Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting Essay

One of S. T. Coleridges many passions was the Science of Words, their use and abuse and the incalculable advantages attached to the raiment of using them appropriately (Aids to Reflection 7). This passion drove Coleridge to coin over 600 words, including psychosomatic, romanticize, supersensuous, and memorable phrases like the willing suspension of dis article of belief. (In fact, the new electronic edition of the Oxford side of meat Dictionary lists Coleridge as 59 in the Top 1000 sources for quotations, only a few slots behind the Bible).He excessively coined the word desynonymize in the belief that clarity in language went hand in hand with clarity in thinking. The importance of words, and coining new ones where necessary, is precisely where Ashton Nichols begins his intriguing book. Nichols invents a word Urba constitution in order forge a new understanding of our relationship to the innate ground. This term (which, as Nichols helpfully points out, rhymes with furniture ) suggests that nature and urban life are not as distinct as human being beings have long supposed ll human and nonhuman get it ons, as well as all breathe in and non-living objects around those lives, are linked in a complex web of interdependent interrelatedness (xiii).Likewise, Nichols refashions the term roosting to describe a new modality of living more self-consciously on the earth by creating more temporary, environmentally sensitive homes in the surrounding environment (3). By engaging these terms, and examining their 18th and 19th century antecedents, Nichols hopes to renew our imbibes of nature at a time of increasing peril for our urban, suburban, rural, and wild environments.Nichols interweaves several types of sources and methodologies in this project romanticist and straitlaced rime and prose, the history of science, ecocriticism, and personal memoir. In taking an ecocritical approach to Romanticism, Nichols aligns his work with Jonathan Bates The Song of th e Earth (2000) Kate Rigbys Topographies of the Sacred The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004) and James McKusicks Green Writing Romanticism and Ecology (2003). just besides conversing with these earlier studies, Nichols book features something unusual for a critical monograph personal memoir -not just in the preface and afterword, which is more common but interleaved in the chapters themselves, wherebit by bitNichols reconstructs a full social class spent roosting in a rustic stone cabin and select urban spots. In twain idea and text this interfusion (to use a Coleridgian coinage) levels the barriers between nature and culture, city and country, academic and personal.While Robert Macfarlanes wonderful book Mountains of the Mind (2003) also alternates between an intellectual history and personal narrative, Nichols pushes until now further by fusing these genres with a manifesto for environmental action. At the heart of this book is a reevaluation of the concept of na ture, a project that began, according to Nichols, not with the environmental revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, but with a new definition of Nature first offered by Romantic writers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (xvi).In Romantic Natural Histories William Wordsworth, Charles Darwin and Others (2004) and a fascinating website called Romantic Natural History, Nichols has already displayed his admirable command of the periods literature and science. In this new, deeply interdisciplinary book, he examines conceptions of nature in the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Erasmus Darwin, Keats, and Tennyson in the prose of Thoreau and Hardy and in the science of wonder cabinets, natural history museums, and zoos.Nichols finds a precedent for urbanature in the science and poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which both relied upon metaphors. In science and poetry alike, he shows, the mind makes metaphors from the nonhuman (natural) world as often as it does f rom human (urban) world at a time when poetry (in fact all art) and natural philosophy (in fact all science) were more closely linked than they often bet today (10). He reminds us that when Coleridge was asked why he attended so many lectures of human physiology in London, he replied, I attend Davys lectures to make up my stock of metaphors. For Nichols, the poetic-scientist take ons imagination buttressed by facts, or facts fired by imagination, to make new metaphors (142).Nichols cites Stephen Hawkings visualization of a murky hole as a contemporary example of the poetic-scientist, and the double-helix shape of DNA arriving in a dream came to my mind as well. Nichols examines the legacy of Romantic poetry through an ecocritical lens, exploring the ways in which the Romantics represent the natural world.Ultimately, however, he aims to go beyond Romantic Ecocriticism because one element of Romanticism has contributed to the problems that urbanature seeks to resolve namely, a vi ew that nature is somehow opposed to urbanity, the wild is what the city gets rid of, human culture is the enemy of nature (xxi). The goal of urbanature is to remove these harmful divisions A fount at the legacy of Romantic natural history will move beyond the word nature as it has been employed since the Enlightenment and beyond the nature versus culture split toward the more inclusive idea of urbanatural roosting. Finally, I will argue that Romantic ecocriticism should now give way to a more socially aware version of environmentalism, one less tightly linked to narrowly Western ideas about the self, the Other, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world.Urbanatural roosting says that, if all military personnel are linked to each(prenominal) other and to their surroundings, then those same humans have clear obligations to each other and to the world they share. (xvii) Moving beyond Romantic ecocriticism, Nichols seeks to dissolve entirely the opposition bet ween nature versus culture, the natural versus the artificial, man versus nature ne of the last great Western dualisms that needs to be bridged or dissolved (203). For