Ecology and the Future

Working together with Rajendra Chetty on this special ecological edition has involved both editors in challenges. We recognise that ecological renewal must be accompanied by a commitment to worldwide social reorganisation to alleviate the poverty facing millions worldwide. But this depends on a massive change of direction, given that our planet is experiencing an ecological crisis of staggering proportions:

We live at the cusp of an extinction event comparable in scale to the Cretacious-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction over 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs along with some 75 percent of all life forms … The massive increase in carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrate emissions into the atmosphere from industrialized agriculture, mineral extraction, petroleum-driven production, and globalized shipping/transportation networks has outpaced all other rhythms of life. (Tsing et al. 2017, G4, G5)

In the face of such powerful and immediate threats to our world, the ecologically oriented essays in this collection may seem unrealistic. But they all stand in opposition to the kind of environmental blindness described by Deborah Rose: “To act as if the world beyond humans is composed of ‘things’ for human use is a catastrophic assault on the diversity, complexity, abundance, and beauty of life” (2017, G55). Our society’s profound ecological amnesia limits our understanding of current and past ecosystems. As concerned and responsible individuals we must work together to promote the process of relearning which discovers “encounters among flying foxes and flowering eucalyptus trees, flying fox people, rain, and rainbows” (Tsing et al. 2017, G11). Such encounters become possible if we stop regarding human beings as masters of creation, entitled to unbridled consumption of the earth’s resources.

A first step towards this relearning is a new understanding of place: “We must somehow live as close to [the land] as possible, be in touch with its particular soils, its waters, its winds; we must learn its ways, its capacities, its limits; we must make its rhythms our patterns, its laws our guide, its fruit our bounty” (Bate 2000, 232).

Insights into the specifics of the landscapes which sustain us involve our recognition of the many species with which we share our planet. Like H. sapiens, they exhibit both intelligence and memory:

It is well established … that many animals have long memories and are able to communicate in complex ways. Some of these animals, like elephants, whales and migratory birds, also move over immense distances and appear to have attachments to particular places. These movements cannot be described as purely mechanical, instinctive, or lacking in meaningful sequences. Humpback whales, for instance, mark the passage of time by changing their song from year to year. This would hardly be possible if they lived entirely in the Here and Now. (Ghosh 2022, 202)

Learning to respect other creatures sharing our earth is rooted in the human capacity for language. But a language such as English channels our thinking into binary divisions which perpetuate the human–animal divide:

English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our language boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being? Where is our yawe? (Kimmerer 2013, 56).

Amitav Ghosh remarks, “It takes only a moment’s reflection to recognize that claims to communications with nonhumans—animals, volcanoes, trees, gods, demons, angels, and indeed God—have been made by innumerable men and women” (2022, 200). Ursula Le Guin similarly stresses our kinship with other species: “Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis” (2017, M15). Linking ecology with poetry and history, the American poet Mary Oliver connects us to the many species with whom we share the earth: “I think as an ecologist. But I feel as a member of a great family—one that includes the elephant and the wheat stalk as well as the schoolteacher and the industrialist. This is not a mental condition, but a spiritual condition. Poetry is a product of our history and our history is inseparable from the natural world” (quoted by Watson [1995] 2015, 117).

Ecology not only incorporates many subject areas such as biology and history, it also changes the scale of our observations of the natural world. Life abounds in even the tiniest microcosm of this world: “What we have is an ocean, a fjord, a pen, a tank, and a drop of water, each of which could be described both as a ‘cosmos unto itself’ and as deeply entangled, teeming with lively and unexpected relations all the way down. This is our damaged planet, and this is our planet of hope” (Lien 2017, M121).

A first condition for our planet to become a place of hope is the restoration of agency to the natural world:

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, film-makers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to non-humans. As with all the most important endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency. (Ghosh 2022, 204)

Such restoration of agency can begin if we start to address the problems of poverty amongst the world’s populations. For as Pope Francis, in his 2016 encyclical, Laudate Si, writes: “A true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (quoted by Ghosh 2022, 233).

