Resilience vs Sustainability

IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA WHILE IT LASTED, BUT WE SHOULD HAVE

KNOWN IT COULD NOT LAST. THE ERA OF SUSTAINABILITY IS OVER. BE-

hind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy

about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that what-

ever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It’s been

pretty to think so, but it’s never been so. In literary studies, we name

this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy,

stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environ-

ment. It seldom rains, mud doesn’t clog our panpipes, and our sheep

never run away while swains sing beautiful songs to coy shepherd-

esses. In this sustainable green world, complicated things it into

simple packages, as literary criticism has recognized, from William

Empson’s “pastoral trick” (115) to Greg Gerrard’s “pastoral ecology”

(56–58). his green vision provides, in Gerrard’s phrase, a “stable,

enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of hu-

man societies” (56). hat’s the dream toward which sustainability

entices us. To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in es-

sence if not details. hat’s not the human experience of the nonhu-

man world. Remember the feeling of being wet, like King Lear, “to

the skin” (Mentz, “Strange Weather”). Changing scale matters, and

local variation does not preclude global consistency, but the feeling

of the world on our skin is disruptive. Our environment changes

constantly, unexpectedly, oten painfully.

Moving beyond happy ictions of sustainability need not mean

consigning ourselves to an unintelligible ecosphere. If we turn from

green pastures to blue oceans, we ind an already present, partly ex-

plored environment for postsustainability thinking. Letting go of

harmony, we ind in the world ocean an environment that is, from a

human point of view, clearly unsustainable but that makes up most

of the planet. Two facts seem especially salient. First, the ocean is our

world; it covers almost three- fourths of the earth’s surface and con-

tains over ninety percent of the biosphere (DeLoughrey 20). Second,

human beings can’t survive in the sea. he ocean represents our near-

STEVE MENTZ, professor of English at St.

John’s University in New York City, is the

author of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s

Ocean (Continuum, 2009) and Romance

for Sale in Early Modern England (Ashgate,

2006) and a coeditor of Rogues and Early

Modern English Culture (U of Michigan P,

2004). He has written articles and chap-

ters on ecological criticism, Shakespeare,

maritime literature, and the early modern

book trade, and in 2010 he curated an

exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Li-

brary, Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the En glish

Imagination, 1550–1750 (www .folger .edu/

lostatsea). He is writing a book on ship-

wreck from Shakespeare’s The Tempest

(1611) to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).

theories and methodologies

After Sustainability

steve mentz

[ P M L A

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est and richest vision of a nonhuman, nonsus-

tainable ecology (Mentz, At the Bottom). As

the global climate becomes increasingly un-

stable, we have begun to recognize that planet-

sized ecological questions are really questions

about the ocean (Earle). Imagining earth as

ocean rather than garden enables us to escape

pastoral nostalgia. For literary humanists,

that’s good news, because building systems to

accommodate and even enjoy radical change

is something literature does well. he ecologi-

cal crisis we live in challenges our appetites for

change. We must learn to love disruption, in-

cluding the disruption of human lives by non-

human forces (Morton, Ecological hought).

Ater sustainability, we need dynamic narra-

tives about our relation to the biosphere.

he most forthright public declaration of

the postsustainability world comes from Bill

McKibben. McKibben’s “new name” for our

planet inserts an almost silent vowel inside

a familiar word, so that “eaarth” indicates

the “tough new planet” climate change has

built (2–6). His model, however, still invokes

comfortable visions of the premodern envi-

ronment. he world before global warming,

McKibben claims, occupied “the sweetest of

sweet spots,” with stable temperatures, gla-

ciation, sea levels, and “predictable heat and

rainfall” (1–2). To adapt a phrase from Lear’s

middle daughter, McKibben names the very

deed of the love we must feel for our disor-

derly planet, but he comes too short, because

he does not embrace the basic disorder in all

natural systems. Local records and experi-

ences show that global stasis has never been

locally stable. As Vladimir Janković notes,

early modern observers found the weather

patterns they recorded full of “uncommon”

and “extraordinary” events (2), and, espe-

cially before the early eighteenth century,

they expressed their indings in “the idiom of

marvel and providence” (33). Human beings

experience the weather as constant change

(Ross 233–34), and it’s weather, not climate,

that our bodies encounter day by day. Eco-

logical science may prefer larger physical and

temporal scales, but human meanings get

made on the skin. We may wish to believe

that hurricanes rupture a sustainable norm,

but historical and contemporary experiences

suggest that departures from stability—catas-

trophes—constitute the real normal.

