Technology

NEWS WATCH; Views of Nature Before Darwin Jumped Into the Debate

By SHELLY FREIERMAN

Published: New York Times, September 21, 2000: front page “Circuits” section, Thursday

      A Romantic Natural History, maintained by Dr. Ashton Nichols, a professor of English at Dickinson College, examines the way artists, writers and scientists viewed nature in the century before Charles Darwin published ”On the Origin of Species” in 1859 (www.dickinson .edu/nicholsa/Romnat/romnat1.htm).

      That 100 years included the work of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of ”Frankenstein”; Carl Linnaeus, who devised the system for naming plants and animals; the fiery poet William Blake; John James Audubon, the nature illustrator; and the writer Henry David Thoreau. Visitors to the site, which features several papers by Dr. Nichols and a bibliography, can meander along a timeline that covers the years from 1750 to 1859.

      The timeline offers wonderful juxtapositions, like the publication of Jane Austen’s ”Sense and Sensibility” and the ”New Idea of the Anatomy of the Brain,” a paper by Charles Bell, in 1811; and the 1832 posthumous publication of ”Faust, Part II,” by Goethe, followed by an 1834 entry noting the invention of the first computer, an ”analytical engine” by Charles Babbage.   –SHELLY FREIERMAN

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Reviews of the most recent book by Ashton Nichols:

Order from:

Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011):

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Palgrave Macmillan cover blurbs:

 

“Nichols offers a provocative new approach to understanding the role of humankind in a post-natural, post-industrial world.  Grounded in a perceptive reading of Romantic natural history, this book moves beyond the conventional nature-versus-culture dichotomy toward a more inclusive concept of ‘urbanatural roosting.’ Along the way, Nichols makes important contributions to our scholarly understanding of British Romantic poetry, American environmentalism, and the history of science.”–James C. McKusick, author of Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology

 

“Ambitious, learned, experimental, and thoroughly readable, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism posits ‘urbanatural roosting’ as a vital twenty-first-century mode of ecological thinking. Perhaps this is what the Chinese might call the ‘tian ren he yi’ (the harmonious unity of the universe and man) of the new millennium. An inspired (and inspiring) book!”–Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

 

“Part lyrical memoir, part literary and cultural history, part philosophical meditation, Nichols’ compelling new book is above all an eloquent, erudite, and impassioned manifesto for a new way of thinking, writing, and living more self-consciously, equitably, and sustainably on this earth. Stressing both the historicity of ‘wilderness’ and the naturality of the city, Nichols envisages the collaboration of scientific knowledge, urban design and the artistic imagination in the crafting of thriving ‘ecomorphic’ townscapes as part of a wider practice of sharing and caring for all of earth’s diverse, yet all more or less humanized places and spaces.”–Kate Rigby, Monash University and author of Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism

Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (Ashton Nichols, $85, paper $28: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011): Both critically and artfully, Nichols explores how our conceptions of nature have derived from Enlightenment-era ideas (humans and nature are separate) and Romantic poetry (humans and nature are connected). Relying heavily on poetic examples, Nichols also envisions an “urbanatural” future in which we see ourselves as part of the earth, but without a sense of atavism or regression, and how our environments will shift accordingly.

 

The Wordsworth Circle

BEYOND ROMANTIC ECOCRITICISM: TOWARD URBANATURAL ROOSTING

By Ashton Nichols  (Palgrave 2011) xiii + 230 pp. Reviewed by Samantha Harvey on 2011-06-27.Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. One of S.T. Coleridge’s many passions was “the Science of Words, their use and abuse and the incalculable advantages attached to the habit of using them appropriately…” (Aids to Reflection 7).  This passion drove Coleridge to coin over 600 words, including “psychosomatic,” “romanticize,” “supersensuous,” and memorable phrases like “the willing suspension of disbelief.” (In fact, the new 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 language went hand in hand with clarity in thinking. The importance of words, and coining new ones where necessary, is precisely where Ashton Nichols begins his intriguing book.  Nichols invents a word — “Urbanature” — in order forge a new understanding of our relationship to the natural world. This term (which, as Nichols helpfully points out, rhymes with “furniture”) “suggests that nature and urban life are not as distinct as human beings have long supposed …all human and nonhuman lives, as well as all animate and inanimate objects around those lives, are linked in a complex 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, environmentally 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 nature 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 science, ecocriticism, and personal memoir. In taking an ecocritical approach to  Romanticism, Nichols aligns his work with Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth  (2000); Kate Rigby’s Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004); and James McKusick’s Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology(2003).  But besides conversing with these earlier studies, Nichols’ book features something unusual for a scholarly monograph: personal memoir — not just in the preface and afterword, which is more common — but interleaved in the chapters themselves, where–bit by bit–Nichols reconstructs a full year spent roosting in a rustic stone cabin and select urban spots. In both idea and text this interfusion (to use a Coleridgean coinage)  levels the barriers between nature and culture, city and country, academic and personal.  While Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful bookMountains 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 heart of this book is a reevaluation of the concept of nature, a project that began, according 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 period’s literature and science. In this new, deeply interdisciplinary book, he examines conceptions of nature in the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Erasmus Darwin, Keats, and Tennyson; in the prose of Thoreau and Hardy; and in the science of wonder cabinets, natural history museums, and zoos.

