Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

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  • t4t as a model of eco intimacy and kinship in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s “T4T”

    t4t as a model of eco intimacy and kinship in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s “T4T”

    T4t stands for “trans for trans” and originated in the early 2000s within Craigslist personals to describe trans individuals choosing to pursue relationships and/or sex with other trans people. t4t as a model has been problematised because it might risk epitomising cis/trans binaries and “distract[ing] us from or cover[ing] over the significant axes of difference, race chief among them, that characterize and trouble trans affinities and solidarities”(Awkward-Rich and Malatino 3). In this way, t4t needs to be reframed through a more expansive approach, one which, as theorised by Black feminist Amira Lundy-Harris, could describe more accurately and comprehensively the different connections between trans people and explore “the relationship between Black feminist thought and trans studies, as part of a larger structure of thinking Blackness and transness in relationship to one another” (89). Expanded in this way, t4t would be a useful and joyful ideal. There is, after all, a great and hopeful resistance in actively choosing only people within your own trans collectivity, outside the borders of which there is a much higher chance of rejection, misidentification, and a forceful need for explanations and justifications. t4t could then summarise and stand for the intricate nets of “recognition, attraction, solidarity, and support” within trans circles described by Hil Malatino (SA).

    Much of the trans experience is based on such exchanges – on webs of relationality and connections with others, which are essential to resistance (Edwards 324). As analysed by Malatino, webs of care, collectivity, and kinship among queer and especially trans individuals arise in a system built on types of collectiveness that are cisheteronormative and centred around the nuclear family, thus leaving no space for trans and queer individuals (TC). These trans counter systems of care contrast both the ways in which care and kinship are “steeped in forms of domesticity and intimacy that are both White and Eurocentered, grounded in the colonial/modern gender system” and “the mythos of neoliberal, entrepreneurial self-making” (TC). The trans self is relational rather than self-sufficient and the webs of collectivity, care, and kinship on which it depends for survival configure a type of care that evades established heteronormative structures. “Subjectivity and dependency” (TC) are then inextricably linked, which is further augmented by the fact that an act of care in trans circles is never a linear, unidirectional exchange; instead, in these webs, any act of care towards another is an act sustaining and supporting those same networks of care you are part of (TC). The trans self that emerges from this analysis is then interconnected and relational, contrasting the “capitalist […] ideology of individualism” (Drucker 56) and the neoliberal idea that the individual must be self-sufficient and self-reliant.

    Starting from the t4t experience, poet Oliver Baez Bendorf shows how this relationality can expand towards a similar interrelationality and kinship with nature and our surroundings. Bendorf’s poem “T4T” opens mid-scene and mid-action, with an “And” that signifies that what is written on the page continues something that is left unwritten, left unseen. 

    And I think he must be drunk, from the sweet way he.

    Brother. I think about his XX all the time. It’s like a joke,

    that we’ll start dreaming of men once we. […]

    Not only does the poem open as if halfway through an already-started action, story, or scene. It also opens by declaring a sense of inebriation. The t4t encounter is then immediately portrayed as belonging to a different state of consciousness, one where “his XX” does not require any further words but can immediately move to being an inside joke shared only between the two men. It is never revealed what the lover is doing that shows a drunk-like state, as some lines abruptly halt and break mid-sentence, so that the reader is left only knowing about a “sweet way” and not what this sweet way is applied to. These unfinished sentences consistently happen after the use of a pronoun referring to either the speaker, the lover, or both together. The actions, descriptions, and definitions of the speaker and the lover are left unsaid, because interrupted or unsayable, so that their identities remain nebulous, interrupted, unfinished. However, their identities are built throughout the poem in the exchange(s) between them. The self is then (partly and) intimately constructed from an encounter with and recognition of the similar, exemplifying how t4t can become “a site of identity formation” (Adair and Azura 46). The sites of the interruptions also become the sites of the constructions, so that what is left unknowable for an external reader is a site of becoming for the two trans men. 

    Identity is built through and within an ‘other’ which is other but is also same, through a process of recognition of similarities and recognition of differences, embodied in the poem by the “brother” address, isolated as a single-word sentence. The use of the term brother pulls the reader into a system of relationality that borrows terminology from the standard heteronormative family just to subvert it and build a different type of kinship and bonds that can only exist outside such family. Further, the term “brother” in the context of sex also creates an immediate connection to incest. According to Lee Edelman, incest, because it confounds and destabilises sameness and difference, threatens the stability of culture as opposed to nature and, as it is in culture rather than nature that meaning is produced, it also disrupts the stability of meaning itself (BE). If “the incest prohibition is the fundamental social rule” that culture is articulated around and depends on (Ramadanovic), the “brother” address interrupts culture and disrupts a clear, singular, and stable presence of meaning – as articulated in the unfinished sentences. It declares its disassociation from culture as opposed to nature and reinforces the t4t encounter as a webbed exchange of sameness and difference belonging to an alternative space. In this way, nature (as opposed to culture) becomes part of what makes these expansive movements of encounter & recognition and similarity & difference possible.

    This expansiveness and enmeshment also directly extends to the non-human, so that t4t evades separatism by merging with what goes beyond the human. Natural imagery is scattered throughout the poem. It starts from being in the surroundings – a place which is already intertwined with the two men and their actions. They eat “citrus on river rock / while others swam out”, in a way that denotes a singularity of interconnectedness with the natural: while “others” swim out, preparing themselves to leave such a space, the two men remain there and eat. Such interconnectedness is then furthered through the t4t encounter so that nature moves from being in the background to becoming part of their sex and intimacy. In the image of their “clothes scattered around pine root” the trees and the ground become what creates the time and space for their nakedness and sex. Nature is also co-creative of their own bodies, as the root of the pine also becomes the root of the lover, the root which the speaker, if given “the chance”, would “go right to”, wanting to reach not only the lover’s deepest core but also the core of the nature around them. The t4t erotic recognition and suspension creates a reaching towards an erotic similarity and intimacy with the non-human, so that the two become intertwined with each other, and one happens through the other, in a process that is reminiscent of the principles of the Ecosex Manifesto, formulated and written by Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle. 

    The Ecosex Manifesto rejects the image of Earth as a mother to instead think of Earth as a “lover”, to be “madly, passionately, and fiercely in love” with, in a relationship to be renovated and continued every day and that can become “more mutual and sustainable” only through a collaboration with nature. The relationship with nature is erotic, sensory, and physical, made of “shamelessly hug[ging] trees, massag[ing] the earth with our feet, and talk[ing] erotically to plants” and, ultimately, “mak[ing] love with the Earth through our senses”. The relationship with nature articulated in the manifesto is an enmeshed and mutual one furthered through physical exchanges and love. In Bendorf’s poem, a similar relationship with nature is depicted, and it is in this fusion with and commitment to nature that queer love, sex, and intimacy can find further fulfilment. 

    The identity formation that happens through t4t intimacy and sex in Bendorf’s poem is, thus, an identity formation that also happens with and through nature. Here we see the trans self is not interconnected and relational only because it belongs to a trans collectivity, but also because – in its t4t exchange – is located within and existing in nature, with which it merges and mingles, in a continuous exchange akin to the one that happens within trans circles of care. This merging with the surroundings intertwined with the merging between the two men’s bodies culminates in the acknowledgement that “there’s something happy and right about us mating”. 

    The word “mating” clearly carries an animal-like connotation. This evocation of non-human animals in the context of t4t sex disrupts even further the social and cultural boundaries that the term brother has already eroded. Going beyond the human as an exclusive subject of love, sexuality, and inter-subjective co-creation, Bendorf shows the happiness and rightness of a t4t encounter bleeding into the happiness and rightness of an inter-nature encounter. This poem thus offers a powerful example of how the potentially problematic or overly simplistic characterization of t4t can be eluded: by showing the body and self are interconnected not only with more, different bodies and selves, but also with the (natural) spaces that allow for those bodies to meet. 

    Works Cited

    Adair, Cassius, and Aizura, Aren. ““The Transgender Craze Seducing Our [Sons]”; or, All the 

    Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other”. TSQ: Transgender Studies 

    Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 44–64. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475509.

    Awkward-Rich, Cameron, and Malatino, Hil. “Meanwhile, t4t”. TSQ: Transgender Studies 

    Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 1-8. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-9475467

    Bendorf, Oliver Baez. “T4T”. Poetry, 2020. 

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151771/t4t.

    Drucker, Peter. Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism. Brill, 2015.

    Edelman, Lee. Bad Education. Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke University 

    Press, 2022.

    Edwards, Kari. In Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, edited by 

    Trace Peterson and TC Colbert, Nightboat Books, 2013.

    Malatino, Hil. Trans Care. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

    —. Side Affects: on Being Trans and Feeling Bad. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

    Lundy-Harris, Amira. ““Necessary Bonding” On Black Trans Studies, Kinship, and Black 

    Feminist Genealogies”. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 

    84-100. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475537.

    Ramadanovic, Petar. “The Non-meaning of Incest or, How Natural Culture Is.” Postmodern 

    Culture, vol 20 no 2, 2010. doi: 10.1353/pmc.2010.0004

    Stephens, Elizabeth M. and Sprinkle, Annie M. “Ecosex Manifesto”. 

    https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/research-writing/ecosex-manifesto/.

