Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place

Abstract

For several decades, the best-known slogan of the environmentalist movement has been Think globally, act locally. This double imperative derives from environmentalists' attempts to propagate images of global ecology that might help to make the functioning of the planet as a whole accessible to average citizens, as well as to connect such an understanding with the experience of local places.1 From the enormous ease and frequency with which this popular slogan is quoted, one might assume that it proposes a smooth conceptual connection between the experience of particular places and an understanding of planet-wide ecological systems. In fact, however, different types of environmentalist thought diverge quite substantially in the ways in which they envision the global and its relation to the local; how the global and the local can and should be considered and experienced together remains as much of an open question for an ecological perspective as it does for other approaches to globalization. The objective of this essay is to explore how literary texts negotiate the juncture between ecological globalism and localism and how, from a comparatisi viewpoint, they link issues of global ecology with those of transnational culture. The analysis will focus on a novel whose narrative material as well as storytelling strategies situate it at the intersection of several national and regional literary traditions. Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), a novel by Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita, draws on some of the conventions of U.S.-American ethnic writing, yet it has far stronger affinities with late twentieth-century Latin American fiction. Yamashita lived in Brazil for almost a decade and wrote her second book on Japanese immigrant communities in that country; the influence of both Portuguese and