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Teaching environmental imagination.

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In his path-breaking book, The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell argues that changes in environmental policy and action depend upon changes in the ways we imagine the world around us and our relation to it. Building on this book and its critical reception, I have designed a course intended to introduce environmental literature and thought to first-year college students. This essay describes the premises, structure and methods of the course, and suggests ways of steering students away from simple preconceptions toward an awareness of the complex and occasionally contradictory values and ideas that make up any view of the world around us.

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According to Lawrence Buell, the current "environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity's relation to it" (2). For the last several years I have been developing a course on environmental writing of various kinds. The course is called "The Environmental Imagination" in homage to Buell's first book in the field of ecocriticism- I have taught it as a first-year seminar both at Wesleyan, my home institution, and at Princeton. In both institutions it has been part of an elective seminar series, not a composition program. My goal in both places has been to challenge students to rethink their assumptions about nature and their relations to it, their "environmental imaginations." Like Buell, I believe that such rethinking prepares students to confront environmental issues responsibly, regardless of their political persuasions.

The notion that critically self-conscious environmental imaginations produce environmentally responsible citizens may seem self-evident, but some environmental activists and critics dispute the claim that changing the way we see, conceive, and imagine the natural world necessarily changes the way we act in and on it. At the end of a recent public debate with Buell (ASLE conference, Boston, June 2003), for example, Leo Marx, the author of The Machine in the Garden (1964), remarked that changing people's minds is all very well, but it doesn't in itself change the way they behave or the effect they have on the world. Buell agreed, and so do I. Reading Thoreau and Dillard, Carson and Cronon, ecofeminists and environmental justice advocates, does not by itself produce responsible environmental action. What such reading does produce, I would argue, is a deeper, more mature understanding of human conceptions...

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