Donnie Secreast

A Wholesome Lust for Destruction: Strategies of Satire in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

Abstract

We are nearly sixty years past when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped ignite the environmental movement of 20th Century America and well past the notion of optimistic global solutions to the rampant destruction of our biosphere. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton suggests that it is time we relinquish sanguine orientations to nature anyway, and that we embrace a dark ecology that is “realistic, depressing, intimate, and alive and ironic all at the same time.” Although in Silent Spring Carson claims to want to encourage us to experience the “wholesome emotions” found through exploring nature, some of the most interesting contours of her book come out of its grotesque elements. In Silent Spring, Carson amasses the ironies in reporting on the dilemmas of man’s attempts to subdue the natural world. Through an analysis of the satirical strategies already at play in Silent Spring, a dark ecological reading emerges that indicates the potential of the grotesque as a method of understanding climate change’s scale and responding to its far-reaching effects without being overwhelmed by them.

Bio

Donnie Secreast would like to honor the land in which ALECC was originally to be held, Treaty 6 Territory, Homeland of the Métis. She would like to acknowledge that she is a (virtual) visitor who was raised in the Cherokee territory, and she commits to making the spaces she inhabits welcoming and open to understanding the value and importance of the interconnected relationships between the land, water, sky, and each other, non-human and human beings alike, as we move towards reconciliation, a future of positive relationships. Donnie is a PhD student at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include the intersections of ecocriticism and humor in Cold War era women’s writing. Her scholarship on Sylvia Plath appears in Studies in the Novel. She is an associate editor for the literary journal Artemis.

Wendy Roy

"The Water in the Locks is Level": Water in a Burning World in P.K. Page's "Unless the Eye Catch Fire"

Abstract

P. K. Page is best known as a Governor-General’s award-winning poet, whose glosa “Planet Earth” was chosen by the United Nations in 2000 to be read on Mount Everest and in Antarctica for the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. Her less-well-known 1979 short story “Unless the Eye Catch Fire” does some of the same work as “Planet Earth,” several decades earlier. Highly metaphoric and starkly beautiful, the story is structured as a journal that documents the end of life as a result of a gradual but unexplained heating of the earth’s core. The earth is becoming a burning and uninhabitable place, what the journal writer calls “a self-cleaning oven” (204): it is purging itself of humans and indeed all other life on the planet. In Page’s short story, water becomes an essential metaphor to counteract the fire of the earth’s destruction. As the narrator and others approach death, a few of them also become able to see the world differently: they see it as brilliantly coloured, “blazing and glowing, flowing in rivulets, gushing in fountains” (187), and they also understand themselves as one with, rather than separate, from the world: there becomes here, object becomes subject, self becomes other, I becomes we. As water starts to be in short supply for the characters within the story, the repeated metaphoric use of water — upstream, floods, fountains, sea levels, water in locks — proclaims an urgent need for humans to see themselves as intimately connected to the waters and other natural features of the earth. A key message of Page’s ecological fable is that humans need to recognize what is upstream of our everyday lives, and to do everything we can to save what is essentially part of ourselves. In declaring this message, the story serves as a watershed moment in ecopoetic work in Canada.

Bio

Wendy Roy was raised on Treaty 2 territory and lives and works on Treaty 6 territory and homeland of the Métis. She is Professor of Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She researches issues of gender and culture in Canadian Literature. Her book The Next Instalment: Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche was published in 2019, and her current SSHRC-funded project is on women’s apocalyptic and dystopian fiction in Canada.

Susan Tyburski

Le Acequia Madre: Conserving a Water Community

Abstract

This brief presentation is an introduction to the traditional acequia systems of water distribution in the American southwest. Acequias are community irrigation ditches that rely on the natural force of gravity to deliver mountain snow-melt to water users’ fields and pastures. Communities organized around acequias consider water to be a communal resource; its use is based on a fair and balanced consideration of every community water user’s needs. Acequias nurture communities rooted in cooperation and mutual thriving, and promote sustainable stewardship and equitable distribution of precious natural resources. 

This presentation discusses the elements of acequia culture and contrasts acequia communities’ cooperative management of water resources with the competitive adjudication of water rights in the American west. This presentation concludes with a description of the incorporation of existing acequia systems into western water law and the lessons these cooperative systems may teach us about surviving in a rapidly warming world.

Bio

Susan J. Tyburski, M.A. (English Literature), J.D., has taught courses concerning the interplay of literature, law & society at the University of Denver and the Colorado School of Mines, and has published a number of essays exploring this topic. A retired lawyer, Sue currently works as a Senior Administrative Law Judge for the State of Colorado. In her spare time, she teaches literature and composition courses for Red Rocks Community College, and enjoys spending time outdoors with her husband, Dave, and their very spoiled dog.

Sue’s interest in acequias arose from her research for a previously published essay, “A Clash of Water Cultures in John Nichols’ The Milagro Beanfield War,” in the collection Make Waves: Water in Contemporary Literature and Film (University of Nevada Press 2019). As she states in her presentation, it is crucial to respectfully acknowledge the original inhabitants and stewards of the lands in the acequia communities she discusses in Colorado and New Mexico: the Apache, Arapahoe, Cheyenne and Navajo nations, the Pueblo tribes, the Shoshone tribe and the Ute nation. These peoples were violently displaced from these lands during successive conquests and colonizations by Europeans and Americans. The enduring contributions of these indigenous peoples to our experience and knowledge of their lands are essential and are gratefully acknowledged.

Discussion