Nichols finds a precedent 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 mind 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 seem 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 Davy’s 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 Hawking’s visualization of a black hole as a contemporary example 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 represent the natural world.  Ultimately, however,  he aims to go “beyond Romantic Ecocriticism” because “one element of Romanticism has contributed to the problems that urbanature seeks to resolve” — namely, a view that “nature is somehow opposed 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 divisions:

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 argue that Romantic ecocriticism should now give way to a more socially aware version of environmentalism, one less tightly linked to narrowly Western ideas about the self, the “Other,” and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Urbanatural roosting says that, if all humans are linked to each other and to their surroundings, then those same humans have clear obligations to each other and to the world they share. (xvii)

Moving beyond Romantic ecocriticism, Nichols seeks to dissolve entirely the opposition between “nature versus culture, the natural versus the artificial, man versus nature …one of the last great Western dualisms that needs to be bridged or dissolved” (203).   For Nichols, these dualistic categories are “old lines of arbitrary separation” that prevent us from seeing both city and country as “locations equally worthy of human care and concern, all equally serving of the attention needed to sustain them” (200).

Despite their anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, the Romantics did succeed in envisioning a dynamic, vital force at work in both the human and natural worlds. In certain poems by Keats and Coleridge, Nichols posits that “one unified power causes all of these natural effects [of the wind, the bird, or the frost], but this power is nothing more than a series of physical processes contained in nature, what John Locke and others had called a ‘natural law'” (27).  In Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” Nichols finds  a similar merging of the human and natural in an “autumnal and naturalistic paradise” (124-5).  But rather than finding transcendence in the poem, he writes:  “I want to forget about Shelley’s sentimentality (“As thus 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 elan vital, the chi, a vital energy that pervades the universe” (125). For Nichols, this world is purely material: “the prophecy itself is nothing more complex that a simple truth of material nature: spring always follows winter…Shelley 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 world I can 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 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 transcendent 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 inherent 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 contextual 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  rhetoric gains strength: “Like ecocentrism, urbanatural roosting will not be so difficult. All 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 significant ways. Pleasure located in the nonhuman world, and pleasure taken by humans in the natural world, are concepts that comingle in a whole 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 dead 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 fascination with spectacle …To see something new and amazing is often to learn something new, but the experience 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 be codified or organized as part of the great encyclopedic project” (154). He gauges too the sheer volume of death 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 required 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: Darwin’s famous “entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting 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 bobcat 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.

Samantha Harvey is an Assistant Professor of English at Boise State University

“ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment”

18.3 (Summer 2011)

Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. By Ashton Nichols. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 230 + xxiii pp.

In one word, “urbanatural,” Nichols’ book strives to bridge the Romantic divide between nature and culture, the rural and the city, offering instead a vision of a single, integrated ecology that seamlessly blends human and non-human beings and systems.  There is no separate “nature” for us to return to, or from which we have ever been apart.  Instead even the most urban places are entirely constituted by and dependent on the natural world, just as the most remote wildernesses have now been thoroughly mapped, imaged, and impacted by human activity.  Refusing to lament over the “end of nature,” however, Nichols argues hopefully that it is time to shift our attention from the imagined boundary between the human and the natural to the more useful distinction of whether we are “taking care” of places and “sharing” resources with other beings poorly or well (192).

As he breaks down the culture/ nature distinction, Nichols also crosses many boundaries of traditional scholarly writing, combining his own nature writing and personal narrative with ecocritical readings of Romantic poems; historical exploration of institutions such as zoos and natural history collections; and broad reflections on issues such as the necessity of death to natural life cycles or how shared susceptibilities to pain and pleasure demonstrate the evolutionary kinship of all living beings.  The book holds these various topics and kinds of writing together through a seasonal almanac, organized around Nichols’ repeated return, each month of a yearly cycle, to “the Roost,” a family cabin at the crest of the “Blue Ridge Mountains, near the Virginia-West Virginia border” (5).  Combining the scientific and the humanistic, the scholarly and the experiential, Nichols writes in a wonderfully consistent and engaging voice that both unifies the book and makes it an unusual pleasure to read.

At the heart of the book is a vision, at once intellectual, spiritual, and pragmatic, of humans as fundamentally part of the natural world, together with a belief that to establish an “ecoculture” we must embrace that belonging.  Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism’s holistic vision of ecology as a single integrated system, combining the human and non-human alike, shares much in this respect with Timothy Morton’s recent writings, Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought.  Nichols focuses, however, not so much on the problem of “nature” as a category as on human kinship within nature: a kinship which must ultimately define our meanings, our values, and our forms of life.  To “roost” in this sense becomes a keyword for living sustainably in and from environment, without damaging that environment.  Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism is in the end a deeply hopeful call, that if we can let go of the false distinction between nature and culture and embrace our urbanatural roosting, we can learn to live ecologically while finding all the “soul” we need in the material and biological world that constitutes us.                                             –Scott Hess, Earlham College

 

NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES

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ISSUE 7.2 (SUMMER 2011)

Urban Nature or Urbanature? Those Ecocentric Romantics

Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. Ashton Nichols. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. 230 pp.