  • Organic Farming: A Spirit of Ecofeminism in India

    Organic Farming: A Spirit of Ecofeminism in India

    According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), organic farming is a production management system that is unique and promotes biological cycles, biodiversity, and biological activity in the soil [4]. This is accomplished by using biological, mechanical, and farm-based agronomic approaches while reducing the amount of synthetic farm input from outside sources.

    The primary goal of organic farming is to enhance the interdependent communities of flora, animals, soil, and humans as well as their ability to produce food and maintain their health (Scialabba and Hattam, 2002) [6].

    Origin of Organic Farming in India

    The main historical examples of organic agriculture in India revolve around the following:

    Period/Literature  Description of organic farming
    Ancient periodNeolithic civilizations used this 10,000-year-old tradition, which was also embraced by Mesopotamian and other civilizations like the Hwang-Ho.
    RamayanaDead matter that returns to the earth, such as trash or rotting corpses, is transformed into nutrient-rich material. According to C. Rajagopalachari, it is Mother Earth’s power.
    Mahabharata (5500 BC)There have been references to the celestial cow, Kamadhenu. Its contribution to human existence and function in ensuring soil fertility has been described.
    Arthashastra by Kautilya (300 BC)Refers to various kinds of manure, including oil cakes and animal excrement.
    Brihad-Sanhita by VarahmihirExplains the numerous ways to collect manure and how to choose the right manure for different types of crops.
    Rig-Veda (2500–1500 BC)The Rig Veda 1,161,10 (written between 2500 and 1500 BC) and the Atharva Veda II 8.3 (written around 1000 BC) both provide descriptions of organic farming. In Vrksayurveda, Surpala also makes reference to manure. According to the Sukra, a plant needs water, meat, excrement from cows, goats, and sheep, among other things, to develop healthily (IV, V, 94, 107-112).
    Holy Quran (590 AD)An indication of harvest and recycling is the return of one-third of the portion removed from the soil.

    Source: Bhattacharya and Chakraborty, 2005

    Organic Farming and Indian Women

    In the arena of Indian culture, a woman is particularly called “Prakriti” which in its literal sense means “Nature”[8]. Prakriti is the feminine essence for conservation, development, and being purely ecological. She is also referred to as “Shakti”, who furnishes energy to steer the living system.

    In present times, the organic farming movement has taken the form of a social movement. India, the holder of the oldest agricultural fields in the entire world where agriculture has been practiced for around 10,000 years, has women as the leaders in organic farming [2]. Indian female farmers devote a significant amount of their work hours on farmlands, which is much above than those invested by male farmers. During the sowing and harvesting seasons, women spend 3300 hours on the fields while men do it for 1860 hours [3]. Women’s contribution to nature supports sustainable development and agricultural systems. This hypothesis develops a stronger bond between women and organic farming.

    In the Odagaon region of Nayagarh district, Odisha, an area of 90 acres of degraded forest has been transformed into a forest that provides food for the nearby population. The idea of change was first sown in Sabarmatee’s mind in the 1980s, when she began experimenting with her father on the land for cultivating organic food [5]. Later, when the efforts started to bear fruit, a non-governmental organization called Sambhav was founded. Today, this organization is aimed at promoting ecological conversation, women capacity, and organic farming. Sabarmatee has done a brilliant job of collecting and preserving 800 varieties of seeds of indigenous origin, which have a strong relationship in combating climate change. Greater than 30 varieties of seeds withstood the cyclonic storms between the time periods 2013-2014.

    Rohibai Popre has the face of a leader of the organic farming movement in Maharashtra [9]. Without any formal education, Rohibai has been successful in leading a women-oriented agro-biodiversity initiative. She has cultivated 17 crop varieties on 50 acres of farmland and shares her knowledge with 3,500 farmers. Her seed bank is meant for the conservation of 122 landraces of 32 crop varieties.

    Bibi Kamaljit Kaur made her endeavor in the field of organic products and farming. Around 39% of the soil in Punjab is absolutely degraded owing to over irrigation. In 2019–20 and 2020–21, the use of pesticides was 4995 MT (technical grade) and 5193 MT (technical grade), respectively, in the state of Punjab [1]. With keeping in mind the paramount damage caused to the environment from the aforementioned factor, organic farming being done by Bibi Kamaljit Kaur in Punjab has assisted in breaking the toxic web of inorganic farming based on pesticide and chemical use. After participating in a seminar by the Agriculture Heritage Mission, Bibi Kaur learned about the negative impacts of pesticides on the environment and human health. Soon she got trained and well-informed about organic farming and started to practice the same in her kitchen garden. She had reached farmers from over 20 neighboring villages and imparted knowledge about the deadly consequences of using harmful chemical fertilizers. Inspired by her, the villages of Bhotna, Malliya, and Chughan have undergone a shift towards organic farming. Presently, she has received overwhelming support from 2000 women farmers and runs 2000 organic kitchen gardens.

    Two villages named Damodarpur and Murakhati in the Jhargram district of West Bengal narrate the revolutionary stories of two women organic cultivators.Panchabati BaskeandNirmala Mahato have seeded organic indigenous rice varieties in their individual villages. These women organic farmers are leading movements at the grassroots level. 55 male and 21 female farmers are each associated with them in Damodarpur and Murakhati villages, helping and making each other realize the power of organic agriculture and womanhood [7]. Rice varieties, namely Kalabhat, Sathia, Kerala Sundari, and Mallifullo, are being grown in the district. With time, the number of women organic cultivators has increased to over 4500 in all 5 gram panchayats of Block Nayagram in the district Jhargram. As per Panchabati, they are saving Rs 4000-Rs 5000 per bigha[1] in relation to fertilizers, and there is hardly any difference witnessed in the crop yield. For additional income plates made up of sal leaves are sold by the women supported by the women enterprise Aamon.

    Conclusion

    Organic farming has done the work of improving women’s role in Indian agriculture. The above-listed real-life examples are a clear indication of the same. This process of women’s involvement in organic farming needs to be constantly ameliorated. Active entrepreneurship opportunities, education, social and environmental justice, equity, farming rights, training, and skill development are some of the ways that can assure their vital contribution to organic farming. This must continue.

    References

    1. CONSUMPTION OF CHEMICAL PESTICIDES IN VARIOUS STATES/UTs DURING 2017-18 TO 2021-22. (2022, July 22). Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine, and Storage, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India. https://ppqs.gov.in/statistical-database
    2. Fernandes, S. (2017, June 17). Farming took root in India only 10,000 years ago, study finds. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/farming-took-root-in-india-only-10-000-years-ago-study-finds/story znhMgOYjQOWWtgX49PkUsJ.html
    3. Kamdar, B. (n.d.). Women grow as much as 80% of India’s food – but its new farm laws overlook their struggles. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/women-grow-as-much-as-80-of-indias-food-but-its-new-farm-laws-overlook-their-struggles-155083
    4. Organic Agriculture: What is organic agriculture? (n.d.). https://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq1/en/
    5. Padma Shri For Father-Daughter Who Transformed Wasteland Into A Forest. (n.d.). NDTV.com. https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/padma-shri-for-father-daughter-radha-mohan-and-sabarmatee-who-transformed-wasteland-into-a-forest-2175441
    6. Scialabba, N. & C. Hattam, Eds. (2002). Organic agriculture, environment and food security. Environment and Natural Resources Series. Rome, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). (n.d.-b). http://www.sciepub.com/reference/90645
    7. Singh, S. S. (2022, August 21). Women farmers of Bengal’s Jhargram reap fortunes with organic rice. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/women-farmers-reap-fortunes-with-organic-indigenous-rice-varieties-in-bengals-jhargram/article65790956.ece
    8. The Incarnate Word. (n.d.). https://incarnateword.in/dict/sans/prakriti-1
    9. Wikipedia contributors. (2022, July 25). Rahibai Soma Popere. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahibai_Soma_Popere

    [1] Bigha is a unit for land measurement in northern India.

    Sonali Sharma is the author of this post.

  • The Eco-Gender Gap: When Sustainability Became a Women’s Issue

    The Eco-Gender Gap: When Sustainability Became a Women’s Issue

    When looking at the faces of the sustainability movement, what do you see? A campaign for environmental justice that is synonymous with names like Jane Goodall, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greta Thunberg, Autumn Petlier, Vanessa Nakate, and Sylvia Earle. Companies dedicated to sustainability, such as Blueland, Stasher, and Bite are led by Sarah Paiji Yoo, Kat Nouri, and Lindsay McCormick, respectively. Women are the advocates, voices of change, and the ones paving the future.

    This trend is called the eco-gender gap, a term created by British marketing company Mintel to describe the “difference in environmental awareness and eco-friendly behavior between men and women, with men being much less likely to feel connected to these issues than women” (Liddell, 2021). Sustainability has become a women’s issue, and in turn, their responsibility. Much of this plays into gender roles, gender-based personality differences, and marketing, as corporations provide gendered messages about sustainability.

    The authors of “Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption,” published in Journal of Consumer Research in 2016, examined this systemic issue, delving deep into working to find the root cause of why the majority of men will not purchase sustainable products. Their studies asked men and women to designate products as either “green” or “non-green”, “feminine” or “masculine”, to choose a product as “better for the environment” or “better at performing ___”, and to gauge affinity for eco-conscious wording and imagery. Across all metrics, green products almost always equated to femininity and were therefore avoided by men. Associating greenness with femininity may also explain why “women display greater concern and willingness to take action to help the environment… across age groups and countries… in contrast, men litter more, recycle less, have a larger overall carbon footprint, and feel less guilty about living a non-green lifestyle” (Brough et al., 2016). There are larger repercussions of this association, as it “may discourage men from engaging in green behaviors, particularly if they are motivated to maintain a macho image and wish to avoid being stereotyped as feminine” (Brough et al., 2016).

