We write letters because we relate. We write letters because, although we each craft our story in a way that will hopefully have the desired effect upon our audience, we do not know how the other will respond. As a gesture, letter writing reflects a need for community as it pushes us beyond our solipsistic refuges, beyond our singular encampments, and invites us to open ourselves to our fellow human beings.Yet, as Jean Luc Nancy writes, “A letter, a missive, once published, is no longer a missive. It is a citation or a mimicking of one” (1991, 108). We must, then, do our best to preserve the living quality of this exchange—the eagerness with which we waited for a reply; the rush when we discovered that the other has seen something that we missed; the joy when a deeper truth had been reached not alone, but together. Although its formal fossilization may be inevitable, as Nancy suggests, we should nonetheless try to remember the vitality of the original back and forth, and ask our audience to read this dialogue with that initial regenerative potential in mind.Of course, there is a third, invisible epistolarian here as well: an impossible voice in the margins, calling out like a siren from the deep. It is not a mere echo to be chased, but a constitutional exterior, one that heightens the uncertainty of any missive fired into the darkness. We can neither speak on its behalf nor ignore its persistent cries. It speaks from without as well as within, challenging us to break down our imagined borders, compelling us to sit, silently, and surrender to a presence that cannot be effortlessly enfolded into academic discourse. That voice: here and far away; a whisper growing louder by the moment.Dear Friend,During the pandemic, my daughters have graciously curated my own personal Disney experience by working their way, albeit circuitously, through the recent hits. As I (re)watch films like Frozen (Lee and Buck 2013), Moana (Clemence et al. 2016), and Frozen II (Lee and Buck 2019), I cannot help but notice an overarching theme: a lingering concern over the climate crisis couched within the typical hegemonic fare that has characterized Disney throughout its history. Mark Bould asks, “What happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all of the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?” (2021, 17). Just what do these films teach our children about the impending environmental catastrophe? How are they being hailed into Disney's wing of the ideological apparatus, and trained to conceptualize the troubled relationship between humans and nature, broadly defined, during the anthropocentric era? You may be wondering why I raise this concern in the context of our current discussion of American religious experiences, so I ought to state plainly the connection as I imagine it (you'll no doubt bring your own insights to bear on the correlation). I view Disney's framing of the climate crisis as a spiritual issue on at least two fronts—first, the company's endowment of Nature, with a capital “N,” with magical properties, a revived animus with which to enchant audiences in very specific ways; and second, the company's cultivation of a subjectivity rooted in a uniquely American Christian tradition, from the Social Gospel at the fin-de-siecle to the more recent prosperity Gospel, espoused by the likes of Dave Ramsey. At the same time, as I consume these films, I keep wondering about the role of awe, of the sublime—that is, about Nature as a constitutional outside that limits humanity instead of providing fodder for self-indulgence.I take my cues from J. P. Telotte's seminal analysis of how Disney succeeds in making unnatural systems appear to be natural. Recalling Leo Marx's (2000) blurry distinction of the garden and the machine in American culture, Telotte illustrates how Disney's vast mediascape passes itself off as “part of the natural world” (2008, 14). In effect, Disney manages to celebrate the garden by tapping into America's long-standing affection for its attractive landscapes, while simultaneously advancing the machine: profit-driven mechanisms designed to prune, parcel, and package the natural world for mass consumption. I will posit my working definition of Nature, then, as a highly romanticized concept that Disney films help to sanitize (at best) or to domesticate for effortless exploitation (at worst). Telotte points to the hugely popular example of Disney's Monster's Inc., which encourages its audience to appreciate laughter as a renewable resource and thereby understand blind optimism as a sincere response to “the obvious problems posed by limited natural resources” (6). In similar ways, Disney films of the last decade repeatedly promote feel-good messages about humanity's possible reconciliation with its environment, impelling “our movement in a generally agreeable direction, one carefully and promisingly laid out for us” (22). Audiences may not find these feel-good interpellations all that satisfactory, though, because it remains improbable that the pressing issue of climate change, driven in no small part by the recklessness of various corporations, will be relieved by salvific offerings from that very same industrial apparatus. Consumers of these works are led to imagine the magic of Nature, the magic of ourselves, and the mystical totality of a magical Kingdom—yet this declared reconciliation with a spiritually endowed natural realm poses real concerns, including the troubling ways in which our children are being conditioned to position themselves vis-à-vis Nature on the path toward a more harmonious future.As I suspect you're currently thinking, as a fellow student of the Transcendentalists, this issue predates Disney; indeed, it may be described as a foundational paradox of the American experience. After all, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau worship Nature while concurrently