Ecopoetics
A Natural Aesthetics combines:
Appreciating natural environments and their fauna, flora, diversities and processes.
Appreciating art that investigates and celebrates the above.
Jan 2011. I have just taught ecopoetics for 5 days - an intensive but very rewarding particularly since
nearly all my students, had never written a poem before, and somehow did not know I was teaching nature poetry let alone ecopoetry.
Yet they produced some great work.
I introduced them to poets ranging from John Clare to Hugh MacDiarmid, Mary Oliver, Les Murray, Mark O'Connor, Gary Snyder and Alice Oswald and thinkers ranging from Thoreau to Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Arne Naess and Val Plumwood.
Val Plumwood argued that the common Western perceptions of the environmental crisis and the rationalist, technocratic methods by which sustainability is habitually conceived and aimed at are profoundly flawed. Accordingly, the challenges we face are not merely matters for better management under the predominant existing forms of rationality, but also "a crisis of the culture of reason or of what the dominant global culture has made of reason," namely the "arrogant and insensitive forms of it that have evolved in the framework of rationalism and its dominant narrative of reason's mastery of the opposing sphere of nature and disengagement from nature's contaminating elements of emotion, attachment and embodiment."Val Plumwood, Environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason, London: Routledge, 2002, p5.
Nature in the Active Voice by the late Val Plumwood; May 2009, Australian Humanities Review. I do think that a dimension Plumwood missed is one of ontology, of our reality newly revealeed as endosymbiosis and symbiogenesis by Lynn Margulis, Sidney Liebes, Elisabet Sahtouris, Mary White and others. See my response in Australian Humanities Review.
The Rainbow Lorikeet was abundant around Sydney until the late 19th century, but I don’t recall seeing many when I arrived in 1980. It is now common across Sydney and along the coastal areas particularly the north east (but was declared a pest by the WA Government in 2006, it was introduced via pet escapees). The larger Honeyeaters have increased due to the planting of rich nectar garden trees like Grevilleas and many smaller Honeyeaters have declined because the thinned understorey gives them no protection from the aggressive larger Honeyeaters.
Naming as information (and power)
Notes on the Pastoral
30 significant art works of the natural world
Some characteristics of an ecopoetics (ecological understanding)
Working with Ian Bettinson
Ian Bettinson's 'The Land', Hazelhurst Art Gallery, 2007.
My talk 'Ecology, Aesthetics and the Desert', 29/04/2007 at Hazelhurst.
Interview with Ian and myself, (20.5 MB) on Art Talk, a monthly podcast by Sean O'Brien.
Aesthetics as natural
The Canadian neuro-psychologist Merlin Donald hypothesises a major transition in human cognitive evolution in the Upper Paleolithic, through cultural change not biological mutation. Archaeologist Steven Mithen agrees, and using evidence from artefacts, burials, art etc., dates ‘the great cultural explosion’, representing the ‘budding and flowering’ of human consciousness to around 50,000 years ago.
Mithen locates the beginnings of human consciousness in interactions flowing among thought, language, behaviour and material culture. He argues that ‘cognitive fluidity‘, mapping across domains and making connections, is a necessary precondition for culture (technology, science, art, and religion). The developmental plasticity of the brain enables language and culture to literally reshape brain circuits. We now know that brain cells can grow - that our brains are constantly changing anatomically has been documented. The arts reflect a cognitive fluidity and opportunity.
Ellen Dissanayake points out that the arts:
1. are universal in all cultures;
2. consume considerable resources. Owerri artists in Nigeria, who build and paint ceremonial Mbari houses are exempted for up to two years from normal labour;
3. give pleasure, with similar systems of reward as sex, enjoying time with friends, and eating; and
4. young children engage in the arts almost spontaneously. With little encouragement, children sing, dance, play, draw. She argues that natural selection has placed the arts as integral to human behaviour.
"The strange thing is In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient, or modern – whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, or industrial, at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed but highly regarded and willingly engaged in." Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus; Where Art Comes From and Why, Seattle, U of Washington P, 1995,