Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility, Scott Slovic (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008)
Scott Slovic is on a world mission to spread the word about ecocriticism and support emergent ASLE groups in all parts of the world. I received this book from him at the second ecocriticism conference to be held in China, where he told me that Africa is his next objective. This book collects essays either written away from home on such trips, or written for such far-flung conferences. It will already be clear that I am implicated in the first of two reservations I have about this book which I’ll air first.
Despite references to gas-guzzling SUVs, the issue of flying and ecocritical responsibility is answered simply by adopting the idea of ‘making it count’. I’ve stopped flying to the US ASLE conferences, but I’m writing this in Spain and I’m all too conscious that I’ve got to do better in this respect. This issue is not on the agenda of a book with this environmentally compromised title and it ought to be.
Second, Slovic’s all-inclusive approach to ecocritical dialogue is not extended to those who have rocked the boat most severely. Dana Phillips’ book The Truth of Ecology is a ‘grave failure’ of ‘witty slander’, and Michael Cohen’s essay ‘The Blues in the Green’ is dismissed as a ‘rant’, whilst William Cronon’s seminal essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ produces the amazing statement: ‘Sometimes it’s simply best for academics to stay in their offices and chatter to each other’. These spectacular home-goals confirm the criticism from Phillips and Cohen of complacency in the ecocritical establishment. Here, surely, engagement rather than retreat was called for.
In other respects this book does contain some radical stuff. More than once there is discussion of the failure of ecocritics to engage successfully with scientists and policy-makers. This culminates in an account of the failure of a gathering of such people to agree upon a press release from a millennium conference in Mexico City in January 2000. Some were uneasy with the discourse of ‘resistance’ and all disagreed on the priorities needed, claiming their own field as a higher form of concern (e.g. human poverty v endangered species; high-tech v low-tech solutions). Visits to India resulted in a correspondence with the Coca-Cola company about their privatisation of water resources for commercial production.
Nearer to home there are essays on ‘Gated Mountains’ and ‘Ecocriticism on and After 9/11’, plus a reflection on colleagues at his own university’s stem cell research. There are interesting thoughts about why the evidence of human-induced climate change has not resulted in life-style change and how to position the elegiac quality of much environmental concern. Throughout the book the author examines his own position, situating his own narrative in relation to those he is engaging. Thus this becomes a key text for references to ‘narrative scholarship’, the term which Slovic invented and offered to Ian Marshall to develop in Story Line (1998) and Peak Experiences (2003). Both Slovic and I thought that supporting ecocriticism in China, of all places, was important work and seeing Slovic in action one has to admit that, as the grace of these essays testifies, he does it well.
Terry Gifford
