profile presentations
Ecology 2. Katherine Brooks, “18 Green Artists”
3. Ingram, “Melodrama, Realism, and
Environmental Crisis”
Student presentations
4. Ivakhiv, “What Can A Film Do”
4. RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS
UVM supports students’ active involvement in their religious/faith communities. Students wishing to be excused from
class participation during their religious holidays should submit a documented list of such holidays by the end of the
second week of classes.
6. CONTACTING ME
The best way to get in touch with me is by e-mail (aivakhiv@uvm.edu), with a clear and obvious subject line. If you don’t
hear back by the next day, it probably means means your message has sunk to the bottom of a deep barrel, so please send a
follow-up email with a clear indication (“following up,” “2nd attempt,” etc.) in the subject line. I get hundreds of emails a
day pertaining to multiple classes, research projects, committees, journals, listservs, et al., and on some days I cannot sort
through them adequately. If something is urgent, please include “URGENT” in the subject line. Please include all relevant
information in the email message, such as anything from past emails that you want me to be aware of when I respond.
You could also try contacting me through Teams. During the pandemic I am not regularly visiting my campus office or
retrieving messages from my office phone.
It is anticipated that this class will also have an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, who will be available to answer
questioons; contact info will be provided.
7. OTHER RESOURCES
• UVM policy on academic integrity: http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmppg/ppg/student/acadintegrity.pdf
• Grade appeals: http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmppg/ppg/student/gradeappeals.pdf
• Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities: www.uvm.edu/~uvmppg/ppg/student/studentcode.pdf
• FERPA Rights Disclosure (student records privacy rights): http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmppg/ppg/student/ferpa.pdf
• UVM policy on disability certification & student support: www.uvm.edu/~uvmppg/ppg/student/disability.pdf
• Center for Health and Wellbeing: http://www.uvm.edu/~chwb/
• Counseling & Psychiatry Services (CAPS): (802) 656-3340
Note: If you are concerned about a UVM community member or are concerned about a specific event, we encourage you
to contact the Dean of Students Office (802-656-3380). If you would like to remain anonymous, you can report your
concerns online by visiting the Dean of Students website at http://www.uvm.edu/~dos/
For other policies, see www.uvm.edu/academics/catalogue and click on Policies (A-Z).
APPENDIX A: THE SEVEN THEMATIC CLUSTERS
Many powerful themes can be found in environmental literature and the eco-arts, today and in the past. Organizing
them into a small number of thematic clusters can help us to make sense of that multiplicity, but also to identify
relations between them, to understand how they have changed due to critiques emerging within environmental
movements and outside of them, and to identify how they work today upon multiple audiences.
Each of these themes has been the focus of intense critical debate. For instance, is the assumption that women are
closer to nature than men—as proposed in many forms of eco-maternalist thought (focused on the Mother Nature
trope; see theme #2)—a progressive and useful notion, or is it regressive, bound to fail in a world where women and
men can hardly revert to “traditional” roles? Can apocalyptic ideas about the ecological future (theme #5) empower
people to change things, or do they just leave us feeling helpless? Is it helpful to blame others as being responsible
for the ecological crisis, as many eco-protest movements do (theme #6), or does that simply divide humanity into
conflicting groups? More generally, what are the more fruitful ways today of engaging with these powerful
metaphors: mother Earth, sublime nature, pollution as sin, and so on?
We will deal with these seven thematic clusters in sequence over the semester, but you should familiarize yourself
with them in advance in order to inform our discussions in class and to help you decide on your class presentation,
project, and analysis topics. We will look at “traditional” or “classical” variants of each of these tropes, and explore
the many “revisionist” forms they have taken, especially in recent times. We will also look at each of them through
the three perspectives introduced in the first class: those of experience (how they are directly experienced—
viscerally, affectively, and emotionally), materiality (how they are materially shaped and enacted and how they in
turn affect the material world), and representation (how they contribute to the world of meanings of their
audiences, viewers, and participants).