Intellectual frameworks for postsustain-

ability appear in the two modeling sciences

whose names are built on the Greek root

oikos: economics and ecology. he ecologist

Colleen Clements observes that sustainabil-

ity itself is an “unnatural value . . . [a] fairy

tale ideal of an ecosystem of achieved and

unchanging harmony” (215). The postequi-

librium shift in ecological thinking trum-

peted its arrival in Daniel Botkin’s Discordant

Harmonies (1992). As Gerrard narrates, the

“new ecology” of dynamic change displaced

the “climax,” or static equilibrium, proposed

in the early twentieth century by the plant

ecologist Frederick Clements (57). In eco-

nomics, the neoclassical synthesis that re-

lied on supply- and- demand equilibrium was

challenged by John Maynard Keynes, whose

post- Depression model put pressure on mar-

ket equilibrium without entirely abandon-

ing the concept (Hayes). In the humanities,

however, the pastoral idea of the sustainable

system has not yet been superseded (Dove).

To move from a static ecological relation to a

dynamic one requires a new understanding of

environmental interrelations, which, as Col-

leen Clements describes them, make up not “a

well- meshed, smoothly- working, serene sys-

tem but one representing many stasis break-

downs compensated for by new inputs which

keep the oscillations within certain critical

limits” (218). Ecology, in this view, represents

a dynamic set of relations, which sometimes

transgress even “critical limits.” Just as early

modern weather watchers wanted a system

that made sense of meteors and eclipses, to-

day we need an ecology of catastrophe that

will resonate with literary models outside pas-

toral. In a world in which disruptive climate

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change has tangibly begun and we recognize that permanent sustainability was never re- ally possible, we expect and encounter radical disruption in all natural systems at all times.

Recent ef for ts to bridge postmodern theory and environmental literary criticism address ecocriticism’s delay in following the ecosciences’ shit from equilibrium to dyna- mism. Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Na- ture claims that “the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of cul- ture, philosophy, politics, and art” (1). Mor- ton’s plea for a “dark ecology” of “irreducible otherness” subverts the pastoralism of his own ield of literary study, Romantic poetry (151). Bruno Latour’s actor- network theory, which locates agency in networked assem- blages of human and nonhuman actors, fur- ther displaces pastoral bias: “Political ecology does not shit attention from the human pole to the pole of nature; it shits from certainty about the production of risk- free objects . . . to uncertainty about the relations whose un- intended consequences threaten to disrupt all orderings, all plans, all impacts” (25). While Morton’s tragic vision does not always mesh with Latour’s dizzying optimism (Mentz, “Tongues”), Morton and Latour gesture be- yond pastoral stasis. Inhabiting a dynamic world requires giving up certain privileges and stabilities, but it produces a new freedom for think ing inside constant change. The task of literary ecocriticism in a postpastoral world does not exactly mirror the descriptive horizontalization of Latour’s or Morton’s the- oretical criticism. Literary culture generates narratives about human bodies and minds inside plurality as well as visions of strange multiplicity. he archives of literary history record human attempts to confront the cha- otic world assemblages about which Morton, Latour, and others theorize.1 It turns out that, despite the hegemony of sustainability, we have a long history of thinking through our dynamic and painful environment. Large parts of this history involve salt water.

