I can't believe it, but it's my first post for the month of August. So much has happened between my last post and now: I turned 21. I am back together with Myles, both of us more mature from the last time, more prepared to articulate ourselves and put forward the necessary effort. Mel is off to Australia in a few weeks and I'll miss her terribly. This summer has been a sort-of test period for being apart; we've only seen each other twice this summer (and did quite a bit in those few days), but all in all, we've only spent a week together for the whole summer. Australia will be the true test, both of us without our complimentary spoons to comfort the other from all the craziness of the world.
Last time, I talked about the implications of ecocriticism in the classroom. In order to see it fulfilled, we're going to have to engage in unconventional means to turn knowledge into action. We're also going to have to let go of the shackles of carefully-guarded disciplines in favor of interdisciplinarity. For those of us in literary studies, we need to give up on The Text in favor of culture as the text.
Recently, I came across a favorite old song of mine: Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi." (performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgMEPk6fvpg and lyrics:http://artists.letssingit.com/joni-mitchell-lyrics-big-yellow-taxi-tsgr9wh).
The miracle of Mitchell's lyrics lies in the fusion of environmental thought. While today's environmentalists are typically sub-divided into factions with specific causes, Mitchell takes a larger scope, lamenting urban sprawl, the end of the individual-owned farm, the use of chemicals on food (before Michael Pollan was even old enough to vote!), and the development of spaces for audiences to consume and conceive of nature. More importantly, "Big Yellow Taxi" functions like a poem, can be analyzed like one, and, like all writing, has cultural implications.
The saddest lyric of "Big Yellow Taxi," is easily "They took all the trees/And put them in a tree museum/And they charged the people/A dollar and a half just to see 'em." A museum serves as a commemorative place, paying tribute to the past. A tree museum implies the end of trees, at least in a natural, liberated sense. Trees becomes symbolic of rigid organization through parks (both local and federal) and development communities. A personal anecdote: the recent re-paving of our street included new sidewalks and new water and sewer lines. As such, the trees lining the street were dug up and have yet to be replaced, leaving our house and others abominably hot from lack of protective cover. Meanwhile, the newer, wider thoroughfare in town has carefully trimmed trees, perfected to attract new investment to the town. The town's priorities are twisted, but it is a microcosm of larger trends in which swaths of land are clear cut and then replanted with limited shrubs and small trees. For all this pristine "beauty," we charge something closer to a million and a half.
In order to ensure that we live in nature not visit it, we need to start reading outside the ecocriticism canon. We need to read Joni Mitchell, Jack Johnson, and others. And we need to recognize the value of texts as something other than cultural artifacts. "Big Yellow Taxi" remains a valuable contribution to ecocriticism because it turns thought into action through performance. We can't all sing like Joni Mitchell, but we can turn environmentalism into action in our own ways.