    Men feeling turned away from sustainable products parallels women feeling drawn in. Though women might in part feel inclined to make sustainable choices to enhance their femininity, they also face more “eco-anxiety,” a chronic fear of environmental doom (American Psychological Association). Globally, women are more susceptible to the effects of climate change, despite men causing more environmental damage, from avoiding sustainable practices like recycling or using less electricity where possible to engaging in “petro-masculinity,” a denial-rooted, climate-destructive reaction – from mostly white, politically conservative men –  to the fear of environmental crisis where they choose to consume the most pollutant energy in response to being told to reduce (Nelson, 2020).  Natural disasters disproportionately affect people in poverty, which is often communities of women, children, elderly, and disabled people. Studies have even shown that “gender-based violence, including physical, psychological, and reproductive violence against women, becomes more prevalent after natural disasters, with complex… consequences on health and well-being” (Gloor et al., 2022). Researchers have also seen an uptick in hormonal imbalance disorders such as polycystic ovary syndrome linked to the consumption of endocrine-disrupting microplastics. Microplastics were also just discovered in breast milk (Ragusa et al., 2022). On the consumer side, women are told their bodies are hurting the earth, from cosmetics to menstrual products, and told to make better – often more expensive – choices before it is too late. Perhaps most importantly, women are typically the main caregivers to their children, who will grow up in a polluted world. Creating a better future for their well-being is the most influential drive of them all.

    The first step in closing the eco-gender gap is to normalize men caring about the climate. In the consumer product industry, companies themselves create much of the issue. Women predominantly assume responsibility for purchasing goods for the household, and thus the items are tailored to them. Some of the most prominent sustainable products are for cleaning, cosmetics, clothing, storage, and office supplies, categories falling within a woman’s stereotypical responsibilities. Men can feel uncatered to and simply avoid sustainability for fear of being seen as feminine. This pattern appears repeatedly and ranges from choosing vegan or vegetarian diets to bringing a reusable shopping bag to a store. These trends have been helpful in spreading awareness, but it is crucial that all genders climb aboard.

    The authors of “Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly?…” designed a solution to address the eco-gender gap: explicitly catering eco-conscious services and products to men. In an experiment with two hypothetical conservation nonprofits, one called Friends of Nature with a tree logo (feminine directed) and one called Wilderness Rangers with a wolf logo (masculine directed), it was found that though both nonprofits carried the same values, Wilderness Rangers attracted more men (Brough et al., 2016). Additionally, they found that while Friends of Nature attracted women yet turned men away, men and women were similarly likely to donate to Wilderness Rangers (Brough et al., 2016). If women are not deterred by clear masculine branding, perhaps this is a solution in catering to everyone.

    As we look at sustainability, we must remember that its core value is caring for the earth. In our patriarchal society, women are assigned the role of caregivers, and the idea of sustainability being a “women’s issue” is “already insidious due to the persistent portrayal of women as caregivers – even of the planet” (Abbiss & Hunt, 2020). Men often hold the most power, especially leading companies responsible for pollution. Watching nineteen-year-old Greta Thunberg in a room of older men encapsulates the gender-based power dynamic embedded in environmental dicussion, demostrating “for climate skeptics, it was not [only] the environment that was threatened; it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity” (Abbiss & Hunt, 2020). Women will continue to lead the way and make change, and thankfully, younger generations of men seem more open to sustainable practices as our livelihoods are eminently threatened. While we have many advocates, women are still outnumbered in many spaces where it counts most. Women make up 27% of STEM roles, 29% of corporate senior management roles, and 25% of US congressional roles. It is especially crucial to open more opportunities for women to bring sustainability issues to the forefront and provide the necessary support to create change.

    As the need to live sustainably grows omnipresent, it is important to remember that everyone – regardless of gender – is responsible for working towards a solution. Society needs to move closer to making sustainability a movement everyone feels welcomed, affirmed, and empowered.

    Bibliography

    Ballew, M., Marlon, J., Leiserowitz, A., & Maibach, E. (2018, December 12). Gender

    Differences in Public Understanding of Climate Change. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/gender-differences-in-public-und erstanding-of-climate-change/

    Brough, A. R., Wilkie, J. E., Ma, J., Isaac, M. S., & Gal, D. (2016). Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and its Effect on Sustainable Consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(4), 567–582. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw044

    Gloor, J. L., Mestre, E. B., Post, C., & Ruigrok, W. (2022, July 26). We Can’t Fight Climate Change Without Fighting for Gender Equity. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2022/07/we-cant-fight-climate-change-without-fighting-for-gender-eq uity

    Hunt, E., & Abbiss, R. (2020, February 6). The Eco Gender Gap: Why is Saving the Planet Seen as Women’s Work? The Guardian. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/06/eco-gender-gap-why-savingplanet-seen-womens-work

    Liddell, A. (2021, May 7). The Eco-Gender Gap. Cherwell. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://cherwell.org/2021/05/07/the-eco-gender-gap/

    Mintel Press Team. (2018, July 27). UK Women Try to Live More Ethically Than Men. Mintel. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/social-and-lifestyle/the-eco-gender-gap-71-of-w omen-try-to-live-more-ethically-compared-to-59-of-men

    Nelson, J. (2020). Petro‐Masculinity and Climate Change Denial Among White, Politically Conservative American Males. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 17(4), 282–295. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps.1638

    Piyatissa, Y. (2021, May 22). What Is The Eco Gender Gap and How Can We Bridge It? IVolunteer International. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from

    Ragusa, A., Notarstefano, V., Svelato, A., Belloni, A., Gioacchini, G., Blondeel, C.,

    Zucchelli, E., De Luca, C., D’Avino, S., Gulotta, A., Carnevali, O., & Giorgini, E.

    (2022, June 30). Raman Microspectroscopy Detection and Characterisation of

    Microplastics in Human Breastmilk. Polymers (Basel). 2022 Jun 30;14(13):2700. doi:

    10.3390/polym14132700. PMID: 35808745; PMCID: PMC9269371. Retrieved

    October 29, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9269371/

    Wallis, J. (2021, July 26). Why Do Women Experience More Eco-Anxiety Than Men? Is There A Sustainability Gender Gap? Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.refinery29.com/en-au/sustainability-gender-gap

    Sophie Bravo is the author of this post.

  • A Case for Denise Levertov as an Ecofeminist

    A Case for Denise Levertov as an Ecofeminist

    Ecofeminism was not refined in its usage until the 1980’s when Levertov was losing popularity as a poet, so it is unlikely she ever would have used this term in her life (ignoring the fact that she did not want to be labelled as a feminist in the first place), however, her work and personal ideologies closely aligns with the general theories of ecofeminism established and refined throughout her lifetime. Most ecofeminist work written during the ’70s centres around “dualisms such as woman-nature that worked in opposition to that of men-culture” (Estévez-Saá and Lorenzo-Modia 126). These dualisms are the subject of many of Levertov’s early poems such as “Losing Track” and “Stepping Westward,” making her one of the trailblazers of this movement.

    Many of Levertov’s poems use the moon or tides as a metaphor for celebrating her innate femininity, which follows one of Gretchen Legler’s, an ecofeminist literary critic, “emancipatory strategies” of ecofeminist criticism. In Levertov’s “Stepping Westward,” she says, “If woman is inconstant, /good, I am faithful to/ ebb and flow” (lines 3–5). The “ebb and flow” suggests images of tides, oceans, and water. Tides are controlled by the moon, which is a common motif for femininity. This image, coupled with her statement that it is good if a woman is “inconstant,” ever-changing, and unfaithful, shows a devotion to nature and its reflection of her inner femininity. In this poem, Levertov expresses the joy she finds in being a woman, the sense of self-sufficiency she feels, and the stability of her innate femininity in her life.

    The forces of water are powerful and are always tied to femininity in Levertov’s work. Water is controlled by the moon in many of her poems, suggesting a devotion to this feminine power. Water often exposes dreams and acts as a source of creativity, while removing men and patriarchal forces in Levertov’s work. These images of water are important because they blur the “boundaries between inner (emotional, psychological, personal) and outer (geographic landscapes),” which is one of Legler’s emancipatory strategies, an ecofeminist way to think about the relationships between women and nature (Estévez-Saá and Lorenzo-Modia 140).

    Not many of Levertov’s poems take a direct, feminist approach. Many of her poems, like “Losing Track,” encode ecofeminist values through the description of personal experience. In “Losing Track,” the speaker describes the tide as a force that takes a lover (presumably a man) away from her and exposes her dreams. Levertov puts her readers in a surreal experience in “The Room,” relying on the senses to make a feminine experience. Levertov adheres to Leger’s strategy of blurring boundaries between woman and nature in “Losing Track” as well. The poem ends with the image of “mud sucking at gray and black/ timbers of me,/ a light growth of green dreams drying” (Levertov lines 16–18). In this poem, the speaker is a pier, and the “green dreams” are moss on her piles (line 18). This moss is only exposed when her feminine force, the tide, takes her presumably male lover away. From this imagery, we infer that she is only able to see her dreams clearly when the presence of a man is removed. She is only free to explore her “green dreams” when the influence of the patriarchy is gone from her life and the tide has taken her love away (line 18). Levertov uses Leger’s strategies by blurring the lines between women’s inner desire and nature in both “Losing Track” and “Stepping Westward.”

