Quickly put, Ursula K. Heise's chapter “From The Blue Planet to Google Earth” is critiquing the well-established argument in environmentalism that to immerse ourselves in an ecological perspective we must be established in the local immediate environment, while, at best, conceptualizing the global.
Heise believes authors such as Scott Russell Sanders, Wendell Berry and Gary Synder, for all the good they've done to promote the environmental movement, are fundamentally in a blind spot when the advocate that everybody root themselves in their own area. Blind because often only a certain kind of financial and educational privilege would allow for such immersing, “local” is always a thorny definition, and migration has been a defining element for all species since life has existed on this earth.
The main problem though, as Heise sees it, is one of imagination. “Sense of place” as a sense of the immediate vicinity is a visionary dead end because it does not allow for the inclusion of the interregional and intercontinental connections, both natural and cultural, that shape the planet. Heise seems well-grounded when she points out that cultural criticism has long ago given up the strict understanding of people as defined by their localities. People are made up of many different kinds of places, influenced not by just their movements but also by cultural and ecological imports, a lesson that for some reason, environmentalism has yet to learn.
What Heise wants to do is supplant the well-worn notions of sense of place as local with a more nuanced and, for her, accurate conception of how beings and communities inhabit the globe today and how allegory shapes our understanding. Given the vast influence of the Apollo 17 “Blue Planet” photo, a similar, updated allegory that makes connections could help comprehend the real, on-ground troubles of urban spaces as well as ecologically devastated areas. In which comes Heise’s metaphor of Google Earth, as a telescopic rendering not just of a blue-washed biosphere, but a nuanced, disjunctive world. With this interactive collage we can better imagine, create and shape our global understanding. Google Earth both overcomes the great cliche of “all-connectiveness” and sees past the localvore’s limiting sense of place.
I find Heise’s arguments against the local persuasive but struggle to see where this could go on a practical level, even on a perceptual practical level. Any thoughts on that? Also, is she being strictly fair in her reduction of “sense of place” to the definition that she provides? Is she too-quickly overlooking the possible detriments to the “cosmopolitan” view she is arguing for? Is their something distinctly dubious in using a mega-corp’s center piece as her main environmental allegory or, contrarily is she just being more philosophically honest than the ecotypes who held up the Blue Planet photo as their rallying cry?
As this relates to Lyrical Ballads, as I see it, though W&C are writing, I understand, with the Lakes District in mind, their poetical frames tend to have enough written complexity to, at least, hedge at the nuance Heise is arguing for. I hate to go back to well-tilled “Tintern” again, but there at least, we see, not so much an endearment to a particular locality, but to a state of mind. We can imagine that Tintern (to strictly speak of the narrator’s state of mind and not to the myriad other things going on in the poem) wouldn’t be so important as to whatever location caused Wordsworth to harken back to his youth regarding his eco-maturity now. As another example, In “Brothers,” thankfully the opposite of the obvious happens, and the regretful, estranged brother doesn’t set up shop in his home town, but instead departs, his trajectory ping-ponging him from mountain to sea and back. This represents, as Heise would argue, a more practical understanding of how lives are conducted on this earth and help us better see the connections taking place. W&C are writing from a place, as we understand, but are they cosmopolitan?
No comments:
Post a Comment