The following is a working “map” of these thematic clusters, illustrating some relationships between them. You can
think of them as a “tree” of themes that extends from the ground (the past, “ancestrality”) upward (to the future).
Whaat follows is a break-down of sub-themes, with examples of ideas, artists/artworks, and writings. (Those
indicated in bold will be referred to or read in class; “Weintraub” refers to the Linda Weintraub book To Life!)
1. ANIMACY
(a) Life Force, Instinct, Drive, Elementality:
Artistic depictions of animals extend back to the Paleolithic. Interpretations of ancient cave art typically focus on the
importance of the hunt in hunter-gatherer lifeways, but are peppered with speculation on “shamanic” modes of
consciousness and perceptions of life force, energy, mana, Wakan, Orenda, and the like. Elemental markings are also a
feature of art influenced by theories of more primitive modes of thought, unconscious instinctuality (as in the Surrealism
of Max Ernst, Joao Miro, Salvador Dali, and others), and the desire to return to the pure expression of fundamentals, as in
the works of Symbolists, the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and the land and earth art of Robert Smithson (“Spiral Jetty”),
Nancy Holt, Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, and Chris Drury. In less restrained forms, such markings become the
artistic free-for-all of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, ecstatic expression within jazz, rock, and musical free
improvisation (late John Coltrane, the AACM, Magma, Circle X), the films of Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, the
Burning Man Festival, and the energy philosophy of Georges Bataille. In more circumscribed forms, they become
references to natural process—as in minimalist music and process-based art.
(b) Animality, Predation, Metamorphosis, Darwinism, Hunting:
Hybrid relations between humans and animals traceable to age-old folk tales, mythic narratives (as that of the Australian
Dreamtime), classical myths and divine pantheons, medieval bestiaries, and other narratives of metamorphosis infuse
baroque art forms, Art Nouveau, and literary and cinematic forms of “magic realism” in South America, Africa,
Australia, and Eastern Europe. In the scientific era, Darwinian struggle-for-life narratives have shaped environmental
discourse profoundly, infusing racist and imperial narratives and biological determinisms, but also the many genres of
scientific nature writing and eco-poetry, from H. D. Thoreau to Robinson Jeffers. The meaning of the animal, as John
Berger and others have argued, changes over time in direct relation to the forms of encounter and relationship with
animals extant within a human social order. Even as philosophers like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Carol Adams argue
for blurring the ethical line between humans and animals, genetic engineering threatens to dissolve boundaries in more
radical ways.
READING:
Weintraub, To Life!: Joseph Beuys, Andy Goldsworthy, Tomas Saraceno, Simon Starling
Others: John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”; Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871);
Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”; Susan Griffin, “The Hunt”; Stephen Harrigan, “Swamp Thing”; Hay Hosler, Clan
Apis (2013); D. H. Lawrence, “Snake,” “Fish”; Gretchen Legler, “Wolf”; Les Murray, “Presence,” “Migratory,” “Shoal”;
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974); Richard K. Nelson, “The Gifts”; Nivakle, “The Jaguar and the
Hunt”; Catherine Puckett, “Beauty and the Beast”; David Rothenberg, “Making music with birds and whales”; Val
Plumwood, “Being prey”; Thomas Seeley, “Swarm as Cognitive Entity” (2010); Gary Snyder, “Migration of Birds, April
1956”; Desmond Stewart, “The Limits of Trooghaft”; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”; Charles Wright, “A blessing”;
Richard White, “Salmon” (1995)
VIEWING: Bambi (Disney Studios); Princess Mononoke (H. Miyazaki); Garden of Earthly Delights (S. Brakhage); Grizzly
Man (W. Herzog); Zoo (R. Devor); The Red Black and Green Revolutionary EcoMusic Tour (video)
LISTENING: Devendra Banhart, “Little Yellow Spider”; Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz (1961); Paul Winter, “Wolf Eyes,”