    In both “Stepping Westward” and “Losing Track” Levertov associates the colour green with feminine dreams. “Stepping Westward” opens with the lines “What is green in me/ darkens, muscadine” (Levertov lines 1–2). Muscadine is a plant, a grapevine that produces grapes used to make wine. These grapes are green when unripe and turn a dark purple as they ripen. The colour green is often associated with fertility and growing, while the colour purple is often associated with power and wealth. As the speaker in this poem is “Stepping Westward,” an idea long associated with the American dream, her dreams ripen or begin to come to fruition. The idea that the speaker is stepping into her power and passing through the stage of growth or fertility in her life into a place where she can “hold steady” is conveyed completely through images of the natural world (Levertov line 11). Levertov’s images work as a metaphor for a woman’s ambitions and dreams, blurring the boundaries between nature and human, because the woman is the plant in this metaphor.

    Most early ecofeminist writers operated with “dualisms” as mentioned earlier. These dualisms are consistent in Levertov’s work. In her “Stepping Westward,” Levertov contrasts the bliss of being a woman with the “burdens” being “gifts, goods, a basket/ of bread that hurts.” These images are items to be bought, sold, and consumed; products of a capitalist society that tie the speaker to a system that she is “inconstant” to (lines 3, 26, 28, and 29). Similarly, in “Losing Track,” the speaker aligns herself as a manmade structure, a pier, to symbolize that she is a product of the patriarchy. She, a pier, is “half-in half-out of the water,” suggesting that she is partly feminine, partly masculine. The speaker also compares her lover to a boat, a manmade symbol of technology, the opposite of nature. When this lover comes to her, she loses track of the moon, her femininity, and the tide takes her lover away, exposing her “green dreams.” The presence of masculine, capitalistic forces in the speaker’s life made her forget her femininity and dreams. These images and metaphors reiterate Levertov’s dislike for the patriarchy and distaste for its degradation of women.

    Levertov’s work demonstrates a deep awareness of the effects the patriarchy can have on women through dualism and exposes a dislike for those effects. While she disliked the label of feminist and preferred her work to be thought of holistically, the values expressed in her poetry are that of an ecofeminist. Her subtle connection of woman to nature and reverent tone when describing the natural world indicate her as a pioneer in ecofeminism.

    Works Cited

    Estévez-Saá, Margarita, and María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia. “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-Caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(S).” Women’s Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2018, pp. 123–46. doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2018.1425509.

    Jarman, Mark. “Lives of a Poet: Denise Levertov.” The Hudson Review, www.hudsonreview.com/2014/02/lives-of-a-poet-denise-levertov/#.YuxJU3bMK3C. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    Levertov, Denise. “Hypocritical Women.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42524/hypocrite-women. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —. “Losing Track.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=29543. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —.  “The Room.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27828. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —. “Stepping Westward.” All Poetry, www.allpoetry.com/poem/8503363-Stepping-Westward-by-Denise-Levertov. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    —.  “The Well.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=28573. Accessed July 15, 2022.

    Siwatch, Pooja. “Ecofeminism and Value Based Social Economy in Feminine Literature: Allied Resistance to the Age of Anthropocene.” Research Horizons, vol. 7, July 2017, pp. 57–63. Academic Search Complete, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=a9h&AN=138606072&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

    Abigail Zajac is the author of this post.

  • Can Indian Ecofeminists be “Ethically” Vegan?

    Can Indian Ecofeminists be “Ethically” Vegan?

    A 2019 report by IndiaSpend stated that since 2012 more than 133 instances of cow vigilantism have been reported, with 50 deaths and 290 injuries (Team IndiaSpend). Cow vigilantism is a form of violent, sectarian activism that aims to prohibit eating beef and/or engaging in beef-related transactions. Among the victims, 57% were Muslims, 9% Dalits and 9% Hindus. In 2016, two women in Haryana were gang-raped on the pretext of being beef-eating Muslims (BBC News). Human rights activist, Bondita Acharya, was threatened with rape and acid attacks by the fundamentalist organisation Bajrang Dal in 2017 for commenting that even “higher caste Hindus” consume beef, and Muslims should not be singled out for punishment (Wire Staff). In the light of the aforementioned statistical data on the interconnection between cow vigilantism and sexual abuse, I would like to explore two crucial questions of personal ethics: is veganism the approach to become an ecofeminist in India? Two, where do animal rights and human rights overlap within the Indian vegan movement?

    While the aggression that fuels the urge to protect cows is alarming, it also raises questions as to why the violence is singularly directed against consumers or dealers of beef. Notably, it appears that instances of “goat vigilantism” or “pork vigilantism” are unheard of. Most Indians who abstain from beef-eating do indulge in pork and mutton.

    Cow vigilantism is not fuelled by compassion for the non-human or to reduce the carbon footprint produced by consuming red meat, but by religious beliefs which make Hindus worship cows as their mother. Most Hindus try countering beef-eating with pork-eating, emphasising that if Muslims abstain from pork, then Hindus should abstain from beef too. Such selective environmentalism seeks to oppress religious and other social minorities whose access to basic nourishment is already severely restricted by inflation, and now by verdicts from self-proclaimed “godmen”[i] wielding their powerful tools to ostracise the non-conformists. It does not promote environmental awareness.

    Where does veganism stand in this nexus of religion, caste, class, and politics? Most Indian vegans trace veganism to Hinduism and Jainism – the primary advocates of vegetarianism. However, they gloss over an important aspect of the dietary restrictions advocated by these religions: none of these ask you to switch to a plant-based diet. Hindu scriptures like Valmiki’s Ramayana and the Adi Parva of Mahabharata even talk of Kamadhenu, the Divine Mother Cow, the Hindu equivalent of the fabled golden goose, who could be milked every time her owner, Vashistha rishi, wanted material amenities. Kamadhenu was regarded to be closely related to Mother Earth or Prithivi- so harnessing the mother cow for material benefits had a subtextual implication of milking/exploiting the earth for human consumption. In fact, the history of untouchability in India is rooted in beef consumption. B.R Ambedkar, India’s pioneering anti-caste activist describes in his book The Untouchables, how Brahmins, who once ate horse-meat from Ashvamedha, beef of sacrificed cows, and honey-slathered cow and goat meat in “madhuparka”, quit meat to resist Buddhism and Jainism, – religions which staunchly advocated compassion towards nature, soil and non-human animals (Ambedkar 89). However, the Dalits or the untouchables were not allowed to practise agriculture, for fear of polluting the soil with their touch, so, to their lot, fell the carcass of the dead animals, after they had served their purpose to the caste Hindus.

    As an ecofeminist, when I started experimenting with vegan foods, these were the problems that I had to grapple with. Why was nobody talking about the problematic equation of the cow with the mother? Hindu feminists like the Kailaasa.org often claim that worshipping the cow and abstaining from eating its meat is a move towards the empowerment of women, for it involves respecting the mother figure through the non-human (Kailaasa Hindu Feminism). Similarly, non-Hindu critics writing on this intersection, such as Peter Sondheim, write that feminists should protest the abuse of dairy cows (Sondheim). Such compassion for animals and protest against animal suffering can lead to an ecofeminist conversation, yet it fails to do so.

    Ecofeminism primarily seeks to dispel patriarchal notions of reducing the human as well as the non-human to their reproductive functions. Greta Gaard adopts this approach of ecofeminism in her definition of vegetarian ecofeminism by saying, “Vegetarian ecofeminism puts into action the feminist insight that “the personal is political” and examines the politic of dietary choices as well as strategic and operational choices in economics” (117). When she asks about what prevents ecofeminists from giving a political direction to their compassion for animals, she commits the fallacy of assumption from a Western purview.

    What Greta Gaard has overlooked in her critique, was the socio-political nuances that inform animal rights activism in the Indian subcontinent. I have always wondered if the passion for protecting cows in India would be so heightened if they did not produce milk, a main source of nourishment and financial revenue in India’s primarily agrarian economy. If vegetarianism is motivated by a utilitarian approach of not murdering the source of nourishment and keeping it alive for man’s own interests, veganism in India aims to be an elite cultural phenomenon of overpriced imported vegan alternatives to locally sourced dairy and meat.

    Indian veganism cannot be scrutinised under Western eyes. One needs to assess India’s nutritional graph and economy to understand why Western veganism will fail unless modified to suit the socio-economic climate of a country whose Gross Development Product (GDP) has been steadily declining and the value of the rupee falling to an unfathomable low, and where meat-eating can lead to mob-lynching. As Rama Ganesan highlighted, “What the West knows about Hindu vegetarianism has been controlled by the upper caste narrative, which couches it in terms of Gandhian ahimsa” (Ganesan). It is a hypocritical narrative among Hindu vegetarians to proclaim themselves as followers of “Ahimsa” or “non-violence” where they murder humans for consuming meat.