espousing a radical form of self-reliance and articulating heightened expressions of individualism. Perhaps Moana and, my personal favorite, for reasons we will need to address in later letters, Frozen II speak to a crucial element of American culture: the ongoing, and uneven, relay between reverence for Nature and reverence for self. One can hear the choral flourishes of Walt Whitman, in all of his multivocal majesty. I would argue that these dueling spiritualized sentiments, while never some static national essence to be recovered, do indicate a degree of spillover between early American writers and the Disney brand, or the residual cultural values that link the legacy of the so-called Boston Brahmin to the renewed synergy between humanity and the environment imposed by Disney films.To close my opening salvo, a niggling question: are my daughters—one named Emerson, the other with a middle name of Walden—doomed to look at Nature and merely find, in perpetuity, their own reflection?1 More pressing still, what does this entropic cycle say about ongoing attempts to tackle the crisis of climate change?With love,MichaelTo my dear friend,In December 2020, Achim Steiner, an environmentalist and current administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, declared rather unequivocally that global humanity had entrenched itself in a new ecological condition spiraling toward unredeemable, human-induced destruction. Reflecting broader conversations regarding a proposed but yet agreed to geological epoch highlighted by humanity's direct impact on our various ecosystems, Steiner stressed that “the pressures we exert on the planet have become so great that scientists are considering whether the Earth has entered an entirely new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, or the age of humans. It means that we are the first people to live in an age defined by human choice, in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves” (2020). According to professor of religion and environmental ethics Bron Taylor, this epoch of human choice represents a moment in “Earth's history traceable to when Homo sapiens began subjugating and expropriating for its own use the world's organisms and ecosystems” (2019, 414). Distinct from the Homogenocene, the term used within scientific communities to describe our contemporary geological epoch as one defined by diminishing biodiversity as a result of globalization and corresponding flows of people, plant life, and species, the Anthropocene2 addresses the force humans assert on the natural world, including anthropogenic climate change, or the theory that current climate change and global warming result directly from humanity's burning of fossil fuels (primarily coal, oil, and natural gas), pollution of water, factory farming, and willful destruction and desecration of the natural world (e.g., deforesting).3Although largely hidden from the public's purview by the Trump Administration's efforts to obscure climate science, the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) issued a 2018 report that, without any ambiguity, made this exact point, concluding “that the evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans’ physical, social, and economic well-being are rising” (25, emphasis in original).4 In underscoring this “threat” to “well-being,” the USGCRP report compels us into a moment of agential reflection: Are we agents of destruction or agents of transformative preservation? To choose the former is to entrench the Anthropocene, resulting in a world defined by humanity's forceful, nonreciprocal use of Nature. To choose the latter, however, obliges us to accept a larger challenge, one that demands a foundational shift in how humans consider the environment and how we choose to engage with the elements of Nature. It necessitates a move away from the Anthropocene to recover a relational condition in which humanity's active stewardship is mirrored in the sustenance found (not offered) within our natural worlds.I offer these opening thoughts in light of my recent re-viewing (and re-viewing again and again) of Moana and the Frozen films. During quarantine, my 11-year old daughter decided it was time to introduce her three brothers to her favorite Disney movies, leading to a series of Friday nights that ended with them often giggling on a sugar high and, increasingly, myself in deep reflection regarding what these films reveal about the future of our natural worlds. Highlighting an intimate relationship between humans and the environments that sustain them, Moana and the Frozen films elevate Nature as an entity (or entities), one with the capacity to respond to, overpower, and be overcome by the actions and decisions of humans. In this way, the films are typically “Western,” anthropomorphizing Nature in order to emphasize individual will as the means for transformative change. By elevating liberal agency, the films contribute to the Disney-fication of the world, where its films and carbon footprint speak to an overlapping between magical thinking and capitalist agendas.Yet uniquely, rather than identify humans as the exclusive site by which a solution is found, Nature itself emerges as a protagonist, as a “power” to correct the “force” humans assert on the environment. Honestly, this might simply be more magical thinking, a type of displacement that continues to blind contemporary people to the climate conditions that surround us. Or, in returning us to the splendor of Nature, to moments of awe that remind us, to borrow from Thoreau, that “heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads,” do these films propose that the power of Nature compels human agents to see themselves within this dynamic, as an echo of—rather than a response to—Nature's power? We see this exemplified within the abilities of Moana (vis-à-vis water) and Elsa (vis-à-vis ice and the