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 innumerable advantages attached to the habit of using them appropriately (Aids to Reflection 7). This passion flock Coleridge to coin over 600 joints, including psychosomatic, romanticize, supersensuous, and memorable phrases like the willing suspension of disbelief. (In fact, the rude(a)ly electronic edition of the Oxford English Dictionary lists Coleridge as 59 in the Top 1000 sources for quotations, only a few slots behind the Bible).He also coined the word desynonymize in the belief that clarity in linguistic process went hand in hand with clarity in thinking. The importance of words, and coining cuttingborn ones whither necessary, is precisely where Ashton Nichols begins his intriguing book. Nichols invents a word Urba constitution in order devise a new understanding of our relationship to the innate creation. This term (which, as Nichols helpfully points out, rhymes with f urniture) suggests that temperament and urban life are non as distinct as mankind beings have long vatic ll human and nonhuman lives, as well as alone instigate and in quicken objects around those lives, are linked in a multiplex web of interdependent interrelatedness (xiii).Likewise, Nichols refashions the term roosting to describe a new way of living more self-consciously on the earth by creating more temporary, environment every(prenominal)y sensitive homes in the surrounding environment (3). By engaging these terms, and examining their eighteenth and nineteenth century antecedents, Nichols hopes to renew our views of record 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 Romantic and Victorian poetry and prose, the history of recognition, ecocriticism, and personal record. In taking an ecocritical approach to Romanticism, Nichols aligns his work with Jona than Bates The Song of the universe (2000) Kate Rigbys Topographies of the Sacred The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004) and pile McKusicks Green Writing Romanticism and Ecology (2003). entirely too conversing with these earlier studies, Nichols book features something unusual for a scholarly monograph personal memoir - non just in the preface and afterword, which is more common but interleaved in the chapters themselves, wherebit by bitNichols reconstructs a full year spent roosting in a rustic stone cabin and select urban spots. In twain idea and text this interfusion (to use a Coleridgean coinage) levels the barriers between nature and purification, city and country, academic and personal.While Robert Macfarlanes marvelous book Mountains of the Mind (2003) also alternates between an intellectual history and personal narrative, Nichols pushes even further by fusing these genres with a manifesto for environmental action. At the watcht of this book is a reeva luation of the apprehension of nature, a project that began, harmonise 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, boneheaded interdisciplinary book, he examines conceptions of nature in the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Erasmus Darwin, Keats, and Tennyson in the prose of Thoreau and barefaced and in the science of call into question cabinets, inherent history museums, and zoos.Nichols finds a preceding(prenominal) 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 min d makes metaphors from the nonhuman (natural) world as often as it does from 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 increase my stock of metaphors. For Nichols, the poetic-scientist needs imagination buttressed by facts, or facts fired by imagination, to make new metaphors (142).Nichols cites Stephen Hawkings visual image of a black hole as a contemporary slip 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 wager the natural world.Ultimately, however, he aims to go beyond Romantic Ecocriticism because one particle of Romanticism has contri buted to the problems that urbanature seeks to resolve namely, a view that nature is somehow unlike 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 di imaginativenesss A look 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 conclude that Romantic ecocriticism should now give way to a more socially aware version of environmentalism, one less tightly linked to narrowly Hesperian ideas somewhat the self, the Other, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world.Urbanatural roosting says that, if all humans are linked to distributively another(prenominal) and to their surroundings, then those uniform humans have clear obligations to each other and to the world they share. (xvii) contemptible beyond Romantic ecocriticism, Nichols seeks to dissolve entirely the opposition between nature versus culture, the natural versus the artificial, man versus nature ne of the last owing(p) Western dualisms that needs to be bridged or dissolved (203). For Nichols, these dualistic categories are antiquated lines of arbitrary separation that prevent us from seeing both city and country as locations equally worthy of human sell and concern, all equally serving of the attention needed to sustain them (200). Despite their theanthropism and anthropocentrism, the Romantics did succeed in envisioning a dynamic, vital force at work in both the human and natural worlds.In true meters by Keats and Coleridge, Nichols posits that one unified causation causes all of these natural do of the wind, the bird, or the frost, but this power is naught 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 conflux of the human and natural in an autumnal and naturalistic paradise (124-5). But rather than finding transcendence in the oem, he writes I want to forget approximately Shelleys sentimentality (As thence 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 hyphen vital, the chi, a vital energy that pervades the universe (125). For Nichols, this world is purely temporal the prophecy itself is nothing more complex that a simple impartiality of material nature spring always follows winterShelley 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 wo rld I domiciliate see and hear and feel outside my window every day. (127). But can this naturalistic reading of the poem account for its wealth of secularized biblical mental 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 concluding lines?These are, I think, spiritual and supernatural motifs that possibly engage a prodigious 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 inwrought 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 context of useual 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 science, 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 cajolery gains strength Like ecocentrism, urbanatural roosting will not be so difficult. only 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 pleasure as a concept that links Romantic poetry to Romantic science in substantive ways.Pleasure located in the nonhuman world, and pleasure taken by humans in the natural world, are concepts that comingle in a hearty range of Romantic metaphors and writings anthropocentric, ecocentric, and otherwise (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 asleep(predicate) animal displays, writes, Nichols, -as I have already suggested in my reflections on natural history museums emerged out of precisely the combination of scientific curiosity and trance with spectacle To see something new and amazing is often to learn something new, but the live on 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 b e codified or organized as part of the great encyclopedic project (154).He gauges too the sheer volume of demolition 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 infallible for these incremental biological changes to occur (61). These are riveting pages. There is no question that Nichols has written a wondrous 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 singing on the bushes, with various insects f litting 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 bay lynx 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.