    Vegan foods like plant-based mock-meat and tofu, are sold, not by local farmers, but by capitalist organizations, at exorbitant rates (Sahani). In a country where the general yearly income is less than 1 lac INR per annum, can we expect mass adoption of vegan foods? Moreover, the levying of taxes on fresh produce makes the vegan diet a mirage for Indians. How shall I, an ecofeminist, then ask them to go vegan even when I know that meat-eating goes against my ecological ethics?

    I cannot ask them to consume the cake of vegan alternatives to their affordable and widely accessible bread when the cake is alienated from them by capitalist monopoly on the food market. And how can I forget the history of caste-class violence that shapes the diet of the Indians who are not caste Hindus? Beef-eating, unlike in the West, does not symbolise prosperity, but a simple fare that nourishes hungry mouths deprived of the expensive vegetables. Nirmala Sitharaman, the Finance Minister of India commented in 2019 that she does not eat much onion or garlic, in response to the rising prices of these two vegetables in India  (Agencies). Sitharaman can afford highly-priced vegetables, unlike the masses. Thus, asking them to adopt veganism is to ask them to starve.

    As an ecofeminist, I would assert the need for sustainable living concept in India, considering the plight of the human and non-human. However, industry-produced vegan foods do no good to the marginalised whose source of meat is locally bred cattle and poultry, or locally sourced fish. Without giving the oppressed Indian a viable reason to adopt veganism, we cannot call ourselves proponents of vegan ecofeminism. And unless we demonstrate how veganism needs to be linked with ecofeminism to enunciate its benefits, we will fail to transform our ecofeminism into praxis. Our obsession with protecting a certain domesticated animal because of our (sexual) reverence for its reproductivity, while endorsing the consumptive exploitation of other animals might not make us hypocritical in the majority’s eyes, but it will certainly put into question the authenticity of our ecofeminism.

    References:

    Agencies. “’I Don’t Eat Much Onion’: Sitharaman in Lok Sabha – Times of India.” The Times of India, TOI, 5 Dec. 2019, 12:28 IST, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/i-dont-eat-much-of-onion-says-sitharaman-in-lok-sabha/articleshow/72379267.cms.

    Ambedkar, B. R. The Untouchables. Siddharth Books, 2008.

    Gaard, Greta Claire. “Vegetarian Ecofeminism: A Review Essay.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2002, pp. 117–146., doi:10.1353/fro.2003.0006.

    Ganesan, Rama. “Brahminical Patriarchy & Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat.” Feminism in India, 10 Sept. 2021, feminisminindia.com/2020/12/25/carol-adams-the-sexual-politics-of-meat-brahminical-patriarchy/.

    “India Muslim Women ‘Raped’ in Fatal Attack ‘over Beef’.” BBC News, BBC, 12 Sept. 2016, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-37336050.

    Kailasa Hindu Feminism. Worshipping cow on Mother’s Day. Facebook, 10 May 2020. https://m.facebook.com/HinduFeminism/photos/a.359124804952763/606856446846263/?type=3&source=57

    Shahani, Shradha. “7 Indian Mock Meat Brands to Try If You like Mutton, Chicken, Seafood.” Condé Nast Traveller India, Condé Nast Traveller India, 6 Dec. 2020, www.cntraveller.in/story/7-indian-mock-meat-brands-to-try-if-you-like-goa-mutton-chicken-seafood-mumbai-delhi-chennai-hyderabad/.

    Sondheim, Peter. “Op-Ed: The Abuse of Dairy Cows Is a Feminist Issue. the ‘Moo Too’ Movement Is Here.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 4 Mar. 2020, www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-03-04/dairy-cows-moo-too-movement-biden.

    Team, IndiaSpend. “Every Third Indian Cop Thinks Mob Violence over Cow Slaughter Is ‘Natural’: New Survey.” Indiaspend, Indiaspend, 28 Aug. 2019, www.indiaspend.com/every-third-indian-cop-thinks-mob-violence-over-cow-slaughter-is-natural-new-survey/.

    Wire Staff. “Assam: Activist Threatened with Rape, Acid Attacks for Condemning Beef Arrests.” The Wire, 10 Apr. 2017, thewire.in/rights/bondita-acharya-beef-bajrang-dal.

    [i] Godmen is a colloquial albeit pejorative term used to describe self-proclaimed gurus with cult following who claim that they are the only ones who have received the word of God. A Hindu godman, Sadhguru asserted in an interview taken by NDTV​ ​Consulting Editor Barkha Dutt that Indian culture has never recommended beef eating. Sadhguru’s use of Indian as a monolithic cultural label is highly debatable, due to the geopolitical diversity and his deliberate choice of the term refers to a subcontinental past prior to the rule of the Muslim emperors.

    Author:

    Debadrita Saha is the author of a blog post.

  • Challenging Mother Nature through the Feminised Imagery of the Moon: An Ecofeminist Reading of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath

    Challenging Mother Nature through the Feminised Imagery of the Moon: An Ecofeminist Reading of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath

    Photograph taken by Artist on Unsplash

    This essay explores the ecofeminist characteristics of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Employing an ecofeminist lens offers a novel approach to studying their shared vision of nature across literary movements. This essay centres on how the poets challenged the essentialist link between nature and women through Radcliffe’s “Sunset” (1791) and Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (1961). Both poems explore empowerment and control of the environment through the feminised imagery of the Moon.

    While critics such as Jane Stabler and Alison Milbank have started to unpack the impact of Radcliffe’s poetry, the ecofeminist characteristics of her verses have remained relatively unaddressed in recent scholarship. In his eco-critical reading of Radcliffe’s novels, Christopher Hitt states that “the visionary is apprehended only in fleeting glimpses, obliquely and indefinitely” (139). The feminised Moon in Radcliffe’s verses, especially the “pale orb” in “Sunset”, is one such example of a “fleeting” and “oblique” symbol of motherhood and the natural world. “Sunset” is a poem narrated by the heroine Adeline in The Romance of the Forest.The twenty-two line single verse poem begins with the onset of Twilight, a soft, obscuring and nurturing female force, characteristic perhaps of an “Edenic Evening” (Milbank 147). The first twelve lines of the poem are devoted to establishing “Ev’ning’s dome”, a space seemingly constructed by female figures who control the transition into the night (Radcliffe 297).

    The appearance of the Moon contrasts with the shadow-casting of Meek Twilight. Countering the gloomy “purple” and “gray” hues, the Moon relights the earth by “throwing her radiance wide” (Radcliffe 297). Her power is concentrated in a sharp and bright “line”, which is at odds with the inky “curling tide”. The “pale orb” ushers in an unpredictable flow of syllables, couplets, and a triplet: 

    Or the Moon’s pale orb appear,
    Throwing her line of radiance wide,
    Far o’er the lightly-curling tide,
    That seems the yellow sands to chide. (Radcliffe 297)

    The unbalanced succession of ‘-ide’ rhymes speaks to wildness in nature. The water commanded by the gravitational force of the moon “chides”, or rather “scolds” the sand, suggestive of raising a child (Johnson 365-6). Radcliffe gives the impression that the guiding hand of the maternal Moon shapes the coast, but this mother figure is not necessarily a gentle force. Her “chiding” juxtaposes the sweep of Meek Twilight’s “shadows” over the landscape. However, the final disruption of the scene comes not from the stars, Moon, or shadowy female figures who have established a silence, but from the distant activities of sailors and oars on the surface of the water. These sounds, which ride the “dying wave,” hail in a masculine gothic presence, immiscible with the evening space (Milbank 147, Passey 194).

    Like Radcliffe’s poetry, ecocriticism remains an under-researched area in Plath’s work, with only a handful of critics, such as Tracy Brain, Scott Knickerbocker, and Irena Ragaišienė, engaging with the ecological aspects of her writings. The figure of the Moon in Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” challenges the essentialist link between women and nature. Plath wrote the poem in October 1961 in Devon. She reflects on a tree growing next to a churchyard, visible from her office window. The material existence of the tree that still stands in the village of North Tawton highlights that without the natural tree, there are no “trees of the mind” that dominate the speaker’s imagination (Plath 172). “The Moon and the Yew Tree” not only rejects the essentialist view of ‘Mother Nature’ but removes the dominant structure of patriarchy altogether. The four seven-line stanzas are characterised by gothic imagery and isolation. In this ambiguous, feminised landscape, the Yew appears as a death-tree, and the Moon represents the antithesis of the nurturing Christian mother. Christina Britzolakis argues that Plath “inverts Romantic lunar symbolism and refuses empathetic identification” (126). Other critics like Judith Kroll noted the influence of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess in Plath’s Moon-Muse, particularly the Moon as a Triple Goddess, such as Hecate (Kroll 44).

    The use of the female pronoun personifies the Moon and singles it out as the only living subject. The Moon “is bald and wild. / And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence” (Plath 173). Here, Plath portrays the Moon as a violent supernatural entity that humans cannot control. Escaping from a male-dominated society symbolised by the physical presence of the church, the speaker desires the ambiguous maternal Moon and the ominous presence of the yew tree. The poem contrasts the Christian religious setting of the churchyard with a pagan Moon-mother, which challenges anthropocentric views of nature: “The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. / How I would like to believe in tenderness –––” (Plath 173). Here, the Moon signifies the freedom of nature as she’ releases’ the flying creatures into the night. The speaker longs for a mutually respectful and intimate connection, similar to what she perceives to be between the Moon and nature. She questions the legitimacy of the Christian mother figure and prefers the non-hierarchical and authentic maternalism of the Moon, suggesting an ecofeminist reading of the human and nonhuman relationship.