elements) to push back against humanist interventions that interrupt the balances maintaining our ecosystems. Nature, within these films, is thus positioned not simply as alive, but sentient and interactive—as intentional and conditional. It is the water that directs Moana forward just as the goddess Te Fiti withdraws, leaving the earth barren of production. In Frozen II, the elements are given unique identities, not exclusively to anthropomorphize, but to demonstrate the mutual relationship—the dance—that exists between human conduct and natural flows. Moana's dancing grandmother, Tala, captures this sense of dependent interaction, suggesting that just as humans rely on our various ecosystems to survive, so too does the natural world rely on the choices humans individually and collectively make.While the climate change debate often occurs at the 10,000-foot view as it relates to global policy changes, Moana and the Frozen films ground the response, removing it from the hands of politicians who see climate change as a problem to mitigate, back to human-to-nature and nature-to-human interactions that position change as contingent on how we view the very place, condition, and role of the natural world as a symbiotic play of mutuality. These films challenge us as viewers to partake in this give-and-take, suggesting that a worldly response is found by accepting a spiritual condition defined by belonging and belongingness, or what indigenous Hawaiians term lokahi, the value of being united as one.5 To borrow from the wisdom of Moana, it is the foundational recognition that “the ocean is in my soul and my soul is in the ocean” (2006). In other words, by returning to indigenous understandings predicated on the basic belief “that land is alive” (Cousins 1996–1997, 500),6 the films suggest that the response to the Anthropocene and climate destruction begins by encountering the land itself as sacred.Globally, what would result if this understanding overtook patriarchal religiosities that situate domination as the mechanism of rule (including the subjugation of Nature)? And what might manifest if this understanding displaced neoliberal ideologies that perpetuate apathetic indifference as a consequence of both elevating personal freedom as virtue and positioning equality as the privilege to access individual rights and economic liberty?With love,MorganDear Friend,Why not turn our conversation to the first Frozen film, in particular, to Elsa's triumphant moment atop the North Mountain? At last released from her societal responsibilities, Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) triumphantly belts out the infamously popular song “Let It Go,” as the camera swoops in grandiose fashion across the snow-covered mountaintops. The film parallels her majestic personal ascent with ecological disaster in the kingdom of Arendelle, which she unwittingly plunges into endless winter with her unleashed powers. For better or worse, Frozen correlates Elsa's internal state with the destabilized state of Nature.7We should begin on the North Mountain because it is here, I would argue, that the film establishes its uniquely neo-Transcendentalist sensibilities. Elsa reveals herself to be a contemporary Thoreau, and her retreat strikes spectators as a sort of revamped Walden Pond. Kristoff notes of Elsa, “Most people who disappear into the mountains want to be alone.” Once separated from the strictures of her society, Elsa taps into her nascent powers and plumbs the inner depths that her father conditioned her to conceal. “No rules for me,” she wails. “I'm free!” From this moment in the film, spectators are led to view Elsa as intimately connected to Nature; her immersion in the solitude of the woods brings out truths that she has long been taught to deny. Conjuring Transcendentalist concepts like the transparent eyeball as well as the Oversoul, Frozen promotes a deep and abiding bond between Elsa's potenza and the unbridled power of the environment, especially the climate: Her powers are seasonal, which is to say, they are classified by their duration—the impossibly long winter; the cyclical balance of winter and summer—and so they are not merely weather (epiphenomena like an unusually hot day, a strong storm, and so forth). The idealism behind Elsa's rise is unmistakable. “I'm one with the wind and sky,” she tells us. Lyrics to the ubiquitous “Let it Go” thus underscore the Oneness of Elsa and Nature: Her “thoughts crystallize”; her “soul spirals”; her “power flurries.”Let's be clear: Nature was, for the Transcendentalists, a source of power, religious as well as secular. Compare, for example, Elsa's Oneness with the wind and sky with a line from Emerson's influential essay “Nature”: “I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements” (1983, 15). For Emerson, to unlock one's intrinsic connection to Nature means accessing “a new weapon in the magazine of power” (25). Elsa's gift (or curse) proves to be a hidden capacity to understand and command the forces of Nature. The Transcendentalists similarly locate their power in this revelation: “We apprehend the absolute . . . we become immortal’” (37). Clues for this spiritual bridge can be located throughout Frozen, including in the etymology of the name of the kingdom itself. In the Germanic language, dell means “valley,” and in Armenian, aren means “of God.” To know Nature, it would seem, is to know the Divine, to walk in the valley of God—or, more appropriate still, to locate the Divine within the Self. (I capitalize Self here for reasons that will become clearer as we go.)Of course, something is definitely wrong here—Nature is not Edenic in Frozen, at least not until the film's resolution; instead, the fragile equilibrium between Nature and humanity appears to have been irreparably damaged. “I can't control the curse,” Elsa laments. Yet according to Emerson, the loveliness of Nature