Sherry Chandler

In search of the sublime

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden has been around long enough to be considered a classic in American Studies. In fact, I think it helped define the discipline.

Marx is an “increasingly militant” environmentalist, a choice of words I found in Jeffrey L. Meikle’s article, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden [Technology and Culture 44.1 (2003) 147-159]. It seems an odd choice to describe one who

appeal[s] to a broad spectrum of scholars and teachers of American studies, especially those of the author’s own generation who shared his anxiety about a postnuclear world dominated by the technological systems of what became known as the military-industrial complex

A casual Google search seems to indicate that Marx’s argument has become the one to refute. He is accused of skewing his argument toward the garden and also of basing it too much in high culture and literature. Meikle enumerates several of the counter arguments. I was particularly struck by this one:

Even more dismissive, John Lark Bryant faulted Marx for “tacitly assuming the essentially Arnoldian premise that a literature reflects its society.”*

I guess I myself always took that premise as a given. Seems to me that we were a nation born in literature. Names lilke Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson do pop up.

On the other hand, I suppose one must recognize that there are cultural forces that march on, for good or ill, in spite of theorists and politicians.

Meikle points toward another couple of post-Marx books that sort of take up where Marx left off: John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 and David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime .

. . . a wide-ranging study whose dramatic dust-jacket photograph exemplified the central paradox of the machine in the garden. The image foregrounds three men looking out from a precipice over a vast mountainous landscape, in the midst of which rises the massive concrete structure of the Hoover Dam, a gleaming artificial white slash across the rugged gorge of the Colorado River. . . .Surrounded by the desert landscape of the Southwest, the dam can hardly be termed a machine in a garden. Yet its reservoir, only beginning to fill at the time of the photograph, would create lush gardens, whose inhabitants would further benefit from the hydroelectric power it generated. Here was a case of the machine creating a garden—about as close a collaboration of nature and technology as one can imagine. When he took a long view, Nye observed that “Americans looked for sublimity in both realms” and concluded that “each was interpreted as a sign of national greatness.”

Nye’s book dates from 1994. Not everyone would now agree that creating a garden out of a desert is necessarily a good thing. But a cultural ideal does not necessarily consider right and wrong. Meikle concludes:

The Machine in the Garden remains the undisputed starting point for all attempts to understand the complex connections among developing technologies, their representations in text and image, and the multiple realities of American cultural experience. Marx might appreciate the irony that the text to which he has devoted a lifetime of thinking, shaping, commenting, and re-visioning has itself become a classic whose continuing influence cannot be ignored.

I don’t know why that’s an irony.

Maybe because a “classic” is no longer a living text?

Oh well.

I am not, at this point, even looking at Marx’s whole premise. I’m only about 125 pages into the book. I’m just sharing the parts that cause me to pay close attention. Sort of thinking out loud on the blog. Writing and thinking are often the same thing for me. It’s one of the functions this blog serves in my life.

Here is more of Marx on de Crèvecoeur’s Letters:

Without the sense of the landscape as a cardinal metaphor of value, the Letters could not have been written. Indeed, for the farmer it is the metaphoric even more than the physical properties of land which regenerate tired Europeans by filling them to overflowing with exuberancy. We are reminded of Robert Beverley’s exuberant style, not to mention Melville’s and Whitman’s — Whitman, whose hero will move from the contemplation of a single spear of grass to his barbaric yawp. It is not surprising that Crèvecoeur was one of the writers who convinced D. H. Lawrence that only the “spirit of place” really can account for the singular voice we hear in American books. In the Letters, as elsewhere in our literature, the voice we hear is that of a man who has discovered the possibility of changing his life. Landscape means regeneration to the farmer. In sociological terms, it means the chance for a simple man, who does actual work, to labor on his own property in his own behalf.[pp. 110-111]

__________
John Lark Bryant, “A Usable Pastoralism: Leo Marx’s Method in The Machine in the Garden,” American Studies 16 (1975): 63

Links

First the heartbreaking: Dave Bonta on white-nose syndrome that is killing off our bats.

then the serious: David Ford’s interview of Helen Losse.

then the amazingly and amusingly techno: Quineau sonnets (via Matthew Lafferty)

And last, the just silly: Emergency Yodel Button (via Troy Teegarden)

Today, by the way, is the anniversary of the Gore vs. Bush election in 2000, the celebration of which puts us all in dire need of an emergency yodel button.

