The Ecology of Desire: Coastal Poetics, Passion, and Environmental Consciousness

Abstract

This essay develops what may seem a curious proposal: that Pacific coast poetry by Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke uses erotic imagery to develop ecological consciousness. Whether describing the advance and retreat of the tides as a kind of foreplay, or envisioning the ardor of anadromous salmon and steelhead as they rush upriver to their spawning redds, these poets distinguish the amorous energies of the marine environment from the structures of human desire. In poems such as Jeffers’s “Salmon Fishing” (1924) and “Steelhead, Wild Pig, The Fungus” (1937) or Roethke’s “North American Sequence” (1964), human desire appears calculating, transactional, avaricious, and even frankly predatory. Against this, the poems eroticize the fecundity of marine ecosystems as immediate and sensual. The “ecology of desire,” as this essay presents it, stands for an understanding of the reproductive urgencies of the coastal environment in nonanthropocentric terms. Intertidal, estuarine, and anadromous writing in this mode appears uniquely passionate. These texts create an equally ardent environmental consciousness by drawing the reader into ecosystems that are natively resilient and natively fervent—indeed desperate to reproduce themselves—even as they are so deeply threatened by human encroachment.