Whales Alive (1993); David Rothenberg, Sudden Music (2002); Art Ensemble of Chicago; Pauline Oliveros
2. GROUND
(a) Soil, Bedrock, Mother Earth, Gaia:
The Mother Earth trope is so prevalent as to be unquestioned, yet it has a history that relates concepts of nature to social
constructs of gender, sexuality, activity/passivity, divinity, exploration, conquest, madness, and utopia. Depictions of
landscape as maternal extend back to deep antiquity, but find a particular resonance in periods when women’s voices are
being reclaimed against an industrial order perceived to be patriarchal and masculinist. References to maternal earth
deities are found around the world, from the Russian Mat’ Syra Zemlya (literally, “moist mother earth”) to the Aymara
and Quechua Pachamama (“World Mother”) to ecopolitical invocations of Mother Earth as in the 2010 Cochabamba
Declaration on the Rights of Mother Nature. Theories of ancient “Goddess civilization” were revived in the 1970s and
1980s by Gimbutas, Eisler, Starhawk, and others; and the Gaia hypothesis, with its mix of scientific theory, ancient
mythology, and popular ecological spirituality, has provided further fuel for depicting (and contesting) nature as female.
(b) Fertility, Verdancy, Flourishing, Tree of Life:
At what point does a flower, tree, vine, or seashell become an object of aesthetic appreciation or artistic craft? Vegetative
forms inform age-old traditions of domestic decoration, clothing design, and embroidery; later they appear intermingled
with human figures in religious sculpture and iconography, from gargoyles and “green men” to the Hermetic and
Kabbalistic “trees of life,” to Baroque and Art Nouveau forms.
(c) Women’s Art, Women’s Work, Weaving, Healing:
With work by Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keefe, and others as precursors, the women’s art movement of the past half-
century—including the body art of Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Mary Beth Edelson, and Betsy Damon, the
“Sanitation Art Manifesto” of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” and the varied feminist
literary interventions of Margaret Atwood, Susan Griffin, Ursula LeGuin, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, and Donna
Haraway—reveals a diverse set of options for rethinking gender stereotypes while revaluing qualities traditionally
associated with women and nature.
READING:
Weintraub: Carolee Schneemann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Gelitin, Red Earth, Lily Yeh
Others: Lorraine Anderson, ed., Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Prose and Poetry About Nature; Margaret Atwood, Surfacing,
The Handmaid’s Tale; Sam Gill, Mother Earth: An American Story; Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature; Annette Kolodny, The
Land Before Her; Ursula LeGuin, Always Coming Home; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature
VIEWING: Full Circle (Dir. Donna Read, 1989)
LISTENING: Bjork, Biophilia; Pauline Oliveros
3. HARMONY
(a) Pastoral, Arcadia, Idyll, Beauty, Utopia, Balance of Nature:
From the classical Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil to the romantic pastorals of Wordsworth,
Clare, and Thoreau, to the long tradition of idyllic, arcadian, and pastoral references in music and the visual arts (such as
Beethoven’s and Brahms’s “pastoral symphonies”), pastoral tropes have been central to civilized—especially urban—
humanity’s understandings of nature and our relationship to it. In their connections to ideas of nature, these tropes
suggest that beauty itself is natural (inherent and biological) and that the only culture appropriate to it is one that dwells
in harmony with it. Critical observers have asked whether this natural harmony might not be a cultural invention; this
deconstructive urge has been pushed to the fullest in poststructuralist cultural critique. More complex forms of “neo-
pastoral,” “post-pastoral,” and “critical pastoral” can be found in the speculative, futuristic, and queer literary (or
cinematic) pastoral works of Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Ernest Callenbach (Ecotopia), Kim Stanley Robinson
(the Mars trilogy), and Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain).