No business

Oh, it’s Saturday morning and I don’t have much to say except where’s my coffee cup?

And of course it’s in the microwave where I put it to warm it up.

You’d think I’d learn.

There’s a family in New York City who gave up microwaves — and toilet paper and heat, cars and even public transportation. I don’t know what to make of such experiments except that they make me feel vaguely guilty and depressed. I am in no position to do any such thing. In fact, it seems to me to be a gesture of the privileged.

The local Advertiser has a feature about a couple who have started a new business, Earth Positive Energy, LLC. They’ll install solar panels and wind turbines with the end of either going off grid or selling energy back to the power companies. They system “typically” pays for itself in 6-10 years. But before it pays for itself, I have to pay for it. In ten years, I’ll be 75. And in who knows what kind of hock to the medical system. Can I undertake that kind of debt?

So I hang clothes on the line when weather permits, recycle, compost, grow a garden, write micropoems and macropoems about birds. And feel depresses.

Anyway, we watched There’s No Business Like Show Business this week. It was sort of fun to watch Marilyn Monroe parody herself in numbers like “Heat Wave.” But of course she reveals herself to be just a sweet young thing in the end.

And what’s not to like about Ethel Merman belting out the title song.

Mitzi Gaynor is winning but Johnny Ray oversells.

Predictably enough, though, I preferred Donald O’Connor. Here’s his big solo number and not a mule in sight.

Frog Poetry Contest

Here’s an opportunity for all you would-be Bashos out there.

The First Annual Save the Frogs Frog Poetry Contest:

Amphibian populations worldwide are in the midst of a mass extinction crisis, yet most people are completely unaware! We need your help in getting the word out. This contest will raise awareness of the amphibian extinction problem by getting people involved and interested. The best frog poems will be used in a book of frog poetry that will be sold to raise money for amphibian conservation efforts. This book will feature artwork from our concurrent 1st Annual Frog Art Contest.

Via, as also this link to Hilaire Belloc’s “The Frog.”

A deep sense of connectedness to the living world. . .

The Unforgettable Commencement Address by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3, 2009

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren�t pessimistic, you don�t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren�t optimistic, you haven�t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, �So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.�

. . .

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power.

Thanks to Rosalie for drawing my attention to this hopeful call to grassroots action.

Meanwhile, Dave Bonta points out Derrick Jensen’s a Beyond-Hope call to action in Orion magazine. This one, it seems to me, goes the same place in bleaker language:

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying �Hope and fear chase each other�s tails,� not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn�t believe�or maybe you would�how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here�s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

I�m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don�t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn�t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they�ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they�ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.

. . .

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to �hope� at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.

. . .

When you give up on hope�when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive�you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this cooption on themselves?

But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

Both of these articles are calls for subversion. While the first one bothers me; it’s a bit too chirpy maybe, the second one bothers me more because, lurking under the language, seems to be a call for violent subversion and I am not into violence. I figure what the world needs now is not another “war on” anything. I’m just tired of the metaphor.

I am, however, against fear. Our fear controls us.

I think change is coming upon us, willy nilly. We’ve been partying at the end of the world.

Obama to the contrary, I don’t think our political leadership is going to do more than try to patch up the current system and keep it going. They can’t do anything more. They’re in power. They want to stay in power.

Any real change has always come from the people.

Carry these words with you:

The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, �So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.�

Indigenous

It was Rebecca who first pointed out to me that honeybees are not indigenous to North America. They’re European immigrants, just like most of us. (Well, maybe not most of us any more.)

Since learning that, I’ve been less inclined to tear up at poetic elegies to the honeybees, though having been raised with an uncle who was a beekeeper, I remain fond on honeybees. After all, they’ve been here since the 17th century and most people whose families have been here that long consider themselves “native.”

Still, we do have honest-injun native species of pollinators:

Pollinators comprise a diversity of wild creatures, from birds and bats to butterflies, moths, beetles, flies and even the odd land mammal or reptile. But �there�s no question that bees are the most important in most ecosystems,� says [Rachel] Winfree, who calls the insects �the 800-pound gorillas� of the pollinator world. Unlike social honeybees, imported to North America in the 1600s, the majority of the continent�s native bees are solitary, nesting in burrows on the ground or small holes in wood rather than building hives. Worldwide, there are some 20,000 bee species, 4,000 of them found in North America.