Reviewed by Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Maryland

<1>“The time has come for a new idea and a new word to describe that idea.” So begins Ashton Nichols’s Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. “The new word is ‘urbanature,’” and Nichols managed to assuage my immediate leeriness of yet another ecocritical neologism with the parenthetical statement that it “rhymes with ‘furniture’” (xiii). This connection (which also left me trying–and failing–to pronounce “furnitural”) is more than simply wordplay. On the contrary, Nichols’s argument asks us to consider all the various forms of artifice with which we have furnished modernity as the stuff of human adaptation, little different in essence from the larder of a well-stocked squirrel’s nest. To this end, Nichols’s book engages three distinct but related projects: the turn from “anthropocentrism” to “ecocentrism” (along with their counterparts anthropomorphism/ecomorphism); historicizing this idea in the writings of Romantic and Victorian poets and natural historians; and dramatizing an argument for the material implementation of “urbanatural roosting.”

<2>The book is organized by season, running through a year with each of its thirteen chapters corresponding to a month (beginning and ending with March). It incorporates memoir and narrative scholarship, in addition to historicized close readings of Romantic and Victorian authors, in an attempt to display urbanatural roosting as both an idea and a practice. Thus, Nichols’s meditations on the seasonal changes he witnesses from “The Roost”–his cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains–need to be understood as part of his evidence base, and thus need to be weighed as such, rather than anecdotes or rhetorical flourishes. I’ve taken this minor detour into method not only to clarify something that may be surprising to anyone unaccustomed to the technique, but also as a means of getting to the rhetorical stakes of Nichols’s argument vis-à-vis the broader field of ecocriticism.

<3>In “urbanature,” Nichols is advancing the idea that “nature” as that which is completely separate from humanity does not exist and never has. This represents a challenge to what Nichols dubs “Romantic ecocriticism,” in which the existence of such an independent, inviolate “nature” provides the central point of reference, restorative, stable, and sacred. Instead, Nichols’s “urbanature” attempts to capture the sense in which human beings must be understood on a continuum with the natural world, in which no firm divide between the “urban” and the “natural” exists. He articulates this thesis in terms of a turn to “ecomorphism,” cultivating metaphors (in both poetry and science) that recognize the fact that “humans are more like animals than animals are like humans” (40). Furthermore, Nichols’s key contribution is not so much this fact of breaking down the human/nature boundary in itself, but rather in situating its origins historically in the nineteenth century. The above quote, for instance, follows on a discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia(1797).

<4>Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Romantic natural history, as well as close readings of an array of nineteenth-century poets, novelists, and natural historians (both Darwins, both Shelleys, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy) Nichols contends: “These authors, poets, and early scientists consistently claim that human beings are contiguous with the natural world rather than distinct from it” (22). As he explains further, “Ecocentrism […] emphasizes this need for humans to see themselves as determined by—while existing within—a world that lies beyond the boundary of the human body” (79). Again, he is making this point both about human beings (and being) in the world in general and about the way in which the Romantics (and Victorians) thought about it. Given the importance of the Romantic “I” (and eye), which so readily seems to position everything in relation to itself (i.e., anthropocentrism), this is a very important insight.

<5>Consider these lines from William Blake’s “The Fly” (1793), “Am not I/ A fly like thee?/ Or art not thou/ A man like me?” (ll. 4-8). The answer, one is inclined to think, is “no and no,” with any contention otherwise falling squarely within the realm of imaginative anthropomorphism. However, as Nichols points out, there are many parallels between a man’s life and a fly’s (eating, reproducing, dying) that can be noted without distorting the material realities of either. He offers compelling readings of Keats’s “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” along similar lines. Furthermore, as he goes on to argue, “Such species boundary-crossing is not simply a poetic metaphor, however; in the twenty-first century it is a scientific reality” (81). This last element is crucial to the argument. Anthropocentrism is a poetic conceit. It is, in other words, imaginary. Ecocentrism, on the other hand, is literally, materially, true.

<6>As noted above, Nichols shows that it is not simply a “scientific reality” in the twenty-first century; it was already becoming one at the end of the eighteenth: “What was new by 1790 was the sense that these were not just rhetorical comparisons of behavior between human and animal realms; rather, such observationally supported comparisons reflected a deeper—and organic—unity of all living things. Ecomorphism was replacing anthropomorphism” (93). Urbanature, then, begins to appear not so much as a “new word” for a “new idea,” but rather as a new way of understanding what the Romantics and Victorians were actually talking about when they referred to “nature.” And in tracing it, Nichols offers a subtle, but significant new way of understanding many of the central debates in the nineteenth century, most notably around evolution, species, and extinction, and how they relate to pressing global concerns. It is this sense of intextricability between the human and the natural that Nichols tries to capture in the word “urbanature.”

