The Shore is Not a Beach

Abstract

Abstract:While environmental psychology has in general focused on constructs such as 'place attachment' to explore formation of environmental identification, other disciplines have sought out modes of understanding that introduce 'space' as a means to highlight possibilities for pro-environmental identification that move away from self-concepts engendered through fixed named and specified places. In era of global ecological crises, play of difference between place and space can be examined in works that respond to tropes of sea-level rise and disappearing coastline. Through Rachel Carson's sea writing, J.G. Ballard's terminal beaches, literary environmental journalism of Mark Lynas, and Cormac McCarthy's post-human borderlands, this chapter explores writing that shifts terrain of meaning between two articulations of landscape: shore and beach. In context of contemporary experience of our relationship with survival, such a shift might operate as a 'literature of recruitment' for pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, offering a last defence in shoring up walls of human identity with at point of ecological collapse.Key names and concepts: J.G. Ballard - Rachel Carson - Mark Lynas - Cormac McCarthy - affective landscapes - climate change - crisis - cultural geography - ecology - emotion - environmental identification - landscape - place - space.1. IntroductionMuch environmental psychology has focused on a physical connection to place, or 'place attachment' (Kelly & Hosking 2008: 578) as subject for studying practices that facilitate pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. For example, in their study of 281 respondents in Germany, KaIs, Schumacher and Montada found most powerful predictors for developing affinity with were the present frequency of time spent in [and] by past frequency of time spent in nature (191) and that these, in turn, were strongest predictors for individual pro-environmental behaviours.Yet a considerable body of work suggests that our ability to spend time in 'natural places' has been eroded (e.g. Jacques 2008; Kovel 2008; Wilding 2008) by structures of a deep anthropocentrism that, finding their articulation in structures of capitalist ways of living, have led to the domination of non-human [by] Western industrial network of knowledge and power (Jacques 2008: 10). Or as Bill McKibben puts it: Wilderness - in its truest sense, of places totally separated from human influence - is extinguished. (McKibben 1995: 5)Perhaps as a result of threats that are perceived to accompany ever-louder suggestions of global ecological degradation brought on by this 'Western industrial network', of which climate change is perhaps only most visible warning (Wilson 2003), this process of self-conceptualisation, or identity formation, has been urgent area for exploration by environmental psychologists who wish to understand many different ways in which 'place attachment' may set individuals along a path on which they might (or might not) develop pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. In their study of university students, environmental psychologists Hinds and Sparks found that engendering empathy towards tends to increase level of connectedness people feel towards it, which in turn encourages proenvironmental behaviours (Hinds and Sparks 2008). Their study builds on work by Clayton and Opotow, who concluded that an identification with, or sense of connection to, environment [broadens] mainstream concept of identity formation to include [...] how people see themselves in relation to natural world (Clayton & Opotow 2003, cited in Hinds and Sparks 2008: 110). This empirical evidence pointing toward attachment to place or places, whether rural or urban, wild or sanitized, is, according to Lynne Manzo (2003: 54) critical in demonstrating that people are active shapers of their environments, and their interaction with around them is part of a conscious process. …