And they are essential:

Bees and other pollinators are essential to human survival. �Without them, you�d lose most of your plants, and ultimately everything else,� says Winfree. To produce seeds and reproduce, three-quarters of the world�s flowering plant species rely on animal pollinators. (The others use the less precise methods of wind or water to transfer pollen between male and female flower parts.) Animal-dependent plants include more than two-thirds of the world�s crop species, whose fruits and seeds provide more than 30 percent of the foods and beverages we consume. Scientists estimate that in the United States alone, native bees perform up to $3 billion worth of pollination services annually.

Natural ecosystems and their inhabitants also rely on pollinators. Many North American songbirds, for instance, feed on the fruits, seeds and berries of plants pollinated by animals. Pollinating insects themselves, especially their plump larvae, provide protein for adult songbirds and their fast-growing fledglings. Even the notoriously carnivorous grizzly bear depends more directly on pollinators than one might expect. According to wildlife ecologist Kimberly Winter, NWF�s habitat programs manager, in some places between 80 and 90 percent of the bear�s diet is made up of fruits, nuts, bulbs and roots of animal-pollinated plants. On an ecosystem level, �losing a pollinator can have a domino effect on countless other species,� she says.

The good news is that there currently exist enough native pollinators to keep us going. We see a lot of bee activity around our place. Many of them I’m glad to say are bumble bees.

The bad news is that these native pollinators are also in decline. The reasons are numerous — imported disease, pesticides, loss of habitat, global warming — and I refer you to Laura Tangley’s “The Buzz on Native Pollinators” for more information.

June 22-28 is National Pollinator Week.. Check around your area for activities. Meantime, the National Wildlife Federation has some suggestions for encouraging native pollinators in your area. These include:

• To provide pollinators with the best sources of food�and to prevent the spread of invasive species�choose as many plants native to your region as possible. For specific recommendations, consult the Pollinator Partnership�s free ecoregional planting guide for your area (www.pollinator.org); all you need is a zip code.
• Select plants that provide a lot of nectar and pollen. Many ornamentals have been specifically bred to produce little or none of these essential foods.
• Plant a diversity of species so your yard will provide bees, butterflies and other animals with nectar and pollen from spring through fall. To attract bats and nocturnal moths, consider night-blooming plants in addition to day-bloomers.
• Be a �messy� gardener: Leave some patches of unmulched soil and brush piles that bees, birds and other animals can use to construct nests. Consider building or purchasing a bee house for wood-nesting wasps and bees.
• During hot, dry periods, provide water in shallow birdbaths or pools where pollinators can easily alight. Some wasps and bees need mud to build their nests, and butterflies like to gather in muddy puddles.
• Do not use pesticides, and encourage your neighbors to reduce their reliance on these chemicals. According to Winter, more pesticides are used in urban areas today than in agricultural regions of the United States.

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  For more tips, check out these sites: www.nwf.org and www.xerces.org.

  bumblebees, Environmentalism 5 Comments

• Unbridled Destruction

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  Posted on May 18th, 2009sherryGreen issues

  For those of you who wonder about the altered license plate below that reads Kentucky Unbridled Destruction, take a look at this from Grist:

  As American citizens in Mingo County and other areas of the flood-stricken Kentucky and West Virginia coalfields continue to dig themselves out of the muck, indefatigable Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward is reporting on his Coal Tattoo blog that the EPA has �signed off on almost all (87.5 percent, to be exact) of the mountaintop removal permits that has so far been reviewed under the initiative announced in March.�

  . . .

  Have 42 out of 48 permits for mountaintop removal�the process of blowing up our nation�s oldest and most diverse mountains, razing historic communities, poisoning watersheds, and causing massive erosion and flooding, which Vice President Al Gore has termed �a crime, and ought to be treated as a crime��been cleared as �environmentally responsible� by the Obama administration�s EPA?

  Since President Barack Obama has taken office, an estimated 300 million pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives have been detonated across our American mountains.

  I like my cheap electricity. I remember, just barely, when there was no electricity in the country in Kentucky. Many members of my family have prospered as employes of the Rural Electric Co-ops and have been considered heroes for going out, as linemen, in sleet, snow, flood, to keep the power on.

  But my dears, this mountaintop removal is wrong!

  Link from Morning Porch.

  Environmentalism No Comments