<7>This brings me to a key distinction that I will admit it took me much of the book to fully understand: “urban,” for Nichols, doesn’t refer to the city, but rather all human artifice, such as the light bulb in his cabin. This last point is crucial because it helps to explain (if not entirely excuse) the fact that there is actually very little of what I would consider “urbanity”–which is to say, the city.

<8>In the preface, Nichols explains that his “emphasis on urbanature and roosting emerges out of my own contention that gentrification, postindustrial waste, environmental racism, and other forms of urban degradation can come about when land-use urban planners or environmentalists say that wild nature takes precedence over urban wastelands” (xxi). While I agree with such statements, I feel compelled to take him to task for the fact that they remain statements, largely unconnected to the real evidence base of the book. To be sure, he points out, “Many of the great ‘nature’ poems of the Romantic era were actually written in the suburbs, in the back gardens of great cities, or in the midst of the largest urban space on the planet at the time: London” (xviii). And he offers a compelling reading of Wordsworth’s “Upon Westminster Bridge” as “nature poem.” But overall, he seems more interested in uncovering the “urban” in the “natural” than vice versa.

<9>The absence of the city is most notable in the personal narrative sections, which (with one exception) take place at “The Roost” and consist of his close observation of wasps, grubs, birds, and trees. The one genuinely urban example shows him seeking out a grove of trees in Florence “near the spot where Shelley composed his West Wind poem” (127) –an instance of urbanity that is exceptional on a variety of levels. While Nichols mentions projects to reclaim derelict urban spaces in Detroit or the South Bronx, most of his invocations of the city seem generic examples chosen for rhetorical purposes, like “Montana/Manhattan,” rather than grounded in the actual lived experience revealed in most of his analysis.

<10>Indeed, one of the clearest evidence that Nichols doesn’t consider genuinely urban spaces conducive to “urbanature” is the fact that he retreats to “The Roost” to find it. This movement of Thoreauvian seclusion is crucial to “roosting” as both practice and critical stance. It dramatizes what seems to be Nichols’s real project, which consists more of pointing out that “Thoreau’s Walden Pond and [Annie] Dillard’s Tinker Creek are not as far from the urban world as they often seem” (170), than of elaborating a fully fledged ecological engagement with the city.

<11>Ultimately, Nichols’s points carry their greatest critical weight when placed within the ecocritical tradition he is asking us to move beyond. It is this context that the book’s insights and Nichols’s knowledge of his material truly shine. He gives us a new look at the most canonical authors of Romantic ecocriticism, from Thoreau and Wordsworth to Annie Dillard, and to one of its most cherished formal movements, the retreat to the woods. In the process, his wide-ranging knowledge of nineteenth-century natural history and the turn from “anthropomorphism” to “ecomorphism” produce readings of canonical works. For example, my favorite part of the book is an extended discussion of death in the nineteenth-century imagination. These readings have the elusive quality of appearing at once genuinely new and almost intuitively true. As if they, like urbanature, were always already there.

 

CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

 

48-6766	PR468	2010-35165 CIP
Humanities \ Language & Literature \ English & American
Nichols, Ashton.  Beyond Romantic ecocriticism: toward urbanatural roosting.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.  230p bibl index; ISBN 9780230102675, $85.00. Reviewed in 2011aug CHOICE.
With this lyrical, insightful book on urbanature (emphasis on the second syllable: ub-ban-ature), Nichols (Dickinson College) makes a significant contribution to the evolving field of eco-criticism and to the prestigious “Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters” series. Nichols inches toward the interdisciplinary by including architecture, natural history, cultural studies, and evolutionary biology within the purview of literary studies. A Wordsworth and Thoreau scholar with a background in journalism, Nichols fuses studies in the Romantics with his own understanding of big ideas, for example, the “great chain of being,” evolution, and natural history. Structured as a nature-writing journal beginning in spring and ending in spring, this green response to modernism finds such progenitors as the ancient Egyptian god Anubis (wild and human) and Blake’s Romantic “tyger” no less a part of the human force than the lamb. Although Nichols claims the coinage “urbanatural roosting,” he gives credit to fellow eco-critics–including Kurt Fosso, who revised the word “animal,” and Timothy Morton, who excised the word “nature.” Combining literary, anecdotal, and philosophical perspectives, this invaluable book crossbreeds political, spiritual, scientific, and aesthetic elements within the outworn dichotomy of town and country. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above. — L. L. Johnson, Lewis & Clark College

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“An enjoyable read with engaging prose . . . Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism is an important contribution to contemporary discussions about the future of environmentalism and how we might face the environmental challenges of our world today.”

                                                                     — Environmental Philosophy

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“In Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, Ashton Nichols reveals himself not just as an ecocritical scholar but as a very effective nature writer.”