Moving beyond sustainability requires diferent models for thinking about nonstable systems. hat’s where the sea proves useful. he humanities can add ocean stories to emerging models of ecological resilience, which measure the tendency of ecosystems to tolerate distur- bance ater perturbation. Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling have coined the term pan ar- chy to describe an overarching model of trans- formation in human and ecological systems. Desires for new systems, however, should be balanced by an awareness that today’s post- equilibrium situation is not new. Human struc- tures have never been sustainable, as rigorous ecothinkers have already recognized (O’Grady; Buell 85). McKibben’s Eaarth argues that de- scriptions of global warming as a problem for “grandchildren” represent a failure to face the reality of today (51). To invert McKibben’s claim, I suspect that all gestures toward an orderly past or once- sustainable golden age, including Mc- Kib ben’s, falsify lived historical experience. Hu- man beings have never lived in pastoral stasis, natural or cultural. Literary studies can contrib- ute to ecodiscourses by showing how cultural meanings emerge through encounters between human experiences and disorderly ecologies. hrough these encounters, we learn what living in a postsustainable world feels like on our bod- ies, as well as how to devise conceptual struc- tures to make sense of disorder. To accomplish this accommodation of dynamic change—to be a “connoisseur of chaos,” in Wallace Stevens’s phrase (166)—requires ornate provisional sys- tems and visionary narrative glimpses of being in the world.

Fortunately, the poets have been there before us.

Immersion

here’s no better place to start than on an At- lantic beach with Walt Whitman:

You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess

what you mean,

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I behold from the beach your crooked

inviting ingers,

I believe you refuse to go back without feeling

of me,

We must have a turn together, I undress,

hurry me out of sight of the land,

Cushion me sot, rock me in billowy drowse,

Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

(39–40)

he poet’s intimate relation with the sea re-

prises some central motifs of Romanticism,

but Whitman’s ocean does not resemble a

pastoral landscape. If the essential topog-

raphy of pastoral is green grass and lowers,

switching to the turbulent ocean radically

reshapes the self- world relation. he pleasure

and threat in Whitman’s lines, the mixed

lure of “amorous wet” and “crooked inviting

ingers,” point toward an oceanic vision that

entices and outrages. he initial and control-

ling phrase of Whitman’s litany—“I resign

myself ”—cedes control while immersing the

body in watery contradictions. his is what a

nonsustainable environment feels like.

The central trope of this body- sea en-

counter is paradox, the sudden meeting of

opposites. An ot- quoted line later in this sec-

tion of “Song of Myself ” embraces contradic-

tion: “I am not the poet of goodness only, I

do not decline to be the poet of wickedness

also.” In the postpastoral ocean, the poet is

“Partaker of inlux and elux, extoller of hate

and conciliation” (40). he narrative hurries

into disorder, venturing “out of sight of the

land,” following a “guess” rather than a ixed

meaning. Motivating the poet’s resignation is

an erotics of surrender in which the solitary

human being relinquishes autonomy into a

body incalculably larger than its own: “Cush-

ion me sot, rock me in billowy drowse.” he

visionary possibilities of immersion animate

the stanza- opening pun: “You sea!” cries the

poet. We do see.

Beyond the ecstasy of the encounter, this

passage leads toward a postsustainability lit-

erary ecology because it imagines disorder

as production. The surf is insistently rela-

tional, “refus[ing] to go back without feeling

of me.” he body- ocean conglomeration cre-

ates something new. Whitman’s metaphor, a

few lines down, is troubled childbirth: “Do

you fear some scrofula out of the unlagging

pregnancy? / Did you guess that the celestial

laws are yet to be work’d over and rectiied?”

(40). he notion of an “unlagging” genera-

tion of new life and new forms recalls La-

tour’s fecund assemblages. he sense that the

“laws” of the universe are themselves only be-

ing formed matches the French theorist’s in-

sistence that new orders are always possible.

he threat of scrofula plus endless fecundity:

W hitman’s lines produce meanings for a

postequilibrium world.

Swimmer Poetics

A skeptic might counter that Whitman’s verse

relies too much on a heroic expansion of the

self and that his rhyming insistence on the

sea’s “feeling of me” screams anthropocen-

trism. his section of “Song of Myself ” does

not grant agency and citizenship, in Latour’s

sense, to the wide universe of things. It does,

however, capture the twinned joy and danger

of a disorderly, threatening world. Entering

the surf puts the body at risk and invites dis-

orientation. he ocean, that place, like the po-

et’s ego, “of one phase and of all phases” (40),

has always represented a dangerous but at-

tractive proving ground for heroic endurance.