(b) Rootedness, Locality, Rurality, Nation, Buen Vivir:
Pastoralism has come variously adumbrated with nationalism, rural escapism, and political resistance, in the romantic
nationalism of Sibelius, Chopin, Smetana, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams; the national gardening traditions of England,
France, and Japan; communalist, back-to-the-land, and Garden Cities movements in architecture and design; and the live-
lightly ethics of Wendell Berry, with their resonance in latter-day “slow food” and “locavore” movements. Folk, country,
“roots,” and “traditional” musics of many kinds have long served as battlegrounds for rival visions of “small town” or
“down home” rurality: from the proletarian anthems of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to the patriotic songs of Merle
Haggard, Charlie Daniels, and Toby Keith; and from the sunny (if psychedelic) rurality of John Denver, the Byrds, the
Incredible String Band, and the Grateful Dead, to the darker, more gothic byways of American and British folk, such as
the “Basement Tapes” of Bob Dylan and The Band; the songs of Shirley Collins, Fairport Convention, and films like The
Wicker Man; and later hybrids of “acid folk,” “psych folk,” “dark folk,” and “freak folk.” Similar struggles have obtained
in other national contexts, where the “good life” (or Buen Vivir, in Spanish) might be a progressive socio-ecological
movement among marginalized classes or, contrarily, a cultural conservatism that would close borders to foreigners and
reclaim the “soil” for the land’s “true” natives.
(c) Natural Health, Religion of Nature, Healthy Environments, Going Native, the Ecological Indian:
Ideas of nature’s healing properties continue to inform American and European traditions of outdoor sport, scouting,
“physical religion,” perceptions of indigenous practices, and environmental thought from Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir to
their latter-day descendants. Quests for harmony have flirted with exotic and escapist fantasies of Otherness—sought in
indigenous cultures (as in the widespread phenomenon of “playing Indian,” or Native cultural appropriation) as well as
cultures of the “orientalized” East—but have also been cultivated by specific non-western cultures (as in the Japanese Zen
arts of gardening, calligraphy, and archery) and in recent movements of restorative landscape art, New Age music, the
soundscape education of R. Murray Schafer, and the “no child left inside” ethic of outdoor educators. The trope of
“healing,” “restoring,” or “mending the earth” is also expressed in artistic efforts connected to themes of
maternity/fertility, as in the work of women artists like Mary Beth Edelson; pastoral harmony, as in the restoration and
reclamation art of Patricia Johansen, Jackie Brookner, and others; and apocalypse, as in the work of Robert and Shana
ParkeHarrison.
READING:
Weintraub: Goldsworthy.
Others: Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia; Phil Deloria, Playing Indian; Joan Didion, “On going home”; Gretel Ehrlich, “The
Solace of Open Spaces”; Stephen Halpern, Sound Health: The Music and Sounds that Make Us Whole; Linda Hogan, “What
holds the water, what holds the light”; bell hooks, “Touching the earth”; Ursula LeGuin, Always Coming Home; N. Scott
Momaday, “Sacred and ancestral ground”; Joyce Carol Oates, “Against nature”; Mary Oliver, “The Honey Tree”; Paul
Roquet, “Ambient Landscapes from Brian Eno to Tetsu Inoue”; Scott Russell Sanders, “On settling down”; Henry David
Thoreau, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”; William Wordsworth, “Michael,” “Poems on the Naming of Places,”
“Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”; R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (1975)
VIEWING: An Inconvenient Truth (D. Guggenheim, 2005); Daughters of the Dust (J. Dash, 1991); Days of Heaven (T.
Malick, 1978)
LISTENING: Pete Seeger, (anything); Woody Guthrie, (anything); Incredible String Band, The Hangman’s Beautiful
Daughter (1968); Grateful Dead, “Dark Star”; a lot of songs by Neil Young, Van Morrison, and other folk/couontry
rockers; Steve Roach, Structures from Silence (1984); Brian Eno and Harold Budd, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980)
4. CRISIS
(a) Pollution, Corruption, Sin, Degeneracy, Monstrosity, Disorder: Awareness of pollution—perhaps the primary impetus
for environmental consciousness—shares qualities with age-old calls for moral regeneration from sinfulness and iniquity.