                                                                      — Ecozon@

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College Literature

39:3 (Summer 2012): 171-73

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Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting is a passionate, lyrical and generically diverse work that draws on equally wide-ranging resources from the Romantic period to our own. Its twelve chapters are unusually organised by the seasons and correspond to each month of a year that Ashton Nichols spent ‘roosting’ in his family cabin. ‘Roosting’, or experiencing and ‘coming to know a precise piece of environment more clearly’ (34), is only one of many new words or new meanings for words that Nichols describes as ecologically necessary for us to ‘appreciate the richness of our widest (not just “wildest”) surroundings’ (31). Bookended by first-person accounts of his experiences at the cabin, the body of each chapter combines observations on our contemporary ecological situation, autobiography, nature writing, anecdotes from the history of zoology, and literary criticism. These approaches are admirably interlinked and consistently directed to the book’s principal aim: to introduce a new concept to contemporary debates concerning man’s interconnectedness with nature. ‘Urbanature’ – which rhymes, according to Nichols, with ‘furniture’ – has already been coincidentally deployed by German experimental musicians and a Honda marketing team (xiii, xiv). But, for Nichols, it is a ‘critical term’ that must be connected to recent attempts to rethink Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of nature: ‘urbanature insists that human beings are not out of nature when they stand in the streets of Manhattan any more than they are in nature when they stand above the tree-line in Montana’ (ibid.). This book critiques the historical purging of indigenous humans from the land during the establishment of Yellowstone National Park and praises the more recent attempts of urban areas from Kerala to Detroit to ‘live in harmony with their surroundings’ (17, 204). It does so in order to remind us repeatedly of what Nichols describes as the ‘seamless [. . . ] continuum that runs from the wildest wilds of north Alaska to the urbanest-urbs of South Boston, from the barest plain of Outer Mongolia to the most densely populated neighborhood of Manila’ (205). In an increasingly complex and globalised world that faces disaster, Nichols wants to break down the false oppositions of urban area and wilderness, nature and culture, human and nonhuman in order to demonstrate the ecological importance of recognising urbanatural interconnections in the broadest possible oikos.

This reconciliation of urban and nonurban into ‘urbanature’ mirrors the book’s simultaneous attempt to unite two normally opposed bodies of thinking about the natural world: literature and science. It will come as no surprise to those who know Nichols’ deservedly lauded website Romantic Natural History and its accompanying printed volume that the most impressive moments in the book make use of his knowledge of the period’s zoology. This expertise in the history of science is combined with a belief in the power of literature to allow for precisely the ecocentric rather than anthropocentric approach to the natural world that he is advocating. In fact, it is clear that Nichols believes that the moment Wordsworth imagined in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads has indeed arrived (100) – a moment where the Poet will not only ‘follow the steps of the man of Science [. . . ] but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself’. Combining historical reflections with sound knowledge of recent developments, Nichols’ writing moves compellingly – if occasionally a little too easily – between Romantic natural histories and contemporary science: ‘Romantic natural history helps us to see how the “Nature” of Isaac Newton and Linnaeus becomes, via Wordsworth and Shelley, the “nature” of Stephen Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould’ (27–8). This statement demonstrates the book’s tendency to claim perhaps a little too much for the poets without detailed presentation of the excellent connecting work that other scholars have performed in the period. But there is no doubting Nichols’ passion for the relevance of Romantic-period literature to contemporary ecological challenges. For this book, literature is not only important in its ability to communicate the interrelatedness of man and nature described by science, but also because its very materials are similar to and indeed may have influenced the sciences: from careful observation of similarity and difference to metaphor and even the provision of pleasure (99–100, 185).

Justifiable assertion of what the two cultures have in common can, however, collapse frustratingly into a corresponding tendency in this book to judge literature by the standards of science. This is summarised by Nichols’ deliberately breezy but, for this reviewer, harmfully oversimplifying paraphrase of Wordsworth: ‘Take a little bit of science, add a bit of “impassioned expression”: the result? Poetry’ (100). It is also sometimes apparent in his closer engagement with the literature of the period. His reading of Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’, for example, is representative in the heavy emphasis that it places upon scientific accuracy or, regarding Keats’ nightingale, ‘naturalistic rigor’ (94, 97). To an extent, this is justified by the contextual information about the hydrological cycle and chemical intoxication that is discussed, but it limits both the literary analysis and the specificity of what poetry can do especially in the face of the ecological challenges that the book poses so well in other places. Romantic poetry’s complex and problematic relation to naturalistic accuracy is, contrary to the emphasis in some of Nichols’ readings, one of its most powerful resources in engaging with – rather than fleeing from – the world that it constructs and that constructs it. To use Nichols’ own example once more, ‘The Cloud’ is most remarkable not for its scientific correctness but for its radical anthropomorphism of a meteorological reality and its many mutable manifestations through voicing in verse the first-person perspective of water vapour. To my mind, it is impossible to judge a powerful literary technique like this in terms of naturalistic accuracy. Furthermore, an analysis based upon such preoccupations leads both to a necessarily impoverished idea of poetry’s usefulness, as well as to a buried implication that reading Romantic literature might help to solve today’s ecological crisis which is arguably not as carefully theorised or interrogated as it needs to be.

