Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground (“Gone Back into the Earth”)
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Ch. 1: “A Fable for Tomorrow”)
Michael Pollan, “Why Mow?”
(about 1.5 pages)
Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground (“Gone Back into the Earth”)
Barry Lopez, author of both fiction and nonfiction about his experience of nature, has been compared by critics to Henry David Thoreau. Lopez, an environmentalist, saw nature travel as evoking the essence of humanity, regardless of whether someone pursued a conscious “quest” to discover themselves at a deeper level or committed themselves to environmental sustainability. This piece—about his experiences within a group traveling in the Grand Canyon— reflects his philosophy about the transformative impact of nature and consciously uses a utopian tone.
- Lopez opens this piece: “I am up to my waist in a basin of cool, acid-clear water at the head of a box canyon some 600 feet above the Colorado River.” What effect is he trying to have on readers?
- A bit later, Lopez tells the reader that he is at the midpoint of a ten-day group journey down the Colorado River. He remarks on the transformations he witnesses in a diverse group of travelers: “Each day we are upended, if not by some element of the landscape itself then by what the landscape does, visibly, to each of us. It has snapped us like fresh-laundered sheets.” What’s he saying here?
- Consider the following quotes:
- “No other animal but the human would bring to bear so many activities, from so many different cultures and levels of society, with so much energy, so suddenly in a new place. And no other animal, the individuals so entirely unknown would chance together something so unknown as this river journey. In this frenetic activity and difference seems a suggestion of human evolution and genuine adventure.”
- “I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time. A radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick, intimate pounding of the heart.”
- In what ways is Lopez appealing to our utopian imagination? In what ways is he cautioning us about the potential loss of environmental beauty?
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Ch. 1: “A Fable for Tomorrow”)
- When she published this book in 1962, Carson, a marine biologist, was a very well known naturalist and conservationist writer, most acclaimed for The Sea Around Us (1950), which had received international acclaim. In Silent Spring (1962), she opens her narrative in the voice of the fairy tale and dystopian genre. Why do you think she chose this introductory strategy? Select a few meaningful quotes.
- In what ways do utopian, dystopian, and science fiction influence environmentalist writing? In what ways can the environmentalist writer learn from these genres?
Michael Pollan, “Why Mow?”
Pollan analyzes the “cult of the lawn” as symbolic of the American character:
“… the democratic front yard has its darker, more coercive side, as my family learned in Farmingdale. In specifying the “plain style” of an unembellished lawn for American front yards, the midcentury designer-reformers were, like Puritan ministers, laying down rigid conventions governing our relationship to the land, our observance of which would henceforth be taken as an index of our character. And just as the Puritans would not tolerate any individual who sought to establish his or her own back-channel relationship with the divinity, the members of the suburban utopia do not tolerate the homeowner who establishes a relationship with the land that is not mediated by the group’s conventions.”
Do you agree with Pollan? In what ways is he advocating for both individual nonconformity and environmental sustainability?
Attributions of Quotes:
Lopez, Barry. “Gone Back into the Earth.” In Crossing Open Ground. Vintage Books, 1989. © Barry Holstun Lopez. All rights reserved. This content is excluded from our Creative Commons license. For more information, see https://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-fair-use/.
Pollan, Michael. “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns,” New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1989. © The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. This content is excluded from our Creative Commons license. For more information, see https://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-fair-use/.