Tropes of dirt, waste, toxicity, and abjection are the reverse side of those of purity, stability, harmony, and the “rooted”
integrity of “blood and soil” (see Theme #3). Fear of pollution and impurity also marks the modern concern for
Promethean overshoot, evident in novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and resonant in more recent critiques of genetic
modification and nuclear mutation. In contrast to these, artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Vic Nunez, and recycled or
second-hand artists and filmmakers (like Agnes Varda in The Gleaners and I) have sought to dignify the work of trash
collection and clean-up so as to make visible their increasing urgency.
(b) Collapse, Entropy, Decline, Ruins, Gothic, Apocalypse: Apocalyptic themes have arisen for millennia, taking religious
guises among subaltern groups and secular ones among political revolutionaries. Dystopian tropes have shaped
environmental discourse since Malthus’s projections of overpopulation, a theme taken up by neo-Malthusians like Paul
Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin and by Transition Town activists and “peak oil” survivalists, as well as in the popular
environmental writings of Fairfield Osborn, Rachel Carson, the Club of Rome, and others. Imagery of urban decay and
environmental pollution characterize representations of industrialism in genres from social realist novels to science
fiction, vampire and zombie films, industrial music, and global warming themed media art (such as Marina Zurkow’s
videos of a flooded world). Imagery of death and extinction mixes with tropes of vitality in hybrid forms including
Gothic novels and music, the “inhumanist” poetry of Robinson Jeffers, and the “apocalyptic folk” of underground
musicians like Current 93. Post-apocalyptic narratives are prominently expressed in science-fiction depictions of
ecological collapse (as in John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up), and theorized in terms of their potential for recalibrating
societal responses to current trends.
READING:
Weintraub: Ant Farm, HeHe, Maya Lin, Tavares Strachan, Marina Zurkow
Others: Sherman Alexie, “The Powwow at the End of the World,” “Sonnet, Without Salmon”; Margaret Atwood, “Time
Capsule Found on the Dead Planet”, Oryx and Crake; Mike Davis, “The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster”; Lance
Duerfahrd, “A Scale that Exceeds Us: The BP Gulf Spill Footage and Photographs of Edward Burtynsky”; Ray Gonzalez,
“Hazardous Cargo”; Kim Hammond, “Monsters of Modernity: Frankenstein and Modern Environmentalism”; John Opie
and Norbert Elliot, “Tracking the Elusive Jeremiad: The Rhetorical Character of American Environmental Discourse”;
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Percy B. Shelley, “Ozymandias”; Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; Patricia Smith,
Blood Dazzler (2008); Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic”; Joel Weisman, The World Without Us
VIEWING: Soylent Green, Silent Running, apocalyptic video mash-ups; WALL-E; Lessons of Darkness (W. Herzog, 1991);
Chris Jordan photo series “Midway: Message from the Gyre” (2009-present), Trouble the Water (dir. Tia Lessin, Carl Deal,
2008), Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (dir. Michael Madsen, 2010), Darwin’s Nightmare, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Slurb
(dir. Marina Zurkow); Pumzi (2010 Kenyan short film); Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, The Architect’s Brother; The Waste
Land (dir. L. Walker, 2010); The Gleaners and I (dir. A. Varda, 1999)
LISTENING: Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970); Marvin Gaye, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and title song,
What’s Going On? (1971); Gorillaz, Plastic Beach (2010); Steel Pulse, “Global Warming” (2010); Current 93, “”Black Ships
Ate the Sky (2006); Wolves in the Throne Room; doom metal/black metal
5. PROTEST
(a) Witnessing, Estrangement, Irony, Jeremiad, Confrontation: Associated initially with the apocalyptic, protest
movements from the Diggers and Ranters of early modern England to today’s eco-activists have cultivated modes of
speaking and writing that mix jeremiadic conventions of “truth telling” with direct, stubborn, and sometimes silent
physical presence to publicly witness and shame environmental wrongdoers. Since the 1960s, activists led by Greenpeace
have added media tools, from cameras to smart phones, while tactical media campaigners and “culture jammers” like the
Critical Art Ensemble, the Yes Men, and Rev. Billy Talen’s Church of Stop Shopping question the culture of
consumerism as culpable for environmental deterioration and social injustice. Tropes of justice link with narratives of
diversity and indigenous resistance in today’s environmental and climate justice movements (like Canada’s Idle No
More), and in animal rights/liberation discourses.