Like other recent works about Romantic science, this book excellently conveys the excitement of the ‘pervasive paradigm shift’ that occurred in the work of figures like Erasmus Darwin: the ‘revolutionary turn away from a fallen version of “Nature” that was static and unchanging toward a Romantic “nature” characterized by dynamic links among all living things’ (xvi). It may be a concern, however, for more period-based readers that the word ‘Romantic’ is quite loosely defined – a result of Nichols’ capacious use of the category to include writers from Mary Shelley to Rachel Carson, William Blake to Lawrence Buell. This ambitious scope can lead not only to Romanticism being associated strongly with ‘ecocriticism’ (as if that is what Keats and Shelley were doing at least some of the time) but also to insufficiently interrogated inconsistencies concerning the value of Romantic approaches to nature. The book’s strength is its articulate and impassioned repetition of the fact that mankind is a part of nature and that nature is so often marked by mankind’s influence: to use Nichols’ Thoreau-infused terminology, there is no wilderness, just differing degrees of urbanatural wildness (xiii). But, while Romantic natural history is key in raising awareness of the connections between man and nature, Nichols makes this move at the expense of what he describes as ‘Romantic ecocriticism’. For Nichols, ‘Romantic ecocriticism’ is apparent not only in twentieth-century literary studies but also in a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts as well: it ‘arises out of the belief that human beings once existed closer to “the state of nature”’ and he sketches a genealogy from the Garden of Eden to Rousseau’s noble savage and even into twentieth-century anthropology (168). But, there is not enough detail to support his claim that ‘the violence and pain of primitive life – the death, disease, destruction, and suffering of nature – is ordinarily overlooked’ in earlier Romantic ecocritical accounts (ibid.). At the core of the book, evidence is cited for why Romantic writers (including Wordsworth and Mary Shelley) found Nature seductive and beautiful, but it ignores that Wordsworth was also fostered by fear as well as beauty and that Mary Shelley’s Creature was – although sympathetic – also monstrous and violent (168–9).

As a result, Nichols’ writing justly acknowledges that the natural world is ‘red in tooth and claw’ (to use his favourite Tennyson quotation), but the book’s principal thesis denies this to what it sees as characteristically ‘Romantic’. In response to Thoreau’s experience on Mount Katahdin in Maine, Nichols suggests two Thoreaus. One is the Romantic ecocritic who ‘like so many Romantic ecocritics before and since [. . . ] had offered up a version of nature with which readers feel at peace because they feel contented and connected’; the other is, according to Nichols, the ‘urbanatural rooster’ who is ‘at once scared, and also overwhelmed, by the harsh materialism of the objects around him’ (172). For Nichols, this terror ‘presents a view that counters Romantic ecocriticism completely and moves directly toward urbanatural roosting’ (ibid.). Such a claim induces questions about the usefulness or accuracy of describing Thoreau as either an ‘ecocritic’ or an ‘urbanatural rooster’. But I also suspect that for many readers this moment will not be counter-Romantic but will instead be a reminder of one of the most Romantic sensations and tropes in the period’s literature and philosophy: the Sublime. Nichols suggests that we move beyond Romantic ecocriticism by deconstructing naive versions of natural beauty into a more complicated, strange and savage world, but – while it sometimes comes out in the details – the broader argument of the book does not sufficiently articulate that many of the best examples of Romantic art and thought are already performing precisely this deconstruction. The book’s desire to be both an academic monograph and a more popularly-oriented ecological polemic is a potential source of this problem. Although it is excellent at not eliding the historical differences between the challenges faced at the beginning of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, its eagerness to reconcile destructively incompatible elements in our contemporary ecological situation makes it too easy to transcend the difficulties that are already present in so much thought and writing of the Romantic period.

Nevertheless, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism is a readable and obviously well-loved project with many memorable instances of evocative nature writing, including an unusually successful hawk-watch and the death-by-lightbulb of a nest of paper-wasps (120–7, 137–9). In its timely ecological claims, the book also offers something interestingly different. A number of reviewers have linked Nichols’ ‘urbanature’ to the influential thinking of Timothy Morton’s ‘ecology without nature’ and this is a connection that Nichols himself encourages at the beginning and end of the book. I see, however, a significant difference in ecological temperament between Morton and Nichols’ respective strategies. Although any deconstruction of a term like ‘nature’ is likely to find itself oscillating between plenitude and scarcity, Morton’s more philosophically-charged critique of ecologocentrism wants to get rid of nature altogether where Nichols wants us to see it everywhere: in cities, industrial wasteland, and suburbs as much as in national parks or pristine wilderness. It is true that this impulse is counteracted to an extent by the fact that a large portion of the book still occurs in the most time-honoured scenario of a solitary North American male chopping wood outside a cabin. But its charming utopianism with regard to modern global challenges is sincere: ‘Imagine urban, suburban, small town, and rural places in which the water and the air are clean, in which the food is fresh, local and preservative free, in which the energy is used but also used wisely – reused and not wasted – in which human spaces are built with an eye to nonhuman needs and built to blend the inner world (of human consciousness) with the outer world (of nonhuman nature): minds and weather, emotions and plants, health and animals, vegetables and computers’ (35). I am suspicious of the suggestion that the layering of more ecocritical jargon (like ‘urbanature’ and ‘roosting’) can really help counter our current ecological crisis. I also see problems with the ease of Nichols’ reconciliation of mutually incompatible human and nonhuman behaviours into urbanature. But, there is no doubting that his approach offers an affirmative new tool for ecocritical thinking and another direction for further complication and consideration.

