Susan Cooper's Humble Ecology: Humility and Christian Stewardship in Rural Hours

Abstract

In 1850 book of nature writing, Rural Hours, Susan Cooper works way toward an ethic of Christian stewardship of earth would prove to be over a century ahead of time, through a sense of humility before G-d departs from traditional Christian notions of humility.1 The basic premise of stewardship theology is, as summarized by Michael Northcott, that neither Hebrew and Christian doctrine of creation, with its separation of creation from creator, nor concept of human dominion over nature, involve a purely instrumentalist vision of nature which legitimates ecological plunder, because role of humans with respect to nature is ordered by metaphor of stewardship through which Genesis creation accounts describe human-nature relationship (129).2 Cooper is second daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, famous for his Leatherstocking Tales, and was for most of life his eldest child, older sister Elizabeth having passed away at age of two, when Cooper was not yet 1 -yearold (Kurth 3-4). In fact, in addition to leaving mark as the first American woman to publish a book of nature writing (Johnson and Patterson, Intro. to Rural ix), Cooper also served as her father's secretary (Kurth 58), and from his passing as his executor (Maddox, Plain Daughters 134). In this last role, she worked hard to help shape and cement his literary legacy by publicly defending father's work after his death and providing prefaces to editions of his novels, [as well as] a reverential memoir to accompany anthology of extracts from his novels (Maddox, Plain Daughters 134). While Cooper stops short of modern notions of ecological humility toward land, which recognize simultaneous smallness of any one being in relation to whole and impossibility of whole without its constituent parts, she nevertheless achieves an overarching, cosmic sense of humility in face of natural world through pious adherence to doctrine of Episcopal Church melded with a finely tuned perception of movements of land (Johnson, Waiden, Rural Hours 190). To see Cooper's ideas on topic are of lasting relevance and importance we need hardly look further than slogan of Episcopal Ecological Network (founded 1989), an environmentalist network within Cooper's own denomination, Episcopal Church, USA, which reads Caring for God's Creation: Called to be Stewards. By observing minute particularities of environment while living in Cooperstown, New York, particularly changing weather and progress of seasons, different colors of sky and water, and life cycles of flowers, animals, and humans around her, Cooper intuits inherent connection of humans to one another (society), and to natural world (ecology). By developing belief Christian believer is but steward and priest of Almighty Father, responsible for use of each gift (Rhyme 28), Cooper arrives at a blueprint for a humble relation to earth calls on humans to treat one another and nonhuman world with love and care. Cooper's ecological vision, and particularly frequent use of short, descriptive entries, enacts a humility toward land, in context of an overall lowliness before G-d. While recent works of ecocriticism by scholars such as Lawrence Buell and Rochelle Johnson acknowledge important role of humility in Cooper's work,3 way in which this humility manifests itself remains largely unexplored. I argue here through a stance of minute attentiveness toward movements of land and people of Cooperstown and its environs, an attentiveness which is predicated upon a humility toward matter of observation at hand, Cooper cultivates a humility which recognizes subtlety and grandeur of nature even as human activity is understood to be inextricably bound up in workings of nature. …