Part III with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: Okay, let me go back to modern environmentalism, which I only sort of brought up earlier. What does your book lead us to do with or in it?
AS: This is a delicate issue, as some people have read my book as a polemic against mainstream environmentalism, and that's not what I intended. A critique, yes--not a polemic. I don't simply want to dump the insights of the 20th century or discredit thinkers like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. This problem comes to a head in my discussion of John Muir, and it's true that to some extent I do attack his later career, when he was essentially a propagandist for the wilderness preservation agenda of the Sierra Club. I think the emphasis on wilderness has been detrimental to modern American environmentalism. Many Americans now associate ecology with nothing more than the effort to save places that contain "beautiful scenery" (as determined by a few aesthetic theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries). But I also take great pains in the book to celebrate Muir for the insights he came to in his earlier career as a Humboldtian explorer. In a nutshell, my hope in the book is to nudge us away from late Muir and toward early Muir in our environmental thinking.
WF: That difference being?
AS: The key difference is that the early Muir placed much less emphasis on simple beauty and wilderness escapism and much more emphasis on the significance of every part of the cosmos and on the need to evaluate the way societies structure themselves with regard to their environmental decision-making, their daily use of natural resources, their ecological footprint. Social structures, Muir realized in Alaska--whether some groups exploit others, whether jobs are more or less specialized, whether habitations are based on an ethic of adaptability or of conquest--have a huge impact on environmental integrity, which in turn matters greatly to social stability. Mainstream environmentalism has not completely lost that awareness, but it does not emphasize it sufficiently. We consistently need to frame environmental issues as social issues--particular kinds of social issues, but social issues nonetheless, in the same genus as human rights abuses, refugee crises, and the abandonment of the rule of law.
WF: From what you say, then, this is a matter of going beyond singular acts and onto ways of thinking, or patterns of living, or values, or...what am I getting at?
AS: Well, to put it more succinctly, those environmentalists who try to simplify the problem into one of defending particular, special places are, in my opinion, doing more harm than good. What we need right now is a generosity of spirit, a cosmopolitan openness to other perspectives, an awareness of how every place matters as much as every other place. The greatest ecological gains would come not from blocking oil drilling in wildlife preserves but from placing harsh limits on the consumption of resources by the world's wealthiest companies and citizens--in other words, by addressing social exploitation. The process may have to start with the fostering of empathy. Don't throw up the barriers around your garden; rather, try to understand how your standard of living automatically compromises the environments of less fortunate people. I don't mean to sound like all I want people to do is feel guilty. Nor do I want to blame environmentalists for our troubles (there are no simple enemies, but obviously the corporate and governmental sectors are where we need to focus our activism).
WF: As I read it, this is about promoting connections to the environment.
AS: I think so. The point is simply that we can never afford, in this era of the global, to close ourselves off. The current crisis demands more connectedness, more humility, more creative combinations of art and science, more thinking otherwise, more sacrifice, more journeying both inward and outward to see if we can't expand the realm of what we truly care about. If it were not acceptable to pollute anyone's community, then we would have no choice but to stop polluting. The stories of obscure 19th-century explorers struggling with their own prejudices ultimately give me hope, because I believe thought is a form of action, and if we can rethink what we take for granted every day, then we'll be headed down a promising path. End of sermon.
WF: You're also (were?) an environmental journalist. How did that kind of audience demand shape your later academic pursuits?
AS: This is another question that means a huge amount to me, so thanks again. I think there are a number of legitimate ways of answering "the audience question," the most honest of which for me is that I tried to write a book that is similar to the kinds of books I most like to read. Every audience makes certain demands, and there is no way of pleasing them all. But given that much of my book adds up to a rant against specialization, you can guess that I wouldn't be particularly sympathetic to the approach many academics take--that they are writing for an audience of a few specialists. On the other hand, I see no logic in the assertion that all books ought to be written for "broader audiences." Each author should be free to imagine his or her own audience. The generalization I would make is that I wish ALL authors would take writing seriously as writing instead of thinking of books simply as convenient ways of presenting research findings. All authors should be actively engaged in the search for a form and a voice that are well suited to their subject. That would certainly make scholarly writing a whole lot more interesting to me.
WF: This is actually related to on-going discussions at Scienceblogs (and, of course, beyond) about how and to whom scientists communicate. Plus, by way of self-reflexivity, it's certainly a dominant theme and purpose for this entire World's Fair site.
AS: Many scholars consider all non-scholarly writing to be inherently light-weight, and that drives me crazy. I am deeply committed to the idea that scholarship and journalism are not inherently incompatible. I try to write in layers, so that different people can connect to my writing in different ways. I do some of my scholarly argumentation in the text, but for much of it you have to be motivated to check out the endnotes. I try to tell a lot of stories, but also to use them both for their narrative appeal and for their analytical potential.
WF: Finally and most obviously, do you think Wes Anderson is likely best suited to make your book into a film?
AS: Well, I definitely want Wes to do the soundtrack. But I was thinking of Ang Lee as a possible director, since he did such a beautiful job with Brokeback Mountain (let's just say that, given how long male explorers went without seeing women, the movie version of The Humboldt Current might provide some insight into the "roots" of the "gay cowboy" motif).
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