From Beowulf ’s and Odysseus’s nights in the

sea to the more recent adventures of John

Cheever’s swimmer and Yann Martel’s Pi,

Western literature frames immersion as risky

and transformative. To swim requires giving

oneself over to the alien element. A poetics

of buoyancy would focus on the temporary

stability in which we recognize the swim-

mer’s skill. Hostile waters force swimmers

to balance human strength, technique, and

“feel for the water” against mortal and eco-

logical limits (Sprawson 13). he swimmer’s

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vulnerability and efort provide a model for how to live in our world today, when landed life increasingly resembles conditions at sea.

To imagine a swimmer poetics for our storm- illed world can generate unsustainable but engaging narratives. Swimmers live in the world and enjoy it, but being in the water means knowing that stability cannot last. As the visible catastrophes of climate change ap- pear, we recognize ourselves in the swimmer more than in the gardener. he belief that this planet was once a bountiful garden is a pow- erful human myth, though the laborer’s geor- gic has always conveyed the better metaphor. Today, however, the world ocean lows into cultural view. As Daniel Brayton observes, the long- standing terrestrial bias of environ- mental studies, with its focus on grounded ethics of the land, has always been an un- tenable iction on our blue planet. “Earth is a misnomer,” the microbiologist Ed DeLong has said. “he planet should be called Ocean” (qtd. in Helmreich 3). Taking this advice to heart, we need a swimmer poetics.

E x p a n d in g the Ocean

The real limitation of Whitman’s surf is its foamy solipsism, its unwillingness to escape the boundaries of the self. For Whitman, the self and the world match perfectly because both are “ large [and] contain multitudes” (72). Postsusta inabi lit y ecopoet ics seek s lashes of poetic insight and provisional sys- tems of meaning, but Whitman’s poem en- ables the vision without the system. To low toward a more systemic model, I juxtapose to Whitman’s verse the francophone Caribbean poet and theorist Édouard Glissant’s late- twentieth- century prose poem “Ocean”:

The ancestor speaks, it is the ocean, it is a race that washed the continents with its veil of sufering; it says this race which is song, dew of song and the muled perfume and the blue of the song, and its mouth is the song of

all the mouths of foam: ocean! you permit, you are accomplice, maker of stars; how is it you do not open your wings into a voracious lung? And see! there remains only the sum of the song and the eternity of voice and child- hood already of those who will inherit it. Because as far as sufering is concerned it be- longs to us all; everyone has its vigorous sand between their teeth. he ocean is patience, its wisdom is the tare of time.2

Even more than Whitman’s, Glissant’s poem operates through addition; the encounter with ocean no longer simply connects self and surf but also involves the global history of “a race that washed the continents with its veil of sufering.” Glissant elsewhere describes the challenge the Caribbean poses to Western historical narratives: “Compared to the Medi- terranean, which is an inner sea surrounded by lands, a sea that concentrates . . . the Ca- ribbean is . . . a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc” (Poetics 33).3 Glissant’s ocean does not invite the swimmer; rather, it “speaks” in the ancestor’s voice. In the same hortatory mode, the poet commands that the ocean reveal itself: “you permit, you are ac- complice, maker of stars: how is it you do not open your wings into a voracious lung?” he urgent fantasy that structures this poetic blast imagines the Caribbean as sonic base, “dew of song and the muled perfume and the blue of the song,” seething with historical possi- bilities. Caribbean salt water transforms lin- earity into a melody of sufering and patience.

Glissant rejects static conceptions of the world for postsustainability dynamism. he beach captures an alterity at the center of hu- man experience, but even this symbol remains opaque: “he edge of the sea . . . represents the alternation (but one that is illegible) between order and chaos. The established munici- palities do their best to manage this constant movement between threatening excess and dreamy fragility” (Poetics 121–22). hrough the metaphor of “municipalities,” Glissant connects systems of thought to political struc-

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tures but then watches both founder on shit-

ing sands. he no place or border place of the

shoreline, which Jean- Didier Urbain calls an

“aesthetics of the void” and a “counterworld”

(60, 113), opposes straight narrative lines.

he result, for Glissant, is a willing embrace

of incomprehension: “Widespread consent

to speciic opacities is the most straightfor-

ward equivalent of nonbarbarism. We clamor

for the right to opacity for everyone” (Poetics

194). he sustainability myth has always been

a plea for transparency, for an environment

that human beings can understand and there-

fore cherish. Glissant insists that we give up

legibility with sustainability. he challenge of

postequilibrium is learning to love the illeg-

ible, while still deciphering it, partly.

