Ecological Imperatives Research Articles

Cape Town and the sustainable city in the writing of Henrietta Rose-Innes

Abstract In narratives that demonstrate the mutual imbrication of urban and ecological imperatives, Henrietta Rose-Innes complements planners’ work that analyses and strives to sustains human and other native and migrating species in Cape Town. Squeezed between cliffs and oceans, urban life here must deal with mountain topography that appears to escape development and with environments that seem to frustrate civic order, particularly the informal settlements on the edges of this cosmopolitan tourist port. Drawing on anti-apartheid tropes of social justice and on post-apartheid challenges to neo-liberal speculation, her fiction and non-fiction writing traces the steps of biped, quadruped and hexapod figures along the borders between habitation and wilderness, urban street and bare earth to capture the beauty and violence of this singular South African city.

Selecting and assessing social objectives for Australian fisheries management

This paper details Australian research that developed tools to assist fisheries managers and government agencies in engaging with the social dimension of industry and community welfare in fisheries management. These tools are in the form of objectives and indicators. These highlight the social dimensions and the effects of management plans and policy implementation on fishing industries and associated communities, while also taking into account the primacy of ecological imperatives. The deployment of these objectives and indicators initially provides a benchmark and, over the life of a management plan, can subsequently be used to identify trends in effects on a variety of social and economic elements that may be objectives in the management of a fishery. It is acknowledged that the degree to which factors can be monitored will be dependent upon resources of management agencies, however these frameworks provide a method for effectively monitoring and measuring change in the social dimension of fisheries management.Essentially, the work discussed in this paper provides fisheries management with the means to both track and begin to understand the effects of government policy and management plans on the social dimension of the fishing industry and its associated communities. Such tools allow the consideration of these elements, within an evidence base, into policy arrangements, and consequently provide an invaluable contribution to the ability to address resilience and sustainability of fishing industries and associated communities.

Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry

In the past decade or so, a handful of studies have begun to investigate the relationship between poetry, form, and ecology or ecological conditions—from Jed Rasula's This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (U of Georgia P, 2002) to Scott Knickerbocker's more recent Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (U of Massachusetts P, 2012). Some scholars call this area of study “ecopoetics.” Aaron M. Moe's Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry marks an intervention into this emerging field. In Zoopoetics, Moe argues that poiesis and poetry are multi-species events, or “zoopoetics.” He defines zoopoetics as “the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through an attentiveness to another species' bodily poiesis” (10). For Moe, animals are makers, and this fact has long shaped the making of poetry by humans. To illuminate this claim, Moe considers theories of the primacy of gestures in human language and across human–animal spheres. In presenting evidence of the gestural origin of speech, Moe is able to argue that animal gestures should also be taken seriously as having their own “rhetorical energy” (15). Moe then traces a zoopoetic lineage, reading E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman as inheritors of a Whitmanian zoopoetic tradition. He discusses everything from the way Cummings's “grasshopper poem” (“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”) reenacts the insect's poiesis through textual leaps and sound structures, to how in the “multi-species polis” of a Hillman poem, earthworms on the State Capitol steps “legislate” through the mere presence of their porous, toxified bodies (131). Between the book's chapters are “interludes”—explorations of research on species and interspecies communication and poiesis (e.g. vocal-range expansion in beluga whales resulting from contact with humans; cultural breakdown and retaliation in elephant populations as a consequence of habitat loss)—that are a testament to the book's serious interest in other-than-human making.

Sustainability and organizational transformation: putting the cart before the horse? (Part Two)

