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A novel understanding of ecology.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

While it enjoins readers to embrace radically new ways of thinking about the land, Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac bids teachers in particular to identify and develop means for encouraging students to better understand and appreciate the environment. As a response to Leopold's implicit call for papers, this essay contends that the genre of the novel has untapped potential to facilitate an understanding of the natural world and to kindle student interest in ecological issues. Braiding together a discussion of Leopold's philosophy, phenomenology, and Bakhtinian theory, this essay presents reasons why the often-overlooked novel lends itself well to helping teachers achieve these goals.

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Today, over a half-century after the publication of A Sand County Almanac, a number of scholars and teachers have begun to discuss the connection between reading literature and understanding a land-based view of the world. Glen Love, for one, in his essay "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism," analyzes the reader's role and the correlative importance of complex literature. He outlines the present state of affairs within literary criticism, noting the absence of emphasis on the land and our understanding of it, and then--as a disciple of Leopold--calls for further contributions to this field of criticism:

our profession must soon direct its attention to that literature which recognizes and dramatizes the integration of the human with natural cycles of life. The time cannot be far off when an ecological perspective will swim into our ken. Just as we now deal with issues of racism or sexism in our pedagogy and our theory, in the books which we canonize, so must it happen that our critical and aesthetic faculties will come to reassess those texts--literary and critical--which ignore any values save for an earth-denying and ultimately destructive anthropocentricism. (235)

Appropriately, part of the purpose of this essay is "to direct attention" to the way in which the genre of the novel--unlike other more conventional genres often assigned in courses dealing with literature and the landscape--"recognizes and dramatizes the integration of the human with the natural cycles." Therefore, it is valuable and instructive to appreciate why assigning novels can enable students to "recognize" ideas as complex and unconventional as "the integration of human with natural cycles." It is beneficial, moreover, to realize that the time "when an ecological perspective will swim into our ken" and into our criticism is not in the least bit far off, in fact, the material for this "ecological perspective," as it relates to literature, has existed for over thirty years in the form of Leopold's philosophy, phenomenology, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel. What has been needed thus far is the assembling...

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