The Environmental Season: Seasonal and Environmental Discourse in the Work of Hal Borland

Abstract

Literary critics and environmental historians focusing on American culture after World War Two note—mostly in passing—the conspicuous role played by seasonal discourse in American nonfiction nature writing. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring attracts the most attention, but as is typical for Carson and her contemporaries who also employ seasonal discourse, that attention is tangential; critics acknowledge the seasonal, pastoral fable behind Carson’s title, but they focus more on what comes after that introduction: Carson’s specific critique of pesticides and in particular the ecological paradigm shift in her analysis, a shift that is seen as emblematic of the nascent environmental movement.1 The seasonal fable that titles and opens her book is not seen as central to the key points of her environmental argument but rather as an example to make her larger point. This separation of seasonal discourse from post-World War Two environmentalism happens in other key criticism of seasonal texts. Michael Kammen’s A Time for Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (2004) provides a more direct and detailed overview of seasonal literature and art—and in particular the burgeoning focus on the seasons after 1949. “From the 1940s until the later 1970s a notable generation of nature writers produced an astonishing number and variety of four seasons books. Most of them reached a remarkably wide and enthusiastic readership,” Kammen notes (175). This surge in the number of writers and readers connected through seasonal discourse provides one general measure of the cultural significance of the seasons during this era. Kammen identifies as causes of this trend nationalism and post-World War Two nostalgia for a past imagined as more connected to nature and to agricultural rhythms (6–7). And while acknowledging the “ecological and conservationist messages” in the work of Carson and her contemporary season writers (32), he does not connect such discourse to the specific ideological and political issues of that era’s environmentalism. Silent Spring, for example, gets scant attention compared to Carson’s earlier, more detailed seasonal work about the ocean.