Purpose – Global corporate strategies are revealing the boundaries of organizational capabilities and the limits of the natural resource capacity that is needed to sustain business operations. Sustainability has emerged as a strategic response adopted by many corporations to reduce resource dependency and consumption costs. The purpose of this paper is to secure existence as a going concern while also demonstrating corporate citizenship. Design/methodology/approach – This two-part paper will present a review of recent findings relevant to sustainability and change management was performed in order to develop a better understanding of factors that may hinder corporate adoption of sustainability, the role of sustainability in transformational change, and the change management challenges involved in integrating sustainability within corporate culture. Findings – For a growing number of organizations, sustainability has recently been elevated from “doing” to the level of “being”, which involves integration into their mission, vision and shared values. Corporate leaders and governing bodies play a critical role as champions in the implementation of sustainability for organizational transformation. Research limitations/implications – The limited number of examples of organizations fully embracing sustainability at a vision level stems from the fact that most executives do not fully understand the issues and do not know how to devise the governance or strategies needed to adopt a more sustainable path. However, the research points to the fact that there is a recognized shortage of empirical research work specifically focussed on sustainability change and effective business cases. Practical implications – Organization development practitioners have a significant role in helping firms implement sustainability-focussed transformations. Social implications – Given the economic, ecological and social imperatives, there is urgency for firms around the world, both big and small, to adopt effective sustainability strategies that add value for stakeholders while reducing resource demand. Originality/value – The research points to the fact that there is a recognized shortage of empirical research work specifically focussed on sustainability change including limited examples of effective business cases.

Dissipation of the solar-energetic gradient as the origin of binarism in human meaning systems

Purpose – This paper aims to formulate a hypothesis for the origin and position of binarism within human meaning systems. Specifically, binarism exists ineluctably as a living system's impetus toward life over death, and then – at the symbolic level within human meaning systems – as a device by which humans more efficiently dissipate the solar-energetic gradient. Design/methodology/approach – Organisms composing terrestrial ecosystems acquire and degrade solar energy or its derivatives, thereby reducing the thermal gradient impressed on Earth by the Sun. Kay and Schneider call this “the thermodynamic imperative of the restated second law for open systems.” This paper connects the “thermodynamic imperative” to aspects of human meaning systems and pushes Serres' notion regarding homeostasis and the origin of communication one step further to consider such an origin in terms of a binarism born of solar-energetic gradient dissipation. Findings – It is hypothesized that the human homoiotherm extends the ineluctable binarism of life over death for all living systems to a symbolic level – as a first, or local, “energetic order” – which serves as a foundational device of human meaning systems; humans efficiently use this binary device to produce entropy and maintain homeostasis within individual organisms and comprehensive ecosystems; and human language, and ultimately the entirety of human meaning systems, emerges from the dissipation of the solar-energetic gradient. Originality/value – Modern Western philosophical concepts related to binarism – i.e. Kantian and Hegelian dialectics – are not associated with ecological imperatives. The present hypothesis proposes the co-existence of both a fundamental binarism (i.e. impetus of life over death) and more complex symbolic differentials (in a Leibnizian/Deleuzian sense) as necessary for the emergence of complex human meaning systems in consonance with thermodynamic and ecological imperatives.

An Impact Assessment of Nomadic Gujjars on Environment in Block Marh and Block Satwari of Jammu

ABASRACT: Migration of nomadic gujjars is a traditional, seasonal activity associated with economic interest. Since the Neolithic revolution pastoral nomads have roamed along the fringes of settled society. Their economy mainly depends on the products of their flocks and the use of natural pastures. The reliance of nomads on their animals brings them closer to the lands where agricultural based societies are present. They are poor, illiterate and without sufficient food and other basic facilities of life and hence are dependent on natural pastures. The harmonious interaction of nomads and their environment enables them to live a sustainable existence with some detrimental impacts on local ecosystem like overgrazing, soil erosion, cutting of trees, and pollution of water bodies, air pollution etc. While no system pastoralists or nomads is in perfect symbiosis with their environment. The associated ecological problems of their lifestyle or subsistence strategies are thereby effecting the environment. There is a dire need to manage the environmental problems associated with the cattle rearing of nomads. The present study is based on primary and secondary data. With the help of questionnaire, a stratified random sample survey was undertaken, 200 local residents were interviewed, 100 in each block i.e. Marh and Satwari of Jammu District. The response to each question was calculated on five point Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5. Taking into consideration the importance of pastoral mobility, necessity to equally exploit the rangelands of summer and winter pasture, their rights for grazing, and ecological imperatives for co-existence that points to a promising new direction for long-term sustainability, we only need to educate the pastoralists and local people regarding proper lifestyle that should not harm the environment.

