The Future of Environmental Criticism and Earth Day (Non-Places vs. Nature)

Another book for my Environmental Lit class (I know I said My Year of Meats was the penultimate one, but I forgot about this one). The Future of Environmental Criticism, by Lawrence Buell, is a text about the environmental movement in literary criticism. Better yet, I get to talk about this in a post on Earth Day!

My teacher pointed out on numerous occasions that, in relation to this author, she comes from the opposing side of literary criticism. But she wanted to give us the entire picture, and so this book was assigned. Some of the things Buell argues for don't actually seem very good to me (such as his insistent desire that books about environmental subjects have to have a certain degree of natural description). He especially won my disfavor when I read his disapproval of Frank Herbert's Dune. He basically said that Dune didn't focus enough on ecological issues! Heck, many people criticize Herbert for putting too much ecology in his work. The entire Dune series is full of ecology!


Rating: 4.4/10

But there is one part of this book that got to me: the idea of non-places. In a world that is constantly churning out objects with interchangeable parts, eventually we came to a point where many of our buildings were the same, built after one model. The best examples are airports and fast food restaurants. We are familiar with these structures, but they don't have many things that distinguish one from the other. They don't have anything that roots them to a certain "place." When you go out into nature, it becomes very obvious that you are in a certain place by the idiosyncratic landscape, the changing climate, the kind of flora and fauna you encounter, etc. But with these non-places we construct, they are entirely the same. If you go on a plane, for instance, and don't look out of the window at all, it won't feel as though you've really actually gone anywhere at all, since the airports will be so similar.

True, this doesn't exactly apply to every non-place, but the basic idea is that these structures, which we are more comfortable with than the natural world which we originated in, don't give any specific feeling of being in a certain place, since you could get the same experience in any one of these buildings you go to.

For Earth Day, our class went outside, not really doing anything but enjoying being in nature, and talking about things pertaining to ecology or the environment. The idea came to me that for most of my life, I have been more comfortable with being inside than outside--more comfortable with non-places than places. I guess part of that has to do with my more Platonic mindset (dealing with more abstract ideas than with actual experience), but also because of the cultural leaning towards moving life into well-contained, air-conditioned and self-sufficient boxes.

Today, I had trouble reconciling this desire to be inside with my feeling that being outside is enjoyable. After all, it's weird to think that our ancestors didn't have these non-places we cling to now; they had to know their landscape more intimately than we ever will (we can just order things and have them brought to us, while they had to travel out to find them and then find their way back. Sure, we have stuff like that too, but not to the same extent: we have cars, after all, so we don't closely interact with--or even notice--our surroundings).

So I guess that's some food for thought this Earth Day (though I guess it's almost over).