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How writers abuse nature
It is a classic scenario: The artist walks into a grassy glade or wooded copse and sees a creature or something else naturally powerful yet benign—a swift deer or fox, a lumbering moose, a multicoloured sunset—and he or she, overcome with emotion, is inspired to write, paint, or take a photograph.
American Henry Thoreau is an early epitome of the nature writer: the keen observer with a solitary disposition, an openness to inspiration, and an appreciation for natural beauty. Such an artistic activity seems pure, pristine, and virtuous, but I would argue it is not necessarily innocent and there are some destructive dynamics at work in this process of the artist using nature as source material.
In northern BC, it is hard not to be affected by the land. In a big city like Vancouver you could get away with being insulated from the land and natural creatures quite successfully; you could be a mall brat, spend a lot of time in a car, and never leave the concrete under your feet. In Prince George, bears walk down Victoria Avenue and moose wander onto the UNBC campus. Unfortunately, even in Prince George, there is a profound kind of eco-illiteracy: we know nature through TV and art, read about it in books, watch as animals cross the road, but our practical knowledge about the nonhuman—animals, plants, and the land—is still amazingly sparse for most of us.
We adore nature. We need it and use it to understand ourselves. But the use of the land by nature artists is akin to our violent use of the land in our insatiable resource extraction and dumping of pollution. Nature writing has been around for centuries and so has human plundering of the land. The two are very possibly complicit. In postcolonial studies, one of the things we’ve noticed is how often the colonizer romanticizes the colonized (the 19th Century African, for example), and how that romanticization becomes a tool in the colonizing process. In this way, the colonized is easily understood in certain safe terms and, so, controlled. In this way art becomes complicit with economic and military agendas.
Are we doing the same when we invoke aesthetically pleasing, idealized, or stylized images of nature? This mediated representation denies the land something—its own agency or needs—for our own pleasure or needs. We colonize the land and its creatures.
This may sound like a condemnation of all nature writing, but it is not. What I have come to understand is that there are no absolutes, and that a variety of kinds of knowledge are necessary for healthy understanding. Artistic appreciation of land in itself would not be detrimental if there were a variety of relationships involved. But when was the last time you saw an artistic representation of subsistence farming? Of the ugly destruction of ecosystems? Of the less photogenic of creatures (why no slug art, for example)?
One of the ways to think about the problem differently is to address the language involved. Might the idea of “nature,” because of its historical development, be tossed aside in favour of something new? Our relationship with the non-human is a complex interweaving of habitats and relations. Where do we stand in that relationship? It is a relationship I, for one, am struggling with. I suppose it moves us all—some are moved to dominate, own, control, use; some are moved to feel, embrace, learn, interact, find a kind of peace and, ideally, enter into a 21st Century non-abusive relationship with nature.
By: William Emerson Williams
24 March 2009