What Postsustainability Does Not Mean

We do not have to stop recycling. It’s still a

good idea to develop renewable energy, com-

post household waste, eat less meat, drive

and ly less. We can even covet Priuses. But

we need to stop dreaming green dreams. Our

environmental logic hopes for a stable, happy

life—but if sustainability has always been a

pipe dream, it’s no wonder we can’t get back

to it. Human cultures have been remaking

ecosystems and climates since the dawn of

agriculture, with increasing rapidity in the

modern era (Mainwaring, Giegengack, and

Vita- Finzi; Ruddiman). Making political and

personal choices to reduce the human eco-

footprint can be thought of not as a route back

to Eden but as a form of practical self- defense

in a chaotic environment—as learning to

swim, not planting eternal gardens. What we

should crave is not stasis—would we want it if

we could get it?—but room to maneuver. Not

permanence but buoyancy. he great weak-

ness of our industrial fossil- fuel economy is

its exclusion of other forms of production, so

that when systemic catastrophes come—wars,

oil spills, inancial crises—we have few alter-

natives. We need options, not sustainability.

T he g reat prac t ica l cha l lenge of t he

twent y- f irst centur y will be replacing oil

monoculture with something, anything, else.

But despite ot- renewed dreams of a radical

breakthrough—cold fusion or superbioalgae

or something not yet imagined—the postoil

economy will likely continue mixed and cha-

otic. A literary ecoculture that pines for pas-

toral stasis will not be able to make sense of

such a world. But an ecocriticism that treats

dynamic change as a fundamental feature of

all natural systems—a feature, not a bug—

may help us recognize that change is the

“natural” value, the condition and structure-

breaking structure of all systems. Literary

culture has always been fascinated with the

interplay of stability and disruption, and lit-

erary attitudes toward change can aid us in

reimagining ecological dreams. Literature,

too, has long peered into the oceanic world

that ecocriticism has ignored. If we recognize

that our global environment, in its change-

ableness, its alterity, and its violence, appears

more oceanic than terrestrial, we might be

able to invent literary ecologies that put the

sea at the center, not the margins. We’ll still

be swimming in deep water, perhaps far from

shore—but we’ll have a better idea of what

we’re doing there.

NOTES

1. Morton’s recent work has moved into the philo-

sophical ield of “ Object- Oriented Ontology,” or “OOO,”

in dialogue with philosophers including Graham Har-

man and Levi Bryant. A lively introduction to Morton’s

OOO thinking can be found in “Objects as Temporary

Autonomous Zones,” but the best place to start is prob-

ably the “OOO for Beginners” page on his blog.

2. “L’ancêtre parle, c’est l’océan, c’est une race qui la-

vait les continents avec son voile de soufrance; il dit cette

race qui est chant, rosée du chant et le parfum sourd et

le bleu du chant, et sa bouche est le chant de toutes les

bouches d’écume; océan! tu permets, tu es complice, fai-

seur d’astres; comment n’ ouvres- tu pas tes ailes en pou-

mon vorace? Et voyez! il ne reste que la somme du chant et

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l’é ter nité de la voix et l’enfance déjà de ceux qui en fe ront hé ri tage. Car pour la soufrance elle appartient à tous: cha cun en a, entre les dents, la sable vigoureux. L’océan est patience, sa sagesse est l’ivraie du temps” (“Océan”).

3. Glissant’s phrasing adapts a famous line describ- ing the Caribbean from Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Ca- lypso”: “he stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands: / Cuba and San Domingo / Jamaica and Puerto Rico . . .” (48).

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