Louisa Gairn, Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) £50.00
This is a wide-ranging study that is rooted in a Scottish notion of ecology – the holism of James Hutton’s notion of the earth as a ‘superorganism’ (1785), and Patrick Geddes’ use of the term ‘biocentric’ (1898). The ‘democratic’ empathy for animals in the poetry of Burns, carried in pocket of John Muir about the canyons, meadows and mountains of Yosemite, feeds into Muir’s ultimate notion of a ‘democratic’ National Park (still a controversial notion as applied to the Highlands). The richness of the Scottish weavings of science and literature before modern literature is hinted at here, but awaits another book to two.
Louisa Gairn’s focus is in tracing lines that lead out of Victorian explorations of the significance of Scottish land to the Scottish imagination in the work of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, via ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’s earth lyrics’, Edwin Muir’s and George Mackay Brown’s resistances to modernity’s displacements, the regional novels of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd, and the ‘delirium’ of realism in the Gaelic poetry of Duncan Ban MacIntyre, to the work of Kenneth White, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Findlay and the more ecologically self-conscious projects of John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Alan Warner. Gairn’s argument is that ‘Scottish literature constitutes a distinctive heritage of ecological thought which is both vitally relevant to international environmentalism and central to Scottish culture’.
What is gained through Gairn’s lively comparative approach is a refining of ecocritical concepts derived from a particularly distinctive intellectual debate. All of her imaginative writers have interesting things to say about the debates extending beyond their work. In this respect all ecocritics would gain from this book by being introduced, for example, to John Veitch’s The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry (1887), Kenneth White’s International Institute for Geopoetics (1989), Jamie’s notion of poetry as ‘a line of defence .. against the ecological threat’ (2001), or Burnside’s exemplification of Heidegger’s techne. An interesting feature of this book is the way its range of reference also connects it outwards as well as richly inwards, with ideas from Americans Emerson, Leopold, Cason, Snyder, Solnit and Leo Marx redefined in a Scottish context where land is always politically complex in its cultural as well as its physical presence.
I still am not convinced that George Mackay Brown’s work offers some kind of resistance to modernism’s alienations by retreating into an idealised past, although I accept that celebrations of Orkney life in the present may be argued as partially achieving this. In this respect the more complex poetry of Shetland’s Jen Hadfield may be a space for ecocritics to watch. One could easily argue that Sorely Maclean’s work deserves a chapter to itself, but that would be to simply acknowledge that there are many more books to be quarried out of the broad ground identified by this one. One day the work of David Craig will be recognised as of great ecocritical significance to his homeland. But these quibbles aside, this is an important and lively book for UK ecocriticism on the international stage, announcing a new generation of culturally rooted ecocritics. I just wish they could be a bit more evaluative in sifting the weak from the strong, the sentimental from the complex pastoral.
Terry Gifford