(b) Heroism, Resistance, Renewal, Resurgence, Reclamation: Perhaps the most popular form of cinematic eco-narrative is
one that pits environmentalist heroes against maleficent villains, which may include corporations, governments, or other
wrongdoers—a rhetoric of “us and them” found in countless fictional as well as documentary dramatizations of
environmental activism, from The Lorax to Silkwood, The China Syndrome, and The Cove. The symbology of environmental
activism covers a broad range, from the “monkeywrenching” and shadowy “ecotage” of Earth First! and the Earth
Liberation Front to the quieter subversion of the “guerilla gardening” movement to the festival-like marches and
gatherings marking Earth Day in its several incarnations since 1970. Rather than outright revolution, however,
environmentalism more commonly opts for some sort of transformation: a reclamation of what had been sacrificed, a
restoration through “re-rooting” in the land, and a regeneration from the ground up. In its most individualized form, this
becomes the lone eco-hero, as in No Impact Man; in its more mythical form, it becomes the hero-as-everyman, as in the art
of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison; and in its collective form, it is the Earth renewing itself through a groundswell of
ecologically awakened humanity.
READING:
Weintraub: Joseph Beuys, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Beehive Design Collective, Critical Art Ensemble, Mel Chin, Marjetica
Potrc, Michael Mandiberg, SUPERFLEX, Reverend Billy Talen
Others: Andrew Boyd, ed., Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Blasted Landscapes (and
the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking)”; Gabriella Giannachi, “Exposing Globalisation: Biopolitics in the Work of
Critical Art Ensemble”; Naomi Klein, “Blockadia”; Yates McKee, “Art After Occupy: Climate Justice, BDS, and
Beyond”; “The People’s Agreement of Cochabamba” (2010); Politika, “Art and Activism in the Age of the Anthropocene”;
Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Avant Gardening”
VIEWING: Nuage vert (dir. Evans and Hansen); Earthlings (dr. S. Monon, 2005); Streetlight Manifesto, “Would You Be
Impressed?” (2007)
LISTENING: Captain Beefheart, “Frownland”; Mos Def, “New World Water” (1999); Michael Franti; Grind for the
Green (G4G); Chumbawamba; punk rock
6. SYSTEM
(a) Conservation, Management, Preservation, Documentation, Exhibition, Database, Mapping: Images of the Earth from
space shape the iconography of popular environmentalism. Their predecessors can be traced to imperial traditions of
documentation, encyclopedism, colonial rule, and the “exhibitionary complex,” alongside related fields of holistic ecology,
scientific systems theories, and organismic and cybernetic notions of biospheric self-organization. Following the urge to
measure, document, and assess, technocratic environmentalists like Buckminster Fuller and the Worldwatch Institute
have striven to eliminate inefficiencies so as to “redesign” human relations with nature—a desire that underpins recent
movements toward sustainability in the arts, such as carbon accounting. Postmodern artists like Mark Dion playfully
continue such traditions to subvert their premises (that we can know everything), while furthering the archaeological
impulse to dig, discover, and order that which is found in the “archaeology” of the contemporary world.