Poststructuralist fiddling while the world burns: Exiting the self made crisis of “architectural culture”

We critique the current crisis for the environmental design professions: facing urgent ecological, social and economic imperatives, key leadership has become mired in the confusions of do-nothing p ...

Cultural Acceptability of Alternative Pit and Quarry Rehabilitations

Pit and quarry sites from sand, gravel, and rock extraction must be rehabilitated by law in Ontario. Adjacent and nearby landscapes affect local residents' perceptions of the success of rehabilitation in terms of how the former extraction site fits the landscape. Along with ecological imperatives, the ways in which rehabilitation is designed to fit a social landscape warrants investigation. It would benefit local people, the aggregates industry, rehabilitation designers, and policy makers to have more information about how rehabilitation projects can embrace local ecological and social contexts by considering how people might perceive the acceptability and cultural value of a rehabilitation. We explored this question in southern Ontario using an online questionnaire to gather responses to a series of photographs, some of which were simulated, showing a range of landscape conditions that might occur around pits and quarries. Respondents were considerably concerned with forest loss, and to a lesser degree with habitats like wetlands and streams. Though housing perceived to be suburban was disliked, housing clusters in a rural area did not suffer the same result. People did not consistently choose a single focus as most desirable. Instead they responded to attributes within the context in which the rehabilitation occurred.

Facing the climate changes: From European strategies to local reality

The energy intensive way of life has created numerous problems that constantly threaten the endurance of ecosystems and cause global uneasiness. The situation is additionally complicated by huge climate, technological and socio-cultural differences between cities and regions, that are therefore not able to accept the same framework for environmental protection and implement synchronized actions. Having in mind the fact that globally proclaimed ecological imperatives effect the change of our perception of the living environment and its limitations, this article offers an insight into the current state of the environment in the EU and in Serbia, and emphasizes differences between our and EU practice. The analysis presents important international and national documents, regional and local strategies, laws and standards, as well as a review of individual initiatives, visions and solutions that could be used as guidelines and examples for our practice. Although some of these suggestions have resulted in a different socio-economic context, it is evident that it is possible to transpose or modify applied models to local conditions. Therefore, this approach opens a new field of cooperation, and includes our regulations and practice into regional and global initiatives leading to the mitigation of consequences of climate changes by increasing energy efficiency and decreasing GHG emissions.

Kyoto is Dead, Long Live Kyoto! A New Era for International Climate Change Law

As the implications of anthropogenic climate change are better understood the pressure builds for more effective legal and policy responses at national and international levels. With climate change looming as an existential threat, climate change law ought not to be characterised merely as a subset of an environmental law designed to reconcile ecological and developmental imperatives in search of the amorphous objective of sustainable development. Instead it should properly be seen as a frontline defender of the social, economic and ecological foundations upon which the rule of law is built. Against the backdrop of improved climate science concerning the temperature threshold beyond which there will be dangerous interference with the climate system, and the carbon reduction pathways to avoid this tipping-point, this paper takes stock of developments in international climate change law in the lead up to the conference and meeting of the parties to UNFCCC and Kyoto in Bali in December; a meeting that will mark 10 years since Kyoto was concluded. While recognising the limitations of the Kyoto Protocol, this paper defends the Kyoto approach against concerted efforts by the Howard Government in Australia and the Bush Administration in the United States to undermine a climate change regime enshrining binding targets and timetables for reducing emissions. It argues that rolling over Kyoto into second and subsequent commitment periods for emissions reductions by developed (and ultimately developing) countries would be an appropriate combination of pragmatism and principle in the pursuit of the rule of law in international climate policy.