This Edition

There are seven essays in this special edition. I give a brief overview of each, seeking to highlight their originality and their interconnectedness. In the opening essay, Adré and Delia Marshall write about the Kromme River in the Eastern Cape, which they have known for several generations. Their article demonstrates the ecological richness of river environments, with their biological, political, and geomorphic complexity and as local microcosms of national macrocosms. The authors emphasise that environmental protection is closely linked to protection of the poor, since “environmental crimes are crimes against humanity”.

Julia Martin’s article about the Aegean islands of Halki and Symi demonstrates her opening quotation: “To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately—ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors—coexist” (Solnit 2014, 1). Martin describes the eco-social web she encounters in her Aegean travels. Returning to Halki after an absence of several years she finds that it is in the process of becoming the first GrEco Island to be transformed by the Greek government into a model of “green economy, energy autonomy, digital innovation, and ecological mobility”.

Gail Fincham’s essay begins with a quotation by Jacklyn Cock: “We are a part of nature, part of a continuous and interrelated pattern of living things and natural processes. Now this ‘web of life’ is unravelling, with fatal consequences for us all, unless we act” (2007, 212). Her article traces the travels of Barry Lopez across many parts of the world over several decades, showing why he chooses the worldview of First People over that of his fellow Americans: “We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects” (Lopez 1986, 200). His identification with First People all over the world changes the boundaries of our limited Western understanding into the expanding horizons of an ecologically sustainable future.

Edward French introduces South Africans to the poetry of Jorie Graham. Though well known in the United States, Graham’s work is unfamiliar to most South African readers. French offers an initiation into Graham’s work, focusing on a close reading of the key poem “Sea Change”, which deals with betrayals and transformations and is characterised by apprehension—a lurking, sometimes explicit dread—brought about by the disruptive and disturbing features of life in our times. To illustrate this violence, French draws on Amitav Ghosh’s (2022) The Nutmeg’s Curse, where he discusses the illusion that rational man is above nature and animals and can therefore treat the life of the planet in a destructively instrumental fashion. Graham’s poetry demonstrates that we are embodied corporeal beings rather than detached minds over and above the material or constructed world.

Readers of Margaret Kooy’s “A Textual Meander through Items of Ecological Interest at Quagga Rare Books and Art” accompany the author on a tour of this unique Kalk Bay bookshop, which buys and sells high-quality rare books, manuscripts, maps, artworks, and photography. Her article might be described as “eco-poetics”. Jonathan Bate explains that “eco-poetics seeks not to enframe literary texts, but to meditate upon them, to thank them, to listen to them, albeit to ask questions of them” (2000, 268). The defining characteristic of eco-poetics is that it keeps the conversation going between human and nonhuman worlds. This characteristic is strikingly fulfilled in Kooy’s explorations of European settlers and trekkers in the Cape Colony, and of rock art, botanical engravings, animal mourning, southern African folklore, rainforests, Ethiopian highlands, Lesotho dongas, “hen fever”, Namibian biodiversity, and childhood understandings of nature.

Addressing the relationship between landscape and music, Jonathan Geidt remarks that the definition of landscape given in most dictionaries concentrates on wide horizontal views of the world—natural, painted, and photographed—which have aesthetic value and artistic beauty. Eighteenth-century composers anticipated later ecological ideas when they started to create music that imitated recognisable sounds suggesting the natural world. In the nineteenth century, pictorial and literary romanticism challenged the self-contained nature of the classical sonata form. After a grand battle with atonalism, folk and landscape-associated music are now attracting fresh audiences.

The article by Goutam Karmakar and Rajendra Chetty is a fitting conclusion to an ecological collection. It explores the role of environmental education in understanding, mitigating, and resolving environmental challenges in different communities. Focusing on Bessie Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), it dramatises the detrimental outcomes resulting from Western concepts of development and colonial intervention in African ecosystems. When Rain Clouds Gather validates the knowledge of indigenous peoples. Its protagonists, Makhaya and Gilbert, attempt to implement principles of the Western Enlightenment derived from colonial paradigms, but these result in the dispossession of indigenous communities and ecological devastation. While Karmakar and Chetty draw on dozens of critics to supplement their argument, their voices are always distinctive, making a valuable contribution to postcolonial transformations through literature.