    In Radcliffe and Plath’s poems, the “pale orb” or “White as a knuckle” face of the Moon represents an empowered female force in a gothicised landscape. Although these poets are part of different literary movements, both use a maternal Moon figure to symbolise a challenge to patriarchal structures. Radcliffe achieves this through an environment under female control, where the Moon relights and reshapes the darkened earth. On the other hand, Plath expresses an interest in nature without a dominant human presence, counters the simplicity of a ‘motherly’ Mother Nature, and presents the ambiguous Moon and the deathly Yew as independent entities.

    Works Cited:

    Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Harlow: Longman, 2001.

    Britzolakis, Christina. “‘Gothic Subjectivity’.” Sylvia Plath. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. 115-146.

    Hitt, Christopher. “Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century.” College Literature, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 123–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115211. Accessed 19 Apr. 2022.

    Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, A History of the Language, and An English Grammar. 3rd ed., vol. 1, London: Various, 1765, https://link-gale-com.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/CB0131375552/GDCS?u=livuni&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=4e749f2d&pg=365.

    Knickerbocker, K. ““Bodied Forth in Words”: Sylvia Plath’s Ecopoetics.” College Literature 36.3 (2009): 1-27.

    Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2007.

    Milbank, Alison. “Milton, Melancholy and the Sublime in the ‘Female’ Gothic from Radcliffe to Le Fanu.” Women’s Writing, vol. 1, no. 2, 1994, pp. 143–60.

    Passey, Joan. “Sound and Silence: The Aesthetics of the Auditory in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe.” Horror Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 2016, pp. 189–204, doi:10.1386/host.7.2.189_1.

    Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

    Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest. Edited by Chloe Chard, Oxford University Press, 2009.

    Ragaišienė, I. “‘I am not a Tree with my Root in the Soil’: Ecofeminist Revisions of the Tree/Root Dialectics in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry.” Journal of Ecocriticism 1.2 (2009): 31-41.

    Stabler, Jane, ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Poetry: The Poetics of Refrain and Inventory’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 185–202 <https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139507448.015>

    Authors:

    Dorka Tamás has submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Exeter, which explores the supernatural themes in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Her research interest includes literary representations of magic and witchcraft and the relationship between the natural environment and supernatural subthemes across literature and culture.

    Roslyn Irving is a PhD candidate co-supervised by the University of Liverpool and XJTLU. Her research centres on Ann Radcliffe’s third novel, The Romance of the Forest and the author’s eighteenth-century socio-political environment.

  • The Experience of Environmental Epiphany in the Lives of A. Leopold, T. Hill, and A. Schweitzer

    The Experience of Environmental Epiphany in the Lives of A. Leopold, T. Hill, and A. Schweitzer

    Can a very short event change one’s outlook on the natural environment? Environmental awareness can be attained through formal and non-formal education, as well as through active engagement in environmental activities. However, a number of historical figures witnessed a change in their outlooks in the blink of an eye. This contribution explores the impact on environmental epiphanies on humans in a human/non-human encounter by showing their role in triggering powerful emotions and a long-lasting change in the character of three environmentalist figures from the 20th century: Aldo Leopold, Thomas Hill, Jr., and Albert Schweitzer.

    A number of definitions have been given to environmental epiphanies. According to Joanne Vining and Melinda S. Merrick, they are “experiences in which one’s perception of the essential meaning of their relationship to nature shifts in a meaningful manner”.[i] Emmanuel Levinas refers to these experiences when he states that a sudden encounter with a nonhuman may cause unexpected ethical obligation on the part of the agent. These are occasions when we become inadvertently ethically responsible for an agonizing nonhuman. This responsibility emanates from our corporeal response to its suffering (body agency); it takes places before any rational decision on our part (pre-reflexivity); it is characterized by immediate rather mediated communication (immediacy), and it makes the agent lose control in the presence of the nonhuman (loss of control).[ii] In brief, Levinas’s theory suggests that we do not always resort to rationalization in order to sympathize with nonhumans. What is missing in Levinas’s view is that before environmental epiphanies can create an ethical obligation, they stir strongly felt emotions. And after they create the ethical obligation, their impact becomes long-lasting.

    I began reflecting upon environmental epiphanies during a group forest walk in a natural park in Oujda, Morocco (the picture above). After walking for some time in the park, my friends and I decided to take a short break. The topic of our discussion shifted towards the ways in which our lived experiences with the natural environment were similar to those of various leading environmentalists. When it was my turn, I started talking about the life of American environmentalist Aldo Leopold, his experience with the forest, and how a single epiphanic event turned his outlook upside down. Leopold loved hunting deer, but more predators in his region meant fewer of them. That was the main reason for his decision to kill wolves, bears and other animals. The turning point in his life was when he shot a grey wolf and saw a “fierce green fire dying in her eyes”. This brief scene was so powerful that he “realized then that there was something new to [him] in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain”.[iii] Although that new thing remained unexplained in the rest of his essay,[iv] he seems to suggest that the gaze in the wolf’s eyes stirred up his emotions and had a lasting effect on his philosophy. This could be noticed in Leopold’s pioneering role in the shift of American environmentalism towards a more holistic policy based on the importance of preserving predators as necessary regulators of biodiversity.

    Leopold was not the only person to have had such an epiphanic experience based on a single event. American professor of philosophy, Thomas Hill Jr. underwent a similar experience that affected his emotions and reshaped his approach with the natural environment. Seeing his “wealthy eccentric”[v] neighbour cut down a lovely tree to pave his way with asphalt as an economical strategy made Hill wonder “what sort of person would do that?” rather than “whose rights have been violated?” or “how has this action minimized overall happiness?”.[vi] It was the first time Hill questioned the character of a human being in regard to a nonhuman entity rather than just considering the possible justifications for such unmindful action. The environmental epiphany of seeing the tree being cut down left him “puzzled over how to explain his own intuitions regarding the wrongness of such situation”,[vii] and marked a long-lasting change in his personality. Small as it might seem, that scene made Hill conjure up memories of human alteration of the Appalachian wilderness.[viii] This was so unexpected that it further deepened his reflection upon the question of human character and the environment for the rest of his life.

    A final example of “Aha” moments[ix] activating new environmental mindsets can be found in the life of the German-French religious philosopher Albert Schweitzer. While travelling upriver on a barge in Africa, “at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase reverence for life”.[x] As Desjardins further explains the concept, that epiphanic moment triggered in Schweitzer a spiritual mix of wonder and awe at nature. Translated from the German phrase Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, reverence for life – as Schweitzer conceives of it – is based on the compulsion to value all other organisms which are capable of development by preserving them and promoting their well-being.[xi] His search for a connection between the affirmative attitude of life and ethics vanished with that mind-blowing more-than-human scene because he finally found that the feeling of reverence for life was the missing link.[xii] Schweitzer was mindful of the natural environment even before this scene. Still,  his realization that we can become ethical only when we consider life as such as sacred to us, and only when we devote ourselves to supporting all life in need of help was new, gained through this epiphanic encounter.[xiii]

    To conclude,these reflections on environmental epiphanies came at a time when international parties were meeting at the COP26 conference in Glasgow[xiv] to make sure that the promises of the Paris agreement were kept. Still, inspiring global climate action needs a particular type of awareness which does not occur only through official meetings and detailed action plans, but may also arise through unexpected encounters with the natural environment that are just as vital for us to meet the big challenges of the 21st century. In this light, despite the influences of social and educational factors on the attitudes of Leopold, Hill, and Schweitzer as environmentally responsible citizens,[xv] their exposure to the natural world was substantial in making a great leap in their lives.[xvi] What about you? Have you ever come across a strong unexpected scene, like the view of a heart-breaking animal, a creeping wildfire or the fall of a giant tree which has categorically reshaped your attitude about nature?[xvii] If so, please write your comments below.[xviii]

    [i] Storie and Vining, “From Oh to Aha: Characteristics and Types of Environmental Epiphany Experiences”, Human Ecology Review, ANU Press, 2018, 157, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26506666 (Accessed 1 November 2021).

    [ii] Marais, Michael,  “Impossible Possibilities: Ethics and Choice in JM Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Disgrace”, English Academy Review, 2012, 118-23. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2012.695480 (Accessed: 1 November 2021).

    [iii] Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford University Press, 1968 [1949], 130.

    [iv] Leopold’s essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” is included in his collection A Sand County Almanac.

    [v] Hill, Thomas, Jr. “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments”, Environmental Ethics, 1983, 1. Available at: https://dx.doi.org/enviroethics19835327 (Accessed: 1 November 2021).

    [vi] Cafaro, Philip, “Environmental Virtue Ethics” in Lorraine Besser-Jones and Michael Slote (eds.),  The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, Routledge, 2015, 1-2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203071755 (Accessed: 1 November 2021).

    [vii] Cafaro, Philip, “Environmental Virtue Ethics” in Lorraine Besser-Jones and Michael Slote (eds.),  The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, Routledge, 2015, 1-2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203071755  (Accessed: 1 November 2021).

    [viii] Hill, Thomas, Jr. “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments”, Environmental Ethics, 1983, 1.

