Editor's Note

Abstract

In her wise and practical 1989 poem “Knot,” Pattiann Rogers acknowledges that human thought processes, in mimicking nature, tend toward both/and rather than either/or. While the speaker of her poem seems to tilt initially toward separation, the world's phenomena inevitably “weave their attachments into my attitude,” she writes. This is very much a both/and issue of ISLE, one that reaches out toward surprising artists and genres and time periods, suggesting that all of this work shares certain central motivations. We might do well, in particular, to keep in mind Kirstin Hotelling Zona's closing critique, in her article on poet Mary Oliver in this issue, of the distinction we tend to “contrive” between “self-actualization and abandon, ethical valence and astonishment.” Perhaps what we take to be diametrically antagonistic sensibilities, when viewed in a different light or imagined in a new way, are elements of the same whole. In considering the presence or absence of certain communities or themes in environmental art, what's there or not there is often a matter of perception rather than essential presence or absence. Salma Monani and Matthew Beehr, in their analysis of John Sayles's 2007 film Honeydripper, underscore the role of “framing” in characterizing African-American attitudes toward the environment, using the film to show “the historical experiences that have played a role in African-American experience.” Such a study joins the surge of recent books that explore the centrality of environmental experience for groups of people who've stereotypically been imagined as non-environmentalists. Mary Ellen Bellanca's study of Daphne du Maurier's “The Birds,” the short story that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film of the same title, is also, in a strange way, a discussion about reaching out and expanding our capacity to imagine, suggesting that the “predation fears” revealed in this nightmarish story enlarge our appreciation of risk and danger in the modern world. At the heart of Michael A. Bryson's article about Chicago naturalist Leonard Dubkin is the ethical imperative to notice the unnoticed, to perceive the vibrancy of the nonhuman in the midst of the city, the ultimate human context—again, this is a matter of framing, or re-framing, in order to notice the multidimensionality of what we take for granted. Robert Emmett's work presents a different approach to urban environmental experience, exploring the usefulness and the ineffectuality of community gardens as environmental justice interventions, with a particular focus on Los Angeles and New York City. In a very different context, Guilia Pacini's consideration of Bernardin de Saint Pierre's bestselling eighteenth-century French novel Paul et Virginie, also encompasses disparities between “idyllic representation” and “forceful cultural critique,” emphasizing ultimately the critique of a “plantation economy” on the island of Mauritius. Jeremy Withers focuses on a rather unusual literary text for ecocriticism, John Lydgate's fifteenth-century Debate of the Horse, Goose and Sheep, but the both/and aspect of his work explores the multivalent representations of and attitudes toward animals, particularly the vacillations and tensions between biocentric, theocentric, and anthropocentric perspectives all encompassed in this one poem. As mentioned above, Kirstin Hotelling Zona's article illuminates the poetry of Mary Oliver, but she seeks to turn inside out readers' sense of how environmental writing might spur social change, showing how Oliver does so not necessarily through the predictable rhetorical mechanism of “repudiation,” but rather through “acute attention and its spawn, awareness.” Just as Zona re-imagines the language of social change in the context of Oliver's awareness-prompting poetry, Lydia R. Cooper re-thinks the role of religion in responding to environmental crisis by showing how Linda Hogan seems to reject certain aspects of both traditional Native American and Judeo-Christian ritual without altogether denying the importance of “sacred ritual” in facilitating environmental and cultural renewal. In various ways, these articles all seem to be gestures of expansion rather than substitution. Summer Harrison's interview with Linda Hogan roams widely through the author's memories about her life and views of writing and cultural and environmental issues, but here, too, the impulse to “put all these things together,” to “knot” rather than separate, triumphs.