The urge to document is also related to the urge to “bear witness” (see theme #6) and render visible that which would
otherwise be silent or unexposed. There are, in this sense, two sides to documentation: a top-down “panoptic” (all-seeing)
mode which controls the (literal and figural) movement of subaltern or nomadic subjects, and a bottom-up “reverse
panopticism” that “speaks back to power” through hand-held cameras, smart phones, and social media networks. The
desire to document, preserve, and protect disappearing species, landscapes, cultures, and experiences has informed the
conservation movement for centuries, from imperial (ancient China, colonial Europe) to modern times. It continues to
inform the efforts of the Nature Conservancy, the World World Fund for Nature, Cultural Survival, UNESCO (with its
World Heritage sites and biosphere reserves), and many movements in the arts and humanities, including R. Murray
Schafer’s World Soundscape Project; the work of ethnomusicologists and world music and soundscape recordists; the
database visualizations of artists like Maya Lin (“What is Missing?”) and Helen and Newton Mayer Harrison; and, more
obliquely (and often ironically), the “appropriation art” of found-footage filmmakers and sonic remixers (such as Bruce
Connor, Negativland, and DJ Spooky).
(b) Cosmic Order, Whole Earth, Globality, Whole Systems, Spaceship Earth: The popular cachet of globality, however,
has less to do with either efficiency or politics and more with spectacle: images of the Whole Earth, simulated recreations
of biospheres (as in Biosphere 2 and The Eden Project), and projections of rainforest loss and climate calamity provide for
an “environmental theater” that conjures the proximity of humans with each other and with potential catastrophe. In this
sense, the predecessors of the global database are visual depictions of universality, from the medieval Great Chain of
Being to the early modern classsification systems of Linnaeus and their alter-cultural counterparts. Opposed to the
pastoral arcadia of “future primitive” ecotopians (see theme 3) are the more technotopian forms of Spaceship Earth
discourse: these include the restraint-focused neo-Malthusianism of Kenneth Boulding, Garrett Hardin, and others
(popular in the 1970s), and the “ecomodernism” of the Breakthrough Institute, whose New Jerusalem would harmonize
science with nature through technologies of bio-engineering, biomimicry, an information-rich global systems ecology, and
nested forms of liberal governance spanning from bioregional to global scales.
READING:
Weintraub: Hans Haacke, Helen & Newton Harrison, Natalie Jeremijenko, Maya Lin
Others: Tobias Boes, “Beyond Whole Earth: Planetary Mediation and the Anthropocene”; Denis Cosgrove, “Contested
Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs”; Thomas Lekan, “Fractal Eaarth:
Visualizing the Global Environment in the Anthropocene”; R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (1975); John Seed
and Joanna Macy, “Gaia meditations”; Kendall Wrightson, “An introduction to acoustic ecology”
VIEWING: Maya Lin, “What is Missing?”, Center for Land Use Interpretation (various videos)
LISTENING: Mickey Hart, Planet Drum (1991); Jon Hassell and Brian Eno, Possible Musics: Fourth World, Vol. 1 (1980);
David Dunn; Annea Lockwood, A Sound Map of the Hudson River
7. SUBLIME
(b) Wilderness—as Threat, as Domain, and as Spectacle: From being seen as a place of chaos and exile (as far back in
history as the Gilgamesh Epic), the forested wilderness came to be seen, through Romantic eyes, as a place of sublimity,
sacredness, and awe—a theme taken up eagerly by American landscape artists, writers, and photographers from Thomas
Cole and the Hudson River School to John Muir and Ansel Adams. The “magisterial gaze” of the late nineteenth century
offers up wilderness as a landscape of discovery, identity formation, and national accomplishment. Revisionist historians
like William Cronon have questioned the virtues of the wilderness trope or found it to be more ambivalent and
multifaceted, appearing in diverse guises from folktale “otherworlds” and heroic mountaineering ventures to eco-horror
films. It nevertheless shapes debates about “saving nature” or finding redemption in nature that inform movements in the
arts such as the ritualistic “holy theater” of Jerzy Grotowski and Gardzienice, and the “ironic sublime” of artist Anselm
Kiefer and filmmaker Werner Herzog. Defenders of wilderness continue to express fears that wilderness has or will be
tamed, debased, “emasculated,” or transformed into the merely picturesque and thus commodified (as in the scenic vistas
built into the National Park highway driving experience).