Nichols, these dualistic categories are old lines of arbitrary separation that prevent us from seeing both city and country as locations equally meet of human care and concern, all equally serving of the attention needed to sustain them (200). Despite their anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, the Romantics did succeed in envisioning a dynamic, resilient force at work in both the human and natural worlds.In certain poems by Keats and Coleridge, Nichols posits that one unified power causes all of these natural effects of the wind, the bird, or the frost, but this power is nothing more than a series of physical processes contained in nature, what John Locke and others had called a natural law (27). In Shelleys Ode to the West Wind Nichols finds a similar merging of the human and natural in an autumnal and naturalis tic paradise (124-5). But rather than finding favourable position in the oem, he writes I want to forget about Shelleys sentimentality (As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need) and set aside his characteristic overstatement (I fall upon the thorns of life I bleed ) and think instead about precisely what he achieves in these justly famous lines of poetry. The wind here is not merely moving air it represents the life force itself the elan vital, the chi, a vital energy that pervades the domain (125). For Nichols, this world is purely material the prophecy itself is nothing more complex that a simple truth of material nature spring always follows passShelley produces a resurrection poem without any link to the supernatural. He offers a promise of natural power and organic efficacy without any reference to a world beyond the physical world, beyond the world I earth-closet see and hear and feel outside my window every day. (127). But can this naturalistic reading of the poem acc ount for its wealth of secularized biblical imagery? For its references to prayer, the thorns of life, apocalyptic showers of black rain, fire, and hail, and most especially the prophetic stance in the reason out lines?These are, I think, spiritual and supernatural motifs that possibly engage a transcendent third category beyond nature and culture. Nevertheless, abandoning this idea of the transcendent may be the very first step necessary for realizing urbanature. Nichols highlights the inherent cultural bias that shapes our conceptions of nature what we observe when we observe nature, he writes, is not some Platonically pure nature in itself, but a nature that is always changing, always determined by specific circumstances, by my consciousness, and by precise conditions in each contextual instance (188) .Our cultural context today is more variegated and includes a greater familiarity with atheistic, agnostic, and non-Christian spiritual traditions as well as wider gaps between sc ience, literature and religion. Nichols is consistently forthright in his desire to refashion the term nature for our times. Towards the end of the book especially, the manifesto-like rhetoric gains strength Like ecocentrism, urbanatural roosting will not be so difficult.All it will require is that every one of us should think about, care about, and do something good about every place, every person, every creature, and everything that each of us can effect on planet earth (206-7). Nichols calls for nothing less than a new ethic, an ecoethic that recognizes the intrinsic value of both animate and inanimate nature. Nichols has a gift for writing about the history of science the best chapters in this book elucidate emotional responses to science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He sees amusement as a concept that links Romantic poetry to Romantic science in significant ways.Pleasure located in the nonhuman world, and pleasure taken by humans in the natural world, are concepts that comingle in a whole range of Romantic metaphors and writings anthropocentric, ecocentric, and differently (88). Nichols salutes the galvanizing force of wonder in Romantic science, a topic also brilliantly explored by Richard Holmes in The Age of Wonder (2008). Zoos and other forms of live or dead animal displays, writes, Nichols, -as I have already suggested in my reflections on natural history museums emerged out of precisely the combination of scientific specialty and fascination with spectacle To see something new and amazing is often to learn something new, but the experience is also about being excited, titillated or amazed (153). But he also charts darker terrain. For colonizing scientists, he notes, it was ethically acceptable to cage other creatures, even human creatures, as long as the knowledge thus gained could be codified or organized as part of the great encyclopedic project (154).He gauges too the sheer volume of death implicit in Darwinian natural selection and the horror of deep time, necessitated by new geological and fossil evidence, that demonstrated how insignificant human life and all of human civilization -seemed in the face of the timeline required for these incremental biological changes to occur (61). These are riveting pages. There is no question that Nichols has written a toppingly book, innovative in its merging of genres, richly veined with intellectual history, literary criticism, and a passionate vision for the future of environmentalism.I read it with great pleasure and wonder, and wrestled with the questions it presented for many days. Indeed, taken as a whole, the book resembles two metaphors Nichols draws from the history of science Darwins famous entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds interpret on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and all of its endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful (16) and wonder cabinets, a subject dear to my heart.In both the entangled bank and the curiosity cabinet, a sense of wonder leads to a deeper engagement with nature. Nichols best nature writing including chronicles of intense I-thou encounters with a bobcat and dolphins also resonate with wonder. Perhaps cultivating this sense of wonder is the Romantics greatest legacy for modern environmentalism, one that could help heal the divisions that imperil our world today.