    [ix] “Aha” is a German and English exclamatory expression of surprise at discovering something. Melinda Storie and Joanne Vining call it a “lightbulb” moment, which is also synonymous with an “epiphany” moment (168). For further details, kindly see Storie and Vining, “From Oh to Aha: Characteristics and Types of Environmental Epiphany Experiences”, Human Ecology Review, ANU Press, 2018, 155–80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26506666 (Accessed 1 November 2021).

    [x] Schweitzer qtd. in Joseph, R., Desjardins, Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy. Fifth edition. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 2013 [2001], 133.

    [xi] Schweitzer qtd. in Joseph, R., Desjardins, Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy. Fifth edition. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 2013 [2001], 133.

    [xii] Schweitzer, Albert, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography. Trans. Antje Bultmann Lemke, The John Hopkins University Press, 1998 [1930], 154.

    [xiii] Schweitzer, Albert, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography. Trans. Antje Bultmann Lemke, The John Hopkins University Press, 1998 [1930], 157-8.

    [xiv] The Conference Of the Parties (COP26) took place from October 31st to November 12th, 2021.

    [xv] An example of that is Leopold’s dissatisfaction with the nearly worldwide ecological short-sightedness in the 1930s and 1940s (see Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human, The Natural of Being Human: from Environmentalism to Consciousness, John Hopkins University Press, 2009, 81).

    [xvi] Similarly, Storie and Vining recommend that educators among others should “provide opportunities for Environmental Epiphanies by ensuring that the public continues to have access to natural areas with room for solitary contemplation.” (2018, 175).

    [xvii] A study of 50 American adults revealed that 80% of them reported drastic changes in their attitudes, values, or behaviour after experiencing environmental epiphanies (See Storie and Vining 2018, 164).

    [xviii] This contribution might pave the way for new lines of thought, namely the generalizability or culture-specificity of unexpected environmentalism as well as ages at which one is most likely to experience it, and the importance of exposing youth to the natural environment in order to open their minds to unexpected possibilities of sympathy and care for the nonhuman.

  • “Survival is insufficient”: The cautionary power of speculative fiction

    “Survival is insufficient”: The cautionary power of speculative fiction

    Image by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

    Current headlines abound with apocalyptic references to the global climate emergency. The 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in August 2021 brought into the mainstream what climate scientists already knew – dramatic and life-altering changes to the climate are much closer than many of us expected. The ambiguous language is gone. Where before there were qualifiers about the likelihood of impacts and degrees of certainty regarding human responsibility, now we are told that the situation is unequivocal, unprecedented, indisputable and immediate. The proximity of potentially disastrous and irreversible climate impacts has come as a complete shock for many people. We thought we had more time. Given this accelerated schedule, we wonder how to respond, how to stay hopeful. What can we do when it feels like the precipice is closer than we imagined?

    Speculative fiction can provide insights into how people might respond to impending crises at different timescales, and what the consequences of those responses could potentially be. With the shortened timelines expressed in the IPCC report, it appears useful to consider three novels where the characters are confronted with crises that unfold over an extended period and which leave various amounts of time remaining before their version of the end of the world. The novels I have selected to do this are Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Seveneves by Neil Stephensen, and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. None of these novels have happy endings. In many ways, the authors seem to be warning against certain attitudes and types of responses rather than suggesting solutions.

    The characters in Station Eleven, for instance, are the survivors of a highly contagious virus which wiped out ninety-five percent of people. The novel looks back on how individuals processed and responded to the immediate threat posed by the Georgian Flu. Many of them managed to escape infection and the rapid loss of life by barricading themselves in places cut off from the rest of society. Outside their safe havens there was widespread panic, looting and hoarding of supplies, and quarantine of entire cities and countries. One man survived the initial crisis inside an airport terminal, haunted for years by his last phone call. Instead of calling his wife and child, he chose to talk to his business partners. The shallow, empty, professional terminology (circle back, put a pin in that) plays and replays in his memory.

    There are clear parallels between these responses and those currently manifesting to climate change. Populist governments across Europe and the United States are already threatening to turn against climate migrants and isolate themselves rather than committing to painful cuts in emissions and consumption that could potentially improve future conditions for vulnerable people. Climate denial persists in some arenas, and even those who believe in climate change may continue their lives as usual. If we trust the lessons of Station Eleven, in hindsight we will be haunted by our failure to act now to cherish and preserve what is important to us.

    The novel Seveneves explores humanity’s response to the destruction of the moon and the knowledge that within two years all life on Earth will be extinct. Governments of the world come together to expand the International Space Station and try to preserve humanity in the form of 1,500 randomly selected representatives. Throughout the novel, there are widespread concerns that the governments of the world do not actually believe in their own desperate projects. They simply want to pacify their citizens by being seen doing something. In the meantime, many people continue commuting to work and school and paying their bills on time, although Stephensen does make a point of noting that the home improvement industry has collapsed.

    The performative actions of world governments in Seveneves are paralleled by some responses to climate change. Despite growing awareness of threats, the temptation to continue business as usual looms large. Many countries take steps that are just enough to be seen to be doing something, even if they are fully aware that it will not be enough. In addition, a phenomenon called greenwashing has emerged, where any kind of product or activity is claimed to be “green” or “climate friendly”, regardless of its real impacts.

    Finally, in The Three-Body Problem a human-instigated crisis likely to lead to the eradication of humanity looms four hundred years in the future. The crisis was caused by people who decided that human civilisation was beyond redemption and invited the destruction of all human life by broadcasting our location to a hostile alien world. The extended timeframe of this novel means that humanity moves through several stages of denial, preparation and hopelessness. At the beginning of the crisis so many resources are poured into defending the Earth that rationing and shortages of basic necessities lead to a period called the “great ravine” where the global population plummets. Later, people decide that technology has advanced enough to save them and become complacent. At the international level, rich governments refuse to share technology and try to manoeuvre so that if anyone survives beyond the crisis they will emerge with more power and control. Low-income countries feel excluded and increasingly desperate, with sometimes violent consequences.

    Again these responses are frighteningly similar to what we see unfolding today. The refusal of rich countries to share their technologies or prioritise global concerns over their own reflects responses to climate change (and COVID-19, another urgent problem but beyond the scope of this post). Debates between proponents of degrowth and technological optimists expose a fundamental divide over how much our lifestyles and economies need to shift. Even further, Cixin Liu describes in detail the dangers of pouring resources into saving the future at the expense of the present. The Three-Body Problem poses a stark warning about the loss of democracy and the risk of losing our humanity in a moment of desperation. He causes us to wonder, what if we manage to stop climate change but, in the meantime, a real “great ravine” happens and millions or billions of people lose their lives? Will it have been worth it? What is the alternative?

    Even though Station Eleven, Seveneves and The Three-Body Problem present fatalistic doomsday scenarios, these novels seem to suggest that we have some agency in deciding between multiple pathways through catastrophe, not just in technical terms but in terms of what kind of future we want on the other side. In the aftermath of the Georgian Flu in Station Eleven, the remaining people decide that “survival is insufficient”. Survivors prioritize keeping art, music, creativity and beauty alive. The question in Seveneves after the decimation of life on Earth similarly is not just how to stay alive, but what kind of life preserves our humanity and is worth living.

    These novels are not optimistic or uplifting stories of how we can prevent climate change or survive the emergency we are already in. Instead, they hold a mirror to our modern society which highlights certain potential flaws in our current tendencies. The authors have each taken an intensified hypothetical scenario and followed it through to its logical conclusion. Such stories provide a source of caution and critique by centring the undesirable consequences of acting in certain ways which parallel responses we are currently seeing to climate change. By making these possibilities visible they give us an opportunity to rethink our own behaviour and perhaps even try to change it.

    Author:

    Elizabeth MacAfee is a PhD candidate in Society, Development and Planning at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Elizabeth has a master’s degree in International Environmental Studies from NMBU and a bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science from the University of Puget Sound. The topic of Elizabeth’s dissertation is drinking water quality governance and planning in Kaolack, Senegal. She is interested in the ethical aspects of drinking water quality governance and frames her thesis using concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory. Elizabeth is also a member of a speculative fiction book club in her free time. She read all three books referenced in this post with the book club and the ideas presented here grew out of those discussions.

  • Humility and Serious Noticing: Résumé of a Discussion Round on “The Everyday in British New Nature Writing”

    Humility and Serious Noticing: Résumé of a Discussion Round on “The Everyday in British New Nature Writing”

    © Mona Eendra

    On June 8th, 2021, my faculty hosted an online discussion round on “The Everyday in British New Nature Writing” with three acclaimed guests of the field: poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie, author and naturalist Mark Cocker, and ecocritical scholar Terry Gifford. The talk was both part of the undergraduate course on ecopoetry I had been teaching and open to the public, attracting an audience of about 50 people from all over the world. In the following blog post, the insights and outcomes of the discussion will be recapitulated.

    As the host, I opened the talk by asking: What, after all, is Nature Writing? While acknowledging the very difficulty of this question, we agreed that such writing usually “dwells on the relationship between humans and the more-than-human parts of the world” (Cocker) and in so doing “foregrounds the natural world, rather than just sketching it as a background to human dramas” (Jamie). Regarding its form, Cocker offered the apt definition of Nature Writing as “semi-non-fictional prose” – which legitimises the use of fiction in a field otherwise seen as non-fiction, as a tool that can help compress an experience into literature.