Assessing the relative effects of fishing on the New Zealand marine environment through risk analysis

Abstract Campbell, M. L. and Gallagher, C. 2007. Assessing the relative effects of fishing on the New Zealand marine environment through risk analysis – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 64: 256–270. Risk analysis is a tool often used by management to aid decision-making. We present a risk-analysis framework that was developed to facilitate managing New Zealand fisheries. Using catch-effort and observer data, the likelihood that a certain fishery will impact upon five effects of fishing (EoF) issues (non-target species, biodiversity, habitat, trophic interactions, and legislated protected species) is determined. The consequences (impact and/or change) of such events are then determined to determine a relative risk ranking across fisheries. Consequence matrices were developed to assess each of the five EoF categories. To illustrate the model, a 13-y data set of New Zealand fisheries catch-effort and observer data was analysed, using orange roughy (Hoplostethus atlanticus) as an example fishery. The New Zealand fisheries management framework follows a traditional model in which socio-political imperatives are determined (through risk assessment) after ecological impacts are assessed. By maintaining separation between ecological and socio-political imperatives, a transparent and objective framework is established.

Landcare and private conservation trusts: Fertile common ground?

Landcare and private conservation trusts: Fertile common ground?

Forest pathogens: friend or foe to biodiversity?

Biological diversity in forest ecosystems results from evolutionary processes driven by ecological imperatives linked to pathogens, symbionts, fire, climate, and competition or impacts from other agents of disturbance. To understand the behavior of microorganisms and microbial pathogens, it is necessary to have a comprehensive appreciation for the diversity of their functional attributes in their natural habitats. Where niches are complex, evolution is guided by more than simple host–pathogen relationships. Moreover, the negative attributes of a pathosystem are not always obvious at different scales or in different contexts. Deleterious impacts on one species (e.g., mortality, parasitism) may benefit another species through reduced competition or enhanced nutrient cycling. Species with pathogenic behavior also display mutualistic and symbiotic benefits (e.g., mycorrhizal fungi and endophytic antagonists found in grasses) or useful attributes as biological control agents. Preserving the diversity of natural areas while controlling forest pests is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to understand pest niches more thoroughly, while the opportunity is to have a wiser use of both timber and nontimber forest resources.

Emergy analysis of one century of agricultural production in the Rolling Pampas of Argentina

Historically, agricultural production in the Rolling Pampas of Argentina was characterised by low use of synthetic inputs. This changed during the 1990s, with the widespread adoption of technology privileged by neoclassical macroeconomic policies implemented in the same decade. In this paper, Emergy Accounting is used to quantitatively assess the ecological sustainability of agricultural systems in the region throughout the 20th century. Economic deregulation and trade liberalisation have led to an increase in productivity, but have also increased dependency on non-renewable resources. As the ecological and socioeconomic implications of intensification become more controversial, there is an urgent need for integrated, multiscale and multi-disciplinary monitoring and research. Moreover, there is a greater need for a broader, critical and inclusive debate to redefine the role and shape of sustainable agriculture in the Rolling Pampas. Emergy accounting, an evolving methodology that brings ecological imperatives to the forefront of evaluation, constitutes a valuable tool for such a debate.

Sustainability speak: Discourse and practice paradigms in subdivision design

In the last decade the concept of sustainable development has been widely embraced as the key to environmentally friendly development. However, in many instances the physical sustainability side of the equation stops at a rhetorical level and the ensuing developments fail to respond to ecological imperatives or to protect existing ecological values. Nowhere is this failure more evident than at the urban fringes of Melbourne, Australia, where residential land estate developments relentlessly engulf degraded agricultural lands that often contain the remnants of vegetative and hydrological ecological systems. This paper postulates that while landscape design practitioners claim the ‘authority of nature’ (and, by extension, the land) for their design inspiration, in reality narrow practice foci and instrumental approaches have meant that the design of estates and subdivisions often make only token reference to ecological underpinnings. It is argued that instrumental influences on design decision-making are embedded in landscape-architectural professional culture and glossed over with an elusive rhetoric of care and concern for the environment. It is further postulated that individual expressions of interest in the land and its systems can make a substantive contribution to sustainable design practice and practical outcomes.