proves an already existing harmony between God and humanity. “The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps,” he reports, “is, because man is disunited with himself” (47, emphasis mine). That is, if Arendelle faces an ecological crisis, the source must be personal unrest. The entire apparatus strikes the audience as a bit solipsistic: “I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me . . . man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature” (10). This neo-Transcendentalist film, in other words, unveils a longstanding assumption in American culture that problems in Nature can always be traced back to problems within the Self: “Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind” (20). Once Elsa can regulate her own emotions and find a balance between prudence and letting go, between excessive fear and a surplus of confidence, the environmental threat should abate.In proper Disney fashion, Nature becomes a tool, a resource, and a consumer-driven vehicle for self-discovery. When Elsa peers into the water and sees reflected back at her the wild horse within, one cannot help but be reminded of Narcissus. Climate change becomes yet another opportunity for self-actualization. The company, founded upon a menagerie of anthropomorphic characters, effectively embodies the Anthropocene—the period of human-centric activity that places humanity at the center of the universe. In the minds of some critics, such a move displaces Nature as well as God. It remains difficult not to trace this American absorption of Nature into a stable of human instruments back to Emerson and his Concord cohort. “Every rational creature has all of nature for his dowry and estate,” Emerson asserts. “It is his, if he will” (16). American thinkers continually render Nature as a useful contrivance: “The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind . . . the world is emblematic” (24). In Frozen, as in Emerson's seminal essay, the life of man and seasonal cycles syncopate. Yet it nearly goes without saying that the analogy here—for Emerson as well as Disney—is not the individual mind as an analogy for Nature; rather, in a reversal of expectations, Nature serves as an analogy for the individual mind, and “the seasons gain . . . grandeur” from the analogy (22). Emerson's chain of causation is quite clear: The individual uses Nature to deify herself, not the other way around. On this front, I would argue that the reindeer Sven can be read as the key for unlocking the narrow humanist perspective of Frozen: Kristoff comically mimes Sven's voice throughout the story; he speaks to himself through his voiceless animal companion, and the audience gradually comes to mistake Kristoff's voice for the reindeer's. The film replicates a human consciousness through the inert material of Nature and thus preserves the working thesis of anthropomorphism proper.What makes Frozen unlike Disney's prior anthropomorphic fare, though, is the ever-present reality of climate change. Could it be that Nature isn't a canvas onto which Elsa projects her own struggles, but that Elsa's unsettled internal state is reflective, instead, of an increasingly unsettled external state: namely, the dramatically changing climate? Put a bit differently, Emerson outlines the difference between the poet and the sensual man: While the poet “conforms things to his thoughts,” the sensual man “conforms thoughts to things” (36). If Americans were once powerful poets, armed with pathetic fallacies and other anthropomorphic fictions, is it possible that Americans are becoming more and more like Emerson's sensual man, due to the psychic and external pressures of imminent climate catastrophe? I elsewhere describe this shift as a reverse pathetic fallacy, through which, rather than turn Nature into fodder for self-discovery, individuals transform the Self into fodder for grappling with worrisome ecological trends.8 What if Frozen is actually a film, then, that utilizes a vocabulary gleaned from the self-centered discourse of the twenty-first century in order to internalize the environmental crisis and make it somehow comprehensible? If Emerson says “Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all,” Frozen might just offer a countermand, however unconscious—now, because the climate crisis faces spectators in its grim totality, and they can no longer afford to ignore it, they are forced to say that human life is so pervaded with ecological concern that there is once more something of Nature in them. Not unlike Sven the anthropomorphized reindeer, Elsa is revealed to be a mere metaphor, stripped of her humanist autonomy. She serves as a figure engrossed by the mounting duress of an endangered Nature.Like so much of Transcendentalism, Frozen outwardly refuses to admit this reversal and instead absconds with Nature and claims Nature as its own, thereby foreclosing opportunities to consider Nature as a constitutive outside (I'm certain we will have more to say on this issue as we work through the other Disney films). The film fails precisely where it succeeds—compared to earlier Disney films, Frozen unquestionably offers more compelling characterizations, more astute social commentary, and a more interesting take on human relationships. For example, challenging the logic behind Disney's long line of princess parables, the film unpacks the dense notion of love. Specifically, Elsa's sister Anna (Kristen Bell) must recognize the fallacy of true love when she nearly rushes into marriage with a power-hungry prince. When the ill-fated lovers sing their duet “Love is an Open Door,” they pantomime automatons and celebrate their “mental synchronization.” As the film progresses, it undermines this message by asserting that love is actually a closed door—that love in fact involves sacrifice on behalf of others instead of vulgar self-indulgence. Kristoff eventually “lets go” of Anna in hopes of saving her life; Elsa “lets go” of Anna in order to free her from her captivity in the castle; and finally, Anna “lets go” of her own life to rescue her sister from a treasonous murder at the hands of her betrothed. But one must ask: Is Frozen willing or able to transpose this sacrificial logic into the register of humanity's broken connection to Nature? When, at the close of the film, Sven finally seizes the carrot nose from the snowman Olaf (Josh Gadd), yet another anthropomorphized entity, the audience might gasp at this animalistic urge. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the reindeer benevolently returns the carrot to its owner, because the animal is only ever a prosthesis for the human. In other words, although the unsavory Oneness of Anna and her lover must be dissolved, the “mental synchronization” that supposedly binds Sven and Kristoff does not budge.What will humanity sacrifice to heal the ailing planet? What will humans give up in order to save a damaged climate? If Frozen is to be believed, the answer is very little. The film rectifies the only apparent cost tied to human manipulation of the climate—Olaf ostensibly melting with the return of summer—with a healthy dose of magical thinking: Elsa provides their anthropomorphized snowman with his own personal flurry that will allow him to live year-round. This effortless resolution highlights the acute problems of neo-Transcendentalism in its latest guise: Many Americans seem unwilling to confront Nature as a true constitutional exterior, or to address the solipsistic impulses that have confused the pressing issue of climate change with yet another call for attitude adjustment.With love,MichaelTo my dear friend,The question of sacrifice looms large in Emerson's work and resides heavily throughout not only Elsa's journeys in Frozen and Frozen II, but also, as I will introduce shortly, within Moana. Evoking a sense of resignation, of giving something up either for one's Self or for others, the etymological roots of sacrifice identify actions of or performances related to (facere) sacred things (sacra). Within Emerson's project, he oscillates between expressions of sacrifice necessary to access two unique, though interrelated, sites of the sacred: an emphasis on what must be forfeited to secure true Self-reliance and a spirituality of Self-sacrifice undertaken on behalf of others. Emerson simultaneously—and at times contradictorily—identifies what must be given up to realize true individual will (Self as the sacred) and what individuals must be willing to personally relinquish (or work for) in the name of others (sacred as the whole). In his essay extolling the value of the transcendentalist, Emerson describes how “it is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is, to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude” (“The Transcendentalist” in Emerson 1983, 195). Yet at the height of this Self-deification, Emerson notes how “the opening of the spiritual senses disposes men ever to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their best means and skill of procuring a present success, their power and their fame,—to cast all things behind, in the insatiable thirst for divine communications,” which, maybe most distinctly, compels individual attention to be directed toward the needs of others (“Man the Reformer” in Emerson 1983, 150). “Great men,” Emerson emphasizes, are not those who abandon responsibility, but who represent “a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other people and their works” (“Uses of Great Men” in Emerson 1983, 626).Sacrifice, when connected to what must be forfeited for Self-realization, speaks to an essential movement of egoism, which, as you so powerfully develop, assumes that the resolution to external problems—such as climate change—resides in the flowering of Selfhood, from a shift in “attitude” that internalizes Nature to contend that any solution is bound to individual actions or inactions. Part of this, I stress in agreement with your previous letter, is the inability to identify and accept the distinction between human agents and a constitutive exterior, an arrogance that sees oneness not as an interconnected state of dependent contingency, but the proposition that if Nature resides within Self, then it is in perfecting one's Self that the destructive cycles inherent to climate patterns find resolution. In other words, Frozen illustrates how a spiritual position of oneness can engender what Soren Kierkegaard labeled the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” or the moment when one transcends above the universal (e.g., ethical regard for others) to reside as “the particular” (2006, 46–49, emphasis added) in unmediated relation to the Divine, a state unbound to the moral dictums regulating worldly behaviors and environmental concerns.Emerson, of course, celebrates (or warns of?) this in “Nature”: To be “uplifted by infinite space” is to experience how “all mean egoism vanishes,” resulting in the belief that “nothing can befall me” (in Emerson 1983, 10). Within such an elevated position, worldly conditions and social relationships cease to function, leading to a reality in which “the name of the nearest friend sounds foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance” (10). Where one can read the stripping of labels as the means to deconstruct hierarchy within human society, it also elevates the human element against the power of Nature. “It is necessary,” Emerson stresses accordingly, “to use these pleasures [initiated by Nature] with great temperance” as “the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both” (11). Does Elsa represent such a point of harmony? Or does Moana, in seeing herself as bound with Nature not as Nature per Elsa, suggest how a “harmony of both” leads to a position of interrelated responsibility, on