(a) Epiphany, Vision, Revelation, Enchantment: The moment of seeing—seeing something new, seeing anew, seeing into
the heart of things beyond appearances or mundane concerns, witnessing reality at its most pure and naked—weaves its
way through art and literature concerned with land, new vistas, and new understandings of nature, humanity, and the
cosmos. It underlies the impulse to break out of the confines of tamed and commodified life. Writers and poets from
Henry Thoreau (“Ktaadn”) to Robinson Jeffers, Jack Kerouac, Annie Dillard, and Charles Wright have attempted to
recreate such visionary moments; photographers such as Ansel Adams and filmmakers like Stan Brakhage have arguably
captured them; and composers and improvisational performers, from John Cage and Merce Cunningham to Keith Jarrett
and Evan Parker, have variously tried to produce such moments through live performances open to the workings of chance
and spontaneity.
(c) Deep Time and Space, Uncanny, Oceanic, Return to Zero, Afrofuturism: In its more temporally or spatially
transcendent guises, the sublime is the object of various artistic “returns to Zero,” such as those of Kasimir Malevich,
Mark Rothko, and Zen-inspired artists; the Land Art of Robert Smithson, and the light and sky based art of James Turrell
and Charles Ross; the structural filmmaking of Michael Snow, and the sensorial cinematic experiments of Harvard’s
Sensory Ethnography Lab (notably Leviathan); the minimalist music of LaMonte Young and William Basinski; and the
“dark ecologies” of Paul Kingsnorth, Tim Morton, and others. In “warmer,” more immersive (and arguably pastoral)
forms, the sublime finds audiences through popular fascination with cetaceans, and in musical genres such as psychedelic,
cosmic space rock, the “oceanic” progressive rock of Yes, and the ambient electronica tradition stretching from Brian Eno
and Klaus Schulze to the chill-out rooms of the rave subculture (see Theme #3). And here one also finds the mix of
“crisis/collapse” and hopeful transcendence in the genre of Afrofuturist art, which looks both to the pre-modern past (of
Africa) and beyond history and beyond Earth for sources of renewal.
READING:
Weintraub: Frans Krajcberg, Alan Sonfist
Others: Edward Abbey, “The Great American Desert”; John Cage, Silence; Denis Cosgrove, “Images and Imagination in
20th-Century Environmentalism: From the Sierras to the Poles”; William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness”; Finis
Dunaway, “Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee & the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge”; Barbara Kingsolver, “New Year’s Day”; Lucy Lippard, “Too Much: The Grand Canyon(s)”; Aldo Leopold,
“Thinking Like a Mountain”; Thomas Merton, “Rain and the Rhinoceros”; Christine Oravec, “To Stand Outside Oneself:
The Sublime in the Discourse of Natural Scenery”
VIEWING: Koyaanisqatsi (G. Reggio, 1983), Baraka (R. Fricke, 1993), Lessons of Darkness (W. Herzog, 1995), Manufactured
Landscapes (J. Baichwal, 2006), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (W. Herzog, 2010)
LISTENING: Klaus Schulze, “Timewind”; Yes, “Tales from Topographic Oceans,” “Close to the Edge”; LaMonte
Young, “The Well Tuned Piano”; John Luther Adams, “Become Ocean”; Sunn O))), “Monoliths and Dimensions”; Sun
Ra & His Arkestra; John Coltrane, “Interstellar Space”