Reading Notes on Buell, chs. 3 and 4

Buell, chapters 3 and 4

Here are some notes on chapters 3 and 4 of Buell’s book (which again introduce us to some new words in the language, “multi-scalar” and “immiserated” being my favorites). A figure that hovers uneasily in the background here is philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose membership in the Nazi party has permanently compromised his reverence for “living-in-rustic –place-and-letting-nature-be” (p. 103; see also p. 66) and who fuels some of the agonizing reflections on ethics and politics in chapter 4. As Buell has it, Heidegger’s parochialism demands the corrective of globalism, which is the direction in which The Future of Environmental Criticism inexorably moves.
Please note: I’ve moved things around in the syllabus. An updated version has been posted both to the blog and to the oncourse site.

1. The distinction between “space” and “place” on which most the argument of chapter 3 hinges is probably uncontroversial. But what are the “intractable ambiguities” (p. 66) that attach themselves to the ecocritical reverence for place (p. 66-68)? What Buell seems to be centrally concerned with is—in the words of Val Plumwood—“a monogamous relationship to just one place” (see p. 69).
2. What does it mean that “non-places are the real measure of our time” (p. 69)—and what consequences does this insight have for environmental criticism? Buell wants to encourage, he claims on p. 71, a “more rigorous” reflection on place as a “physical environment.”
3. Consider the distinction between “phenomenological” and “sociological” place-attachment (pp. 72 ff.). What are the five dimensions of place-attachment Buell thinks he has identified? And where or when does the transition from phenomenology to sociology take place?
4. The largest section of chapter 3 is devoted to a critique of eco-localism, of the kind represented by Wendell Berry. Much in this and the next chapter rests on Buell’s selection of counterexamples (especially Derek Walcott). Comment on Buell’s canon or “archive” here and elsewhere. Can any one critic be conversant with so many different national traditions, writers, and themes? See also Buell’s weary comment about the lack of “true comparatists” (p. 91).
5. What does Buell pit against the importance of the local in traditional environmental writing? What exactly is a “bioregion” (which also includes urban environments)?
6. What happens to place as the scope of environmental writing expands? Note the convergence of ecocritical and postcolonial writing in Walcott’s Omeros. Is this a convincing example (judging from the excerpts)?
7. Chapter 4: can you figure out the little graph Buell suggests on p. 98 (see also p. 112)? The whole chapter, as Buell admits at the end, is essentially a simplification of a “pluriform critical scene,” proposing as it does a three-step development to glory, ranging from “deep ecology” (which he calls “chuckle-headed” [???]) to “ecofeminism” (much better) to “environmental justice,” the teleological goal of all earlier efforts, as long as it performs a balancing act, “if not also the reconciliation,” between the “social” and the “natural.” Do you find this Hegelian synthesis convincing?
8. What precisely is the reason for the “chuckle-headedness” of deep ecology, according to Buell? Deep ecology he apparently can take seriously only as “ontology or aesthetics” rather than as a recipe for ethics (p. 103)—why? See how he discusses the example of Aldo Leopold’s advice to “think like the mountain” (p. 104).
9. Note how short the ecofeminism section is (pp. 108-112)—a bit odd given how “strong” he thinks the positions of ecofeminists are.
10. It’s important, says Buell, that ecocriticism doesn’t disconnect “the history of conservation” from the “evolution of urban and workplace environmentalism” (p. 115). Why? Note the importance of Carson for the movement.
11. It’s interesting how Buell deals with “environmental racism”—by first agreeing with and then criticizing and then again agreeing (“But it is also true that….”) Joan Martínez-Alier. Buell alludes here to the case of Love Canal and activist Lois Gibbs, who in 1978 discovered that her son's elementary school--and indeed her entire neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY, known as “Love Canal”--was built on a toxic waste dump. Gibbs went on to lead her community in a battle against the local, state, and federal governments that ended with the evacuation of the residents and the creation of the EPA’s Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.
12. The chapter ends with a kind of moral imperative for “ecocritics.” What must we do?