In the end, Nichols’ ultimate thesis is admirable even as it fails to confront adequately the difficulties of such a task: ‘Urbanatural roosting asks, simply, that the old lines of arbitrary separation – urban/rural, city/country, natural/artificial – be removed; the idea claims that the populous boroughs of Manhattan and the crowded neighbourhoods of Los Angeles are not qualitatively different from the still lakes of the Adirondacks and the waving kelp beds off the Californian coast. All of these locations are equally worthy of human care and concern, all equally deserving of the attention needed to sustain them’ (205). The best parts of this book affirm and reaffirm this way of living so passionately that it is difficult not to feel that it might be possible. Yet, some of the Romantic writing considered by Nichols can also be – and indeed has been – read as challenging precisely the ease with which he reconciles these ‘arbitrary separations’. This book’s mixed genres (an advantage in other respects) limit its level of single-minded engagement with Romantic texts and scholarship and make it less convincing in its secondary claims that ‘Romantic ecocriticism tended to demonize the urban while idealizing the natural’ or that ‘the Romantic world of nature has ended’ and we should move towards ‘urbanatural roosting’ (205). This reviewer is confident neither that Romantic nature was ever that simple (as Nichols himself acknowledges in parts of this book) nor that it is so easy to move beyond the insightfully incompatible complexities of Romantic thought about the natural world.

James Castell, St John’s College, Cambridge. DOI: 10.3366/rom.2013.0136

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Southern Humanities Review

“The concept of “urbanatural roosting” is evocative. . . . Rarely does one come across a work of contemporary criticism this enjoyable to read. The organization of the book mirrors its subject matter in fascinating, experimental ways, offering seasonal readings through thirteen months, Spring through Spring, Again, chronicling a year living at the ‘Roost,’ and blending literary theory with personal history in ways that reverberate with the whirlwind music of Walden. The work’s poetic introspection, modeled after writers like Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, offers so much hope through its imagism and plainly rendered honesty . . . Don’t let the intimacy of his work fool you. Nichols’s criticism is profound and reflects scrupulous research . . . . In keeping with its Thoreauvian style and organization, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism seems to call out to contemporary criticism, “simplify, simplify” (Walden, chapter two), offering intricate readings of complex Romantic and Victorian poetics in plain language, avoiding weighty jargon and using metaphors drawn from daily experiences living at “the Roost”. . . In its clear, poetic, and joyful message Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism exemplifies what it advocates: place-conscious theory that is also accessible to any greenhorn-ecocritic.”                                                              Madison Jones IV, Southern Humanities Review (2013)

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European Romantic Review 

Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting; William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture

Teddi Lynn Chichester, University of California, Los Angeles. Published online: 08 Jan 2014.

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Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting, by Ashton Nichols, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, xiii + 230 pp.

William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environment- alism in Nineteenth-Century Culture, by Scott Hess, Charlottesville and London, U of Virginia P, 2012, ix + 290 pp.

A recent item in the Los Angeles Times announced a proposed name change to a local freeway that connects the central artery of Interstate 405 to the sprawling “multi-use” community of Playa Vista. Currently designated the Marina Freeway, the road in ques- tion may soon unfurl, in all its traffic-jamming glory, under the banner “Ballona Freeway.” Councilman Mike Bonin recommended this change because, in his words, “Ballona Creek is an important natural resource in the Los Angeles environment,” and the new moniker “would allow people to connect the natural beauty around them with the name ‘Ballona’” (qtd. Groves) rather than with the man-man structure of the marina. Aside from the fact that developers have nearly erased any “natural beauty” – and viable resources – that the once glorious Ballona Wetlands once possessed, this minor story, buried in the back pages of the Times, would offer two current ecocritics much to ponder, beginning with the hotly contested words “natural,” “resource,” “beauty,” and “man-made.” 

Scott Hess, author of William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture, and Ashton Nichols, who has penned Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting, forcefully challenge the firm boundary between the natural and the human that Bonin and his Ballona versus Marina debate assert. Both Hess and Nichols, who present themselves as recovering Romantic ecocritics, with all the nature-worship, transcendentalism, and deep ecology affiliations that term might imply, largely reject the rapturous visions of unpeopled wilds germane to Romantic poetry (and some strands of ecocriticism) in favor of shared spaces, “natural” as well as humanly constructed.

While Hess labors to uproot the (primarily) Wordsworthian forests and fields of what Jonathan Bate has called “ecopoetics” – and the ecocritical practices spawned thereby – Nichols initially embraces and then more gently moves “beyond” what he sees as Romanticism’s and its (eco)critics’ disavowal of the human, especially the urban. With the transposition of one letter, entangled Romantic roots become a presumably lofty and capacious roost, where a more ecocentric humanity can dwell in “urbanatural” harmony. . . . Nichols, too, though happy to “roost” in his isolated cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, similarly declares: “Save the wilderness – ignore the cities! As long as environmentalists are busy saving unpopulated wild lands, they are wasting valuable resources that could help to save the whole world, not just those parts of it that are aesthetically pleasing to white, upper-middle-class nature lovers” (202).

