Introduction
No one needs to be told that the early European settlers of this land thought of the earth's natural resources as exploitable commodities, raw materials out of which to make a civilization in God's image. The land was here to be conquered and used for humans' ends and God's purposes. The current state of the environment in America is the result of centuries of this philosophy that theoretically urges use without abuse but that, in the hands of mortal humans, too often becomes rationalized abuse. Nor is it any secret that the nation's dominant religion, Christianity, enabled and even dictated this attitude by denying any inherent value, being, spirit, presence, or sacredness to nature. Lynn White, Jr., in his classic essay, "Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis," summarizes the process:
In Antiquity, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. . . . Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference toward the feelings of natural objects. . . . Man's effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled (Ecocriticism Reader 10).
The sacred was taken from nature and lodged in the heavens, where humans were to seek it. Underfoot was mere nature; above was sacrality; between was the human, whose purpose was to wonder how he (or she) stood with God above, not with the spirit of nature below. Hence, nature was exposed and made vulnerable to human exploitation that was not only justified by God but that was very close to a human duty to honor God's benevolence when He placed all these wonderful natural resources within our reach for our use and His glory.
Today the ideas of respect for earth and responsible stewardship of natural resources are being taken seriously. At the same time, however, we have also come to believe that all value, truth, and meaning are socially or linguistically constructed. No value, truth, or meaning resides in the world itself but is constructed out of social conventions (something is good today that was bad yesterday) or linguistic sleight-of-hand (by calling it good, it becomes good). Princeton University scholar William Howarth summarizes some aspects of contemporary thinking in his essay "Some Principles of Ecocriticism":
In the poststructural wave of discourse analysis, references to the natural sciences are almost entirely missing. Phenomena instead become cultural constructs, void of physical content and subject to cryptic readings . . . a bias echoed in New Historical readings of culture as shaped entirely by race, gender, class, money, and other factors of material life. . . . For deconstruction, on the other hand, all notions of order and structure become anathema, since language is assumed to have no stable meaning. This view is seen as mainly hostile to authoritarian rule, not as a new idea about nature or culture (Ecocriticism Reader 79-80).
Despite our new respect for the earth, the land remains in our contemporary intellectual culture a neutral site upon which humans project their values, which, fortunately, are now more likely to include recognition of the natural world's presence. Even so, postmodern nature remains in the tenuous position of surviving by humans' good graces.
Some would even question the continuing importance of place in human culture. Leonard Lutwack, in The Role of Place in Literature, contends that modern people have become so alienated from place (as a result of "the centralization of governing power and economic processes, the development of transportation and communication, the radical redistribution of dwelling places" [182-83]) that place has been displaced by movement as the significant fact of most people's lives. Place does not even count in the "peculiarly modern malaise called placelessness" (183). Places have become so standardized, the "Anyplace" syndrome, that place itself has lost its significance. Lutwack claims a "universal recognition" for this "new condition": the "dwindling importance of fixed places in the lives of individuals . . . the change from a life influenced by locations to a life governed by mobility and communications" (213). No one who has had to share a freeway with commuters speeding home while chatting on their cellular phones can doubt the contemporary importance of "mobility and communications."
Another Place is based upon a different premise articulated by professor of English Glen A. Love that it is time to recognize that "the current ideology which separates human beings from their environment is demonstrably and dangerously reductionist" for the simple reason that "the natural world is indubitably real and beautiful and significant" ("Revaluing" 213). A consistent theme in the poetry discussed here is that the West, as a land of imposing geography that varies from awesome prairies to towering mountains to crashing ocean waves with human-dwarfing deserts sprinkled about, has a spirit, or a variety of spirits depending on location. Furthermore, sensitive souls (such as poets) raised in or transplanted to places like the New Mexico desert, the Alaskan wilderness, or the Pacific shore absorb those spirits as part of their identities, and then the place's spirit--now integral to the poet's self--inevitably becomes part of the work that flows from the poet's creative spirit. Alaskan poet John Haines says, "I believe that there is a spirit of place, a presence asking to be expressed; and sometimes when we are lucky as writers, and quiet in a way few of us want to be anymore, a voice enters our own, becomes mingled with it, and we speak with a force and clarity not otherwise heard" (Country 19). In somewhat different terms, New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church says, "One has to emphasize that the character of the land will determine the nature of the people who settle on it." Californian Jane Hirshfield puts the idea into poetic form, in "The Song":
The tree, cut down this morning,
is already chainsawed and quartered, stripped
of its branches, transported and stacked.
Not an instant too early, its girl slipped away.
She is singing now, a small figure
glimpsed in the surface of the pond.
As the wood, if taken too quickly, will sing
a little in the stove, still remembering her.
The girl, the genius loci of the tree, escapes to inhabit the pond to continue her song that the poet hears and that then becomes Hirshfield's poem. The poets of the West affirm Love's assertion that "the natural world is indubitably real and beautiful and significant." How does that affirmation get translated into poetry and what does it look like in verse?
Words and places, we now are beginning to understand, are reciprocally influential. Yi-Fu Tuan, who has done as much as anyone to create the modern discipline of geography, makes a powerful case that "Speech is a component of the total force that transforms nature into a human place" ("Language and the Making of Place" 685) at all stages of cultural development, from the hunter-gatherer phase through the exploration and pioneer stage, and beyond. Tuan seems bewildered that, despite the evidence of words' power, "people still find it difficult to accept the seemingly magical idea that mere words can call places into being" ("Language" 691). The idea can be twisted a bit to claim the equally magical idea that mere places can call words into being. John Elder quotes evolutionist Ernst Mayr's phrase "allopatric speciation," which Elder says Mayr uses "to indicate the way in which a given landscape's character has evolutionary influence fully equal to that of intra- or interspecies competition; the development of species must therefore always be understood in localized terms" (Imagining the Earth 39). In Elder's words, "Poetry, too, becomes a manifestation of landscape and climate, just as the ecosystem's flora and fauna are. A human voice becomes the voice of a place" (39). Conversely, a place becomes the voice of a poet. In the words of historian Donald Worster:
Excerpt from Another Place: An Ecocritical Study of Selected Western American Poets Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Elkins. No portion of this excerpt may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Texas Christian University Press.