    Despite the potential fluidity of the field, there is currently a worrying trend: Jamie diagnosed an “ubiquity”, even a “cacophony” of first-person narratives. Cocker added that this might be due to the assumed popularity of the Nature Writing label in the publishing world, which leads to it being applied to works which are more about the identity of their authors, using the natural world as a mere “vehicle for the self”, instead of giving voice to the more-than-human. Accordingly, we wondered how we can get away from this overabundance of first-person narratives. How can Nature Writing “bring something out for us which is special about our lives and which is not us” (Cocker)?

    One way could lie, as Gifford suggests, in cultivating a “discipline of attention” and “finding space to make a focus” amongst all the other preoccupations of the everyday. In quoting James Wood, Jamie phrases this as “serious noticing”. There should be a moment of such serious attention, she emphasises, before we do anything at all, be it writing, painting, or doing science. Put as a simple question: “Why don’t we just take an hour to look?” (Jamie)

    Aside from making more space between daily preoccupations, this prompt could also mean that you undertake a nature walk during which you do not move at all – Cocker’s ideal version of such a walk. To get past ourselves and break down the seemingly ordinary character of the everyday, Cocker also suggests we find ways of seeing differently: using lenses, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes. It is all about shifting our perspective, about “re-orienting our entire imaginative and moral universe” in order to realise that “we are surrounded by the miracle of life everyday” (Cocker).

    While changing our attention in this spirit is a task for everyone, further challenges arise for the writer, as we have seen above. Poetry might offer a way out of the trappings of first-person narratives, with its playful qualities and its ability to ask questions, as Gifford highlights. Cocker adds that “poetry has a way of narrating the inner life of things”. He sees this exemplified in the work of Jamie herself: “The language she uses is like penetrating from the everyday to the miraculous itself.”

    In contrast to this, the linguistic structures used in scientific language have a tendency to “completely deaden any interest in the subject itself”, as Cocker criticises. He has also highlighted this problem in his book Our Place:

    “[Through a] confusing multiplicity of landscape designations [and an exclusive use of scientific nomenclature] environmentalists have constructed a barrier to the general public’s understanding of nature and of environmental activity. It should be pulled down to make life simpler. Naturalists and environmentalists need to recover the art of speaking plainly. […] The creation of common names for all parts of nature is probably the biggest low-cost change that environmentalists could implement.” (301-303)

    Removing such linguistic barriers might also help free people of a certain unease they feel in encountering the natural world “because they know they don’t know” (Jamie). There are different ways of knowing, as Gifford remarks, and science is just one of them. Everyday experiences and poetry can open up further ways. In them, naming the other parts of life then becomes an act of both connection and respect.

    Respect towards the more-than-human also entails understanding “the frailty and limitations of being us” (Cocker). This realisation need not frighten us; rather, it can help us to be humble and honour what is beyond us. In such awareness, we can heed to an advice Jamie quotes from George Orwell: “The writer should be as a pane of glass.” She adheres to this in her own practice, polishing sentences by “clarifying, clarifying, clarifying” – until they “ideally crystallise into something you can see right through.” Transparent language that takes its roots in the common and everyday will “let the reader participate in the natural world beyond” (Jamie).

    This insight serves as a summary of what we were able to learn from the discussion round: Paying serious attention before writing and then employing a clear and humble language will not only make the reader feel part of the scene described but also help them find greater value in their own everyday nature.

    Works Cited

    Cocker, Mark. Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before it is Too Late? London: Jonathan Cape, 2018.

    A recording of the full discussion can be found here: https://seafile.rlp.net/f/97adce4ca9dd4fb98781/

  • Gr/ecocriticism: A Conversation with Nikoleta Zampaki

    Gr/ecocriticism: A Conversation with Nikoleta Zampaki

    © Miltos Gikas

    This series wants to know what contemporary ecocritical research is like – what people are working on, and how they’re doing it. We’re asking PGRs and ECRs from across the world to discuss their work with us, reflecting on the ways in which their social and cultural contexts influence their understanding of what they do. We’ll ask our contributors for a short biography and starting proposition, and then open space for a conversation.

    Dr Nikoleta Zampaki is a Post-doc Researcher at the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She was Instructor at the Utah University in the U.S.A. Her disciplines are Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Digital Humanities, and Comparative Literature. She is editor and reviewer at many journals overseas, Associate and Managing Editor at the Journal of Ecohumanism, and current member of Education Team of NASA, V.I.N.E.-Glenn Research Center. She has also participated in many conferences and she is a multilingual student by working on English, French, Romanian, Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Maori, and Turkish. She is also co-editor with Professor Peggy Karpouzou of the book series “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Rowman & Littlefield, and “Environmental Humanities” at TPLondon based in the U.K.

    Nikoleta is in conversation with Arcadiana co-editor Milo Harries.

    MH:

    So, Nikoleta, what’s your starting proposition?

    NZ:

    To speak of Environmental Humanities in Modern Greek Studies is at the same time a way to speak of the future of Modern Greek humanities. Human beings and the more than human world come out of that future.

    MH:

    Your prompt suggests to me that you think that the future of Modern Greek Studies will inevitably be ecological – that the humanities already are and will have to be ‘more-than-humanities’. Is that accurate?

    NZ:

    My main question here is if Modern Greek Studies could take up the concepts of nature, human being, ecological citizenship to shape new perspectives on our reading practices in literature, arts, modern philosophy and so on.

    If one inquires in Modern Greek literature departments about the current state of ecocriticism in the country, the answer tends to be that certainly not much as be going on in rather ‘unusual’ or ‘exotic’ field. However, on closer examination it becomes obvious that environmental approaches to literature and culture are actually popular in Greece, but in contrast to other European countries, the amount of work done in the field of Environmental Humanities has not increased in recent years.

    MH:

    I see – so you understand your research as introducing an ecological lens to a Greek critical context?

    NZ:

    Yes, or perhaps several lenses: my PhD thesis in progress brings together three main disciplines such as Ecocriticism, Ecopsychology, and Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty under the term of Ecophenomenology in American and Modern Greek Poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.

    I’m grateful, in this, for the support, strong willingness, efforts and encouragement shown to me by my Professors Mr. Dimitris Angelatos and Ms. Peggy Karpouzou who are literary scholars and theorists of literature and culture, and have been avid readers of the eco-lensing in my research.

    MH:

    You mention ‘lenses’ in your response – how, or to what, will you be applying these critical, psychological, and phenomenological filters?

    NZ:

    My comparative study case brings together these three epistemological terrains by studying nature and body in Walt Whitman and Angelos Sikelianos’ poetic works. The translation of ‘universal flesh’s’ rhetorics, expressed by Merleau-Ponty, in the ecopoetics and zoopoetics of both poets, is a central means of understanding natural and human world-being, and transcends any dualistic boundaries between body and ‘nature’. The in-habitation of ‘universal flesh’ is held through the embodied and lived experience which shapes an eco-identity of both poets. This kind of identity is perceived in terms of an ecological citizenship that resists the irrationality and logocentrism of poets’ era.

    MH:

    And does this project have specific resonance or importance for a potential Greek ecocriticism (or even – sorry – Grecocriticism)?

    NZ:

    The notion of oikos (home), polis (city) and citizenship have roots in Ancient Greek Antiquity. Specifically, in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Culture the citizens were liberal beings and closely connected to nature and natural daily practices, found in religion, medicine, cuisine etc. Nature was an anthropomorphized being and adored as goodness, the Mother of all Beings. The citizens were active beings in all spheres of life and this action could be considered as a primary form of ecological awareness. Protection of and respect for nature was one of the major aspects of their biocosmic perception. This perception is found in literature and culture right up to the late 20th century, where pastoral poetry, nature writings, lyric poetry, movements of Romanticism, Symbolism etc. are full of nature and body, and the symbiosis of nature and humans, expressed in varying ways.

    My research aims to revive an eco-sense and raise the possibility of discussing an ‘eco-turn’ in the Modern Greek Studies. Two central questions, therefore, one global, one local:

    How can we live in balance with all of life on Earth?

    How about the Greek eco-humanist perspective?

    MH:

    I see – so it’s a question of global concerns thought through and into a local frame, shaped by Greek cultural and intellectual histories (particularly concerning citizenship)?

    NZ:

    Yes: the Modern Greek Studies requires a reimagining of who we were and are, and the story that we live by. Through my ecophenomenological perspective we could observe the constant interplays of the global phenomena which are in progress and try to understand their complex mechanics. New reading practices of Modern Greek Literature will not only offer an interpretation of nature and body as representations, ideas, expressions etc. in the texts, but they will shape our ethos and offer a new model of thinking in praxis: the extension and expansion of a new kind of eco-cosmopolitanism, a universal perspective of partial subjectivities in space that lead to the shaping of an identity of eco-citizen.

    Here emphasis will be given to the meanings of cosmos and universal being which are ascribed to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘flesh of the world’. The latter is considered to be the classical beauty of Wholeness, and it based on the constant chiasms of nature and body in time and space. This symbiosis is the unfolding of an eco-identity which describes the ‘birth’ of a new planetary perception of human action: an eco–flâneur, like us, but found throughout history. This kind of action could be the Greek eco-humanist perspective of a globalized and cosmopolitan being in both theory and praxis.