Indigenous community economic development in Northern Australia

There have been numerous enquiries reporting on the economic and social disadvantages of Indigenous Australians. Important factors that have worsened the labour market difficulties for Indigenous Australians include their relatively rapid population growth, the relatively high proportion of the population in the younger age ranges, and the geographical concentration of much of the population in rural and remote areas. As employment opportunities for Indigenous Australians have shrunk there has been an increased dependence on government services and programs within many Indigenous communities. It is a central argument of this paper that promoting options for sustainable community economic development will improve social indicators of well being due to the linkage between economic and social outcomes, and while the need to, link the economic, social and ecological imperatives of development have been widely agreed, questions of implementation are matters for central concern. Based upon the findings of case studies of small business development in remote Indigenous communities in the north of Australia as well as overseas, this paper addresses the questions of how ideas of sustainable community development can be best translated into reality.

Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology; This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Book Review| December 01 2004 Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology; This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry By Michael A. Bryson. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2002. xvii,228 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $16.50.By Jed Rasula. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2002. xv, 259 pp.$39.95. Anne Raine Anne Raine Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2004) 76 (4): 899–901. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-76-4-899 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Anne Raine; Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology; This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. American Literature 1 December 2004; 76 (4): 899–901. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-76-4-899 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

The Science and Values of Restoration Ecology

It has been 22 years since William Jordan III and the University of Wisconsin Arboretum published the first issue of Restoration and Management Notes, 16 years since the founding of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), and 10 years since SER published the first issue of its flagship journal, Restoration Ecology. In this short time, restoration ecology has become a leader in North American conservation efforts. Believing it is important that the field has a strong scientific foundation (Bradshaw 1993), restoration ecologists have emphasized concepts such as ‘ecosystem health’ and ‘ecosystem integrity’ when articulating restoration goals and frequently have invoked ecological principles when describing and justifying their objectives (SER 2002). Although ecology plays a central and essential role in the implementation of restoration projects, we believe that defining restoration goals and objectives is fundamentally a value-based, not scientific, activity. Since its inception, SER has taken the lead in developing and articulating paradigms of restoration. SER’s most recent major publication, The SER Primer of Ecological Restoration (SER 2002), is developed around the notion that communities and ecosystems are ecological entities. In the Primer, the goal of restoration is stated to be ‘‘the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.’’ The Primer describes a recovered ecosystem as one that ‘‘contains sufficient biotic and abiotic resources to continue its development without further assistance’’ and for which ‘‘potential threats to the health and integrity of the restored ecosystem have been eliminated.’’ An ecosystem is also considered restored when it ‘‘apparently functions normally for its ecological stage of development, and signs of dysfunction are absent.’’ The idea that communities and ecosystems possess traits such as health and integrity, that they exhibit an organic development, that their ‘‘health’’ can be injured or harmed and then can be restored through informed efforts of ecologists is reminiscent of earlier ecological claims of communities and ecosystems as integrated entities (Clements & Shelford 1939). Attributes such as ‘‘health’’ and ‘‘integrity’’ can be meaningfully applied to entities that have been directly shaped by evolution, such as individual organisms. Organisms normally have clearly defined boundaries and a myriad of homeostatic mechanisms that maintain those boundaries while the organism develops, matures, and reproduces. However, communities and ecosystems are not shaped as entities by evolution. Today, communities are no longer believed to be tightly organized systems (Slobodkin 2003). They are believed to lack coherence (Gould 2002) and clear boundaries (Stiling 1999). A community or ecosystem does not possess distinct boundaries nor does it have mechanisms that have evolved to regulate particular processes. Communities do not exhibit any kind of evolutionary imperative, such as reproduction, as do individual organisms. The terms ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘ecosystem’’ are useful in a practical sense for referring to species and processes occurring in a particular locale (O’Neill 2001), but this does not mean that there actually exists some integrated entity out there called an ecosystem that grows, lives, reproduces and dies, or can be injured or healed. If ecological communities and ecosystems lack any intrinsic evolutionary or ecological purpose, one cannot validly invoke any ecological (or evolutionary) rationale to establish particular restoration goals. As noted by Diamond, ‘‘this goal [of restoration ecology] is not itself a self-evident mandate. It is a choice based on values, and it is only one of many possible choices’’ (Diamond 1987). Restorationists have often tried to justify their goals by presenting them as fulfillling various ecological imperatives, e.g., restoring ecosystem health and restoring indigenous environments. However, characterizing communities and ecosystems as ‘‘healthy’’ or ‘‘damaged’’ is a value-based, not scientific, assessment (Lackey 2001). Architecture uses mathematics, physics, and engineering in its efforts to achieve a particular result of aesthetic and social value. In an analogous fashion, restorationists must use ecology, and often geology, soil science, and more to achieve results of social value. Often, their results are also of great beauty as well. Perhaps, ‘‘ecological architecture’’ might be a more apt characterization of the work of ecological restoration, because the term acknowledges the central roles played by both values and science. Ultimately, it is important that restorationists do their best to clearly distinguish between their science and their values in their discussions with the public and policy Department of Biology, Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN 55105, U.S.A. Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, U.S.A. Address correspondence to Mark A. Davis, email davis@macalester.edu