For Ashton Nichols, author of Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting, it is those urban places that deserve much more attention, both by ecocritics and ecoactivists. In fact, Nichols’s book, an entertaining and erudite compendium of scholarly research, memoir, and manifesto, argues that human or “built” worlds and the realm of nature are so enmeshed that this borderless realm deserves a new appellation: urbanature, a hybrid oikos, or home, where we, like our non-human neighbors, must “roost,” or live lightly and harmoniously. Nichols structures his book like a kind of almanac or Thoreauvian “meteorological journal of the mind” that records the author’s “urbanatural year” of roosting (3, 4). His main dwelling place is in fact called The Roost – Aldo Leopold’s Shack comes to mind – a tiny cabin perched atop Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. 

Here, Nichols reflects engagingly on Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” (a truly lovely close reading), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural history (and the poetry it inspired), Thoreau’s terrifying revelation on Mount Katahdin, and contemporary design theory, a field in which environmentally attuned thinkers such as David Orr and Anne Whiston Spirn contend that if architects and urban planners recognize that, in the latter’s words, “The city is part of nature,” designers can enhance urban dwellers’ lives – and cultivate nature’s presence – by nourishing natural forces and features within the city (46). Nichols the scholar-pilgrim also descends from his mountain roost to travel, for example, to Florence, where he goes “in search of urbanature,” not, as I expected, within the parks and plazas of the city, but instead in its natural history museum, which reminds him of nature’s astonishing variety and further convinces him of the often startling kinship among beetles, bats, great apes, and homo sapiens, a kinship that inspires the somewhat clumsy term “ecomorphic ecocentrism” (184) that Nichols proposes should replace “anthropomorphic anthropocentricism” (other trendy buzzwords include “ecoethic” and “ecoculture”).

Like Hess, Nichols challenges the “human culture versus wild nature distinction” that both authors ascribe to Romantic thought (though Nichols, following Timothy Morton, acknowledges that such a split simply never existed for Percy Shelley, a poet who makes several appearances in Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism). However, while Hess exposes in order to prune ecocriticism’s Romantic – or at least Wordsworthian – roots, Nichols’s book affectionately traces them through such strands as Coleridge’s “one Life” philosophy, Keats’s autumnal meditations, and Shelley’s west-wind driven thoughts before moving “beyond” them in his final, more polemical sections. For Nichols, this shift involves embracing what Bill McKibben, in a very different spirit from Nichols’s, calls “a postnatural world,” now bereft of the “separate, timeless wild sphere” (118, 47) apart from man’s influence (and, in McKibben’s text, contamination), a world in which past and present-day Romantics, if not post-Romantic ecocritics, fervently believe(d). 

McKibben laments in The End of Nature (1989) that as we continue to (over-) populate and (carbon-) warm the earth, “The world outdoors will mean much the same thing as the world indoors, the hill the same thing as the house” (48); yet Nichols – though never cavalier about the planet’s ills – provocatively urges his readers to accept and even celebrate “an idea of nature” that “break[s] down the separation between outdoors and indoors” (192). But it is as a nature writer, and outdoors-man, that Nichols really shines, especially stylistically, as he minutely and empathetically observes the flora and fauna that enliven the land surrounding the Roost. As he eloquently honors the rites of spring in April, when “small clouds of multicolored, skittery warblers” and “a tight bundle of rusty, thudding robins” approach his cabin (20), or makes us shiver as September’s ghostly fog blankets the mountain and permeates his cabin (112–14), the book’s balance towards nature and away from urbanity tips precariously, but to my mind beautifully.

When, however, Nichols asks near the end of the book, “Why should my life alone on this mountain be any different than my life in Calcutta or Cleveland?” and answers “It is not,” I was a bit dismayed at how this otherwise deeply personal, deeply searching book could deny the profound experiential distinctions that no amount of (ecocritical) theorizing can erase (192). It seems to me that Nichols’s choice of a solitary roost, where human voices cannot wake him from his musings on nature and/as culture, surreptitiously inserts a hyphen into his title’s portmanteau word. While his epilogue dis- misses the notion of an independent, (once) pristine nature as – echoes of Hess – “a beautiful aesthetic dream” (207), his often lyrical celebrations of the wildlife in the Blue Ridge Mountains (re)introduce the “note of enchantment” that a caged thrush brings to London’s Cheapside in William Wordsworth’s “The Reverie of Poor Susan.” As both Scott Hess and Ashton Nichols confront, with real earnestness and expertise, the legacies of Romantic nature writing and Romantic ecocriticism, they prompt us to wonder how, now that we’re moving beyond the wilderness focus of earlier modes of ecocriticism and environmental activism, we can sustain that much-needed note, on the page, in the forest, and on the city street.

References

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Groves, Martha. “Changing Name of Marina Freeway to ‘Ballona Freeway’ is Proposed.” Los Angeles Times 3 Sep. 2013. Web. 3 Sep. 2013. Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005 [1920]. Print. 

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——. The Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850). Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. Print.

Teddi Lynn Chichester

University of California, Los Angeles. # 2014 Teddi Lynn Chichester http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2013.866738