Welcome to SNP. It’s been a little over a month since we launched this project on October 10th 2006 at a lecture by the Wormsloe Foundation’s Craig Barrow on the campus of the University of Georgia. I hope you’ve been back since a few times and found something interesting or surprising here. It’s our hope that this space of the Southern Nature Project will become a lively and active field in which we all can meet and exchange ideas and information about the Southern landscape. Log on often!
This will be the first in an on-going series of posts we’re calling “field notes,” a forum where one of us will present whatever happens to be crossing our radar at the moment. We’ll put up new field notes as often as we get them in. At first it might be just us (the site’s webmasters, myself and Dorinda Dallmeyer) whose voices you hear, but we’re hoping others will take up the call and contribute “field notes” from where you are. This month I have three issues I wanted to bring up:
Will Blue Equal Green in Washington for Next Two Years?
We all know there might be a caribou herd or two breathing a sign of relief in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge after the Democrats swept the House and Senate last Tuesday, but the change in power could also make a difference for Southern nature. At least two issues that were up in the air could be settled by the change in government:
~ Heath Shuler’s victory over Clyde Taylor in a North Carolina House race should put to rest the “Road to Nowhere” issue of pushing a long-abandoned road into the North Shore Roadless Area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Shuler favors a multi-million dollar payoff over finishing the road.
~ A Democratic House and Senate should make I-3, the interstate highway projected to threaten the Chattooga watershed and many wild areas of North Georgia, western North Carolina, and Eastern Tennessee more difficult to support.
Working Toward an Idea of Southern Wilderness?
Three weeks ago Janisse Ray and I spent a weekend at the Watson-Brown Foundation’s Thompson, Georgia, headquarters participating at a Hickory Hill Seminar called “Cornbread & Sushi: The Changing Rural South.” The forum was a spin-off of a course I’ve co-taught with a Wofford colleague Deno Trakas for two years running with generous funding from Watson-Brown.
The Hickory Hill Forum offered a weekend of spirited discussion abut the South, its literature, past, present, and future. There were fourteen voices at the table in all--poets, writers, historians, free-lance intellectuals, scholars, and academics from all over the South. Wofford’s president, Bernie Dunlap moderated, and he did a great job of keeping the conversation moving around Hickory Hill’s big dining room table for five sessions and a special one-time treat of meeting in Flannery O’Connor’s dining room an hour away.
Most of the weekend’s discussion found us walking the intellectual fence line between nature and culture looking mostly into the pasture we call culture. We asked what survives of the rural South. We talked often and passionately about the past, farming, mill work, immigration, religion. We laughed and argued.
In one session the text under discussion was closer to the passions that Janisse and I share: nature writing and wild places: William Faulkner’s “The Bear” and Tom Franklin’s “Poachers.” At the heart of both pieces is a sense of something outside human experience and thought and society, something wild and separate and valuable.
Jack Temple Kirby, friend and respected historian of rural landscapes, said in the midst of this talk of “wilderness” there that is really no such thing in the South, and has not really been any for hundreds of years. Janisse and I exchanged a questioning glance. Really? What about all those areas we’ve so strongly defended for all these years since the beginning of the Southern Nature Project?
Jack’s “one of us,” has thought deeply and widely for decades now about the nature of nature in the South, but believes wilderness is an idea Southerners have never been very interested in over time. Wild to Southerners has usually meant dark and therefore scary or unwanted, as in “I’d rather live in some dark hollow…”
I know what Jack means: in that classic western academic sense of “wilderness” there is little if any land in the South that fits. Even “designated” Southern wildernesses in national forests and parks have at one time in the near or far past been somebody’s farmland, timberland, or even backyard.
It has to do with scale, Rick Bass might say. Rick is also one of us, a writer with his own page here on the site. He’s a Southerner now exiled to Montana: “I love and still love the Texas landscape. But I got lucky: I got out. I stumbled into Utah, where the scale of my existence was suddenly measured by the western scale of distance, in hundreds of thousands of acres at a time, rather than the Southern scale of time compressed.” (from “The Right to be Wild” Mother Jones November/December 2003)
The most comprehensive review of the history and ideas behind wilderness came to me with my reading early on of Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, first published in 1967, only a few short years after the Wilderness Act was established in 1964.
After reviewing the etymology of the word wilderness, Nash concludes that wilderness really can’t be defined. It’s a state of mind, so the question really becomes not so much what wilderness is, but “what men think it is.” [Emphasis is by Nash.]
For me, Nash’s discussion of wilderness was picked up and amplified by Max Oelschlaeger in The Idea of Wilderness (1991). Oelschlaeger writes of a planet almost totally “humanized” after 10,000 years of activity driven by our metabolism and reproduction, a landscape on the verge of a "looming global eco-crisis.” He suggests that wild nature is the source of human existence rather than simply the fuel that drives our material and physical desire, reproduction. It is a “source” rather than a mere “resource.” In this study Oelschlaeger attempts to explore “a terra incognita, a forbidden place, a heart of darkness that civilized people have long attempted to repress—that is wilderness within the human soul and without, in that living profusion that envelops all creation.”
What does this issue of wildness have to do with thinking and writing about the South? Should wildness be one of the issues closest to our hearts in the literature of Southern landscapes? I’d love to hear what people are thinking about this issue.
Home Ground released
Our own Barbara Ras’s Trinity University Press has recently released Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. The book is a wonder cache of 850 words that connect our language to our land. There are 45 writers from 26 states, many of them from the South.
In the introduction Barry Lopez speaks of “a language so suited to a place… it fit against it like another kind of air.” Naming the features of a "home ground” terrain he says, “keeps us from slipping off into abstract space.”
Lopez claims “…something emotive abides in the land, and… it can be recognized and evoked even if it cannot be thoroughly plumbed. It is inaccessible to the analytic researcher, invisible to the ironist. To hear the unembodied call of a place, that numinous voice, one has to wait for it to speak through the harmony of its features—the soughing of the wind across it, its upward reach against a clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain. One must wait for the moment when the thing—the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada—ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.”
The most interesting criticism so far of the project comes from reviewer Jon Christensen in the San Francisco Chronicle. It is a positive review for the most part, but toward the end he voices this complaint: “There is… a wide swath of our landscape that gets little attention here. And it happens to be where most of us actually live. There is no ‘neighborhood’ in this lexicon, nor ‘block,’ not to mention ‘suburb.” He concludes, “It is a shame that the same loving, literate, critical and humorous attention to meaning is not lavished on words for the landscape where most Americans live today. Alas, it is not surprising. There is something nostalgic and exotic about this linguistic rescue project. Unfortunately, this gives it the moribund air of a memorial.”
It’s important for us to remember the same is true in the South. Though we love the woods, swamps, and mountain streams, much of Southern nature is to be found in backyards and vacant lots in the suburbs.