Good Nature: Bridging Ecology, Poetry, and Community

Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2002. xv + 259 pp. $39.95. Jed Rasula's 1996 American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 was a groundbreaking work of institutional literary history. In it, Rasula used the figure of the wax museum to spark a detailed account of the forces that brought the personal lyric and its practitioners to dominance in the latter half of the twentieth century, exploring such phenomena as the Bollingen controversy, the anthology wars, and the rise of the Associated Writing Programs. Seeking to develop "a sense of poetry in America as a matrix of lives lived, not a Jurassic Park of spectacular behemoths," he broke from the traditional literary historical monograph's poet-per-chapter format to produce a rangy, idiosyncratic work that hovers, in his words, "between documentary and polemic."1 With its section of cross-referenced appendices, including inventories of American poetry anthologies and the poets who appeared in them, prizes and awards, and "critical industries" (a list of poets ranked by the number of hits each received in the MLA bibliography from 1981 to 1994), Wax Museum stands as a remarkable archive of the regulatory practices that it argues so forcefully against. [End Page 557] Rasula's first book's exhaustive documentation of what he calls "the institutional custodianship of literature" seems to have freed him to explore what falls out of literary bounds and launched a project of methodological innovation whose stakes have become increasingly high. His next work, Imagining Language: An Anthology, co-edited with Steve McCaffery, collects three millennia of language practices that have either been excluded from or gleefully flouted the sanctioned literary. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, his most recent book of new work, uses generic fluidity to perhaps the greatest effect. Both an anthology and an extended essay, it's also a poem including history in which Rasula glosses, performs, and celebrates a poetics governed by the ecological principle of "solidarity in anonymity" (9). As anyone who has read Wax Museum well knows, this is not an easy feat in an American literary landscape governed more by Parnassian hierarchy than by the fungal egalitarianism of the climax forest. But the depredations of humanism reach far beyond its mortifying effects in the literary world, Rasula's purview in Wax Museum; they encompass ten thousand years, he argues here, of species and planetary destruction. American poetry of a certain post-Poundian order has the unique capacity to change things, he suggests, and This Compost makes the challenging case that to do so is nothing less than imperative. "I . . . think of poems as ecosystems, precariously adjusted to the surrounding biomass," Rasula writes in his introduction (7). The book's argument for what poetry can do hinges on the nature and effects of this adjustment. This Compost could hardly feel more different from Wax Museum. But there's an interesting congruence between the earlier work's model of literary history as a "matrix of lives lived" and this book's "compost library"—the layered conceit that interweaves the text's methodology with its ecological argument about literary, human, and natural history. On the page, "the compost library" names Rasula's citational practice of placing texts side by side, mostly without authorial identification, an act of foregrounding poetry, not poets, "the system, not the signet," designed to demonstrate and sustain "poetry as ecology in the community of words" (7). The community that Rasula gathers in This Compost constellates around Black Mountain but reaches back through Emerson, [End Page 558] Whitman, and Dickinson and makes surprising lateral moves to include Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, even A. R. Ammons and Jorie Graham. All are united in their affinity for what Gary Snyder calls "the practice of the wild." For Rasula, this embraces not only the recognition of what Charles Olson terms our "ape-side" and the realm of nature, but also such counterphilosophies...