LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      Perception is inference.

      —Atul Gawande, “The Itch”

      In Here and There I challenge the assumption that literature and local places matter less and less in a world that economists describe as “flat,” politicians insist has “globalized,” and social scientists imagine as a “village.” Through the prisms of literature and history, I explore tensions and conflicts within northeastern Pennsylvania, tensions and conflicts created by national and global demand for the region’s resources: farmland, forest products, anthracite coal, and college-educated young people. Powerful ways of knowing, history and literature tell stories of people in time and place; they are not simply dates or fictions. The project pivots on the interplay between other places and my native ones: Scranton, where I now live and work, and the family dairy farm, where I grew up and to which I often return. Sharing the Moosic Mountains, each ground is a place of beginning, becoming, and homecoming. My experiences in this “rough terrain” may be unique to me, but I know they are common, ordinary, shared.¹

      The local and the global intersect most visibly in how people treat the land where they live. Because we must use land to survive, we need to think carefully about the ethics of land use. Responsible not only to themselves, but also to the community, landowners touch the lives of next-door neighbors, others living in a watershed, and those residing a world away. These responsibilities encompass, literally, everyone, everywhere, living and to come. It cannot be otherwise, because our lives are profoundly connected to and shaped by the world beyond our home ground. We inhabit, as they say at Marywood University, a “diverse and interdependent world.”

      The interplay among places that I invoke has become increasingly important to scholars of environmental literature and history. For example, in Writing for an Endangered World (2001), literary scholar Lawrence Buell offers a critical framework for understanding the sort of rural/urban interchange that I describe.² Buell juxtaposes depictions of “ ‘green’ and ‘brown’ landscapes” to argue that environmental writers and critics must attend to a single, complex environment that interweaves the found and the human-made. Adding to Buell’s argument another layer of complexity, I study the altered landscapes of the mine-scarred Lackawanna Valley, home to what I describe as dark fields.

      Somewhere between a green field and a brown field, a dark field has been industrially developed and polluted, but people live there, often unaware of the site’s history and danger. The natural and the constructed may intersect most obviously in the green fields of a farm, but the dark fields of mined land testify to the thoughtless, forgotten abuse of the natural and the human-made. In traversing meadows and woods, culm banks and mineshafts, towns and cities, I uncover a past that remains all too present. This past is like dark matter in the universe: it’s everywhere but nowhere visible.

      Any discussion of literature, history, and the environment is insufficient if it does not address the human need for food and fuel. Anthracite coal mining, the foundation of nineteenth-century U.S. industrialization and urbanization, erased in no time the northern hardwood forest of a very local geography, planting in its place an unstable, boom-and-bust economy. Agriculture, the work that I knew growing up, turned the adjoining beech and hemlock forest into a patchwork of fields and woods that another forest may now be reclaiming. Although our family farm survives, barely, farmers as a group have statistically disappeared from the American landscape;³ our shrinking farm, once a member of a thriving neighborhood, limps along as a remainder and a reminder of another time. With food and fuel basic to people’s lives, environmental writers and historians need more than ever to re-envision rural and urban places as parts of a single tapestry, one that is rapidly fraying. Mending the damage starts with remembering what damage has been done.

      Acutely aware of their proximity to this damage, several scholars of environmental history and literature have recently called for more attention to a “literature of everyday nature.”⁴ These writers place landscapes within their historical and cultural contexts, and they encourage examination of the working landscapes where most people live. For example, in reminding us that “wilderness” is a socially constructed concept, one that did not take on its current resonance as a place of escape until the late nineteenth century, William Cronon asserts that “most of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it.” To show us how our attention to home can be diverted, Bart Welling analyzes ecopornography, a “type of contemporary visual discourse made up of highly idealized, anthropomorphized views of landscapes and nonhuman animals,” a discourse that hides “damage inflicted on the nonrepresented, nonphotogenic landscapes that are logged, mined, dammed, polluted, or otherwise exploited to provide the materials and energy required for producing and distributing images of more visually appealing places.” Although Scott Hess wants us to imagine nature as the everyday world of the “unspectacular, developed, aesthetically ordinary environments where most of us live and work,” he points out that everyday nature is “not just a location, but rather a kind of attention, or better yet, a way of defining our identities and values through local relationship rather than through imaginative escape.”⁵

      Here and There explores working landscapes. I understand work to include duty, craft, and creativity. As an expression of ideas, our work reveals how we answer moral questions that arise in our use of land. When one adds the present participle, the word places us in time: working means “used as a guide” and “capable of being used as the basis of further work.”⁶ I define the word “landscape” to refer not to land so much as to human perceptions of land; landscape is about point of view. Examining working landscapes, which are both places and depictions of places, demands then that I judge what I have been seeing and doing in the world.

      Regions Within Regions

      Regions are “culturally constructed” landscapes. The American West, for example, is much more a product of human imagination than it is a fact of nature.⁷ As human constructs, language and literature necessarily shape our definitions of region. However, as modes of representation, each can, at best, only point to what it seeks to express. In the gap between thing and word stretches not only a world of error and deception, but also the possibility of powerful insight. In this gap, we imagine our lives and communities. Because such gaps pockmark my understanding of northeastern Pennsylvania, I can make sense of the region only by tracing its interdependent relationships with other people and places, across time.

      Named for an industry that all but disappeared sixty years ago, the Anthracite Region, a series of distinct coalfields, has a rich ethnic and labor history, a long record of social and environmental upheaval, and a reputation as the first major example of U.S. deindustrialization. A collection of fragments defined by the geology of its coal, the Anthracite Region consists of four geographies—northern, eastern middle, western middle, and southern fields—and three commercial zones: Wyoming, Lehigh, and Schuylkill.⁸ Found in patches within the folds of the Appalachian Mountains, from Schuylkill County north to Susquehanna County, each field is distinct from the others because of its type and quantity of anthracite, its settlement patterns, and its links with New York and Philadelphia. For example, the northern field, which includes the Lackawanna Valley, has the deepest deposits and its coal has the highest carbon content, but it was the costliest to mine and the last to develop.⁹ While the southern field looks to Philadelphia, the northern field faces New York.

      A region within a region, the northern anthracite field exerted a gravitational pull on places and people far beyond the mines. For example, the Pennsylvania Coal Company purchased props from farms in neighboring Wayne County to shore up its mines in Forest City, at the extreme northern tip of the northern field. Miners latticed their workspaces there with white and red oak, chestnut, beech, maple, birch, and locust—until, that is, they exhausted the local supply. After nearby forests all but disappeared, companies imported loblolly pine from the South and, later, Douglas fir from Oregon via the Panama Canal. Companies preferred wooden props, by the way, because they failed over time, thus warning of a working mine, rather than crumpling all of a sudden, as steel often did.¹⁰ Beneath towns and cities up and down the Lackawanna Valley a mixed phantom

Скачать книгу