Earth Day essay contributions help advance discussion

What role do writers play in the unending environmental challenges urban, rural and wild areas face because of our propensity for war, razing, insatiable appetite and unholy regard for the other species and ecosystems we so are dependent upon beyond average comprehension? To put it simply: Do we have a role as writers to understand what Hegel called “a unity of differences” or “unity of diversity”? In one sense, the creative writer’s duty is to examine lives in the midst of struggle – with self, man, society, machine, nature and spirituality or creation – and to look at the interplay of struggle and process and elevate it to the poetic or philosophic. The storyteller is the historian, social critic, and troubadour. It’s a juggling act as we dance around like jesters while singing dirges and mocking power and creeping into our brethren’s souls with the nightmare of doing nothing against the scourge of injustice. We are the holders and inventors of memory talismans and have a larger duty than mere entertainer. We are the tenders of gardens, helping roots emerge and take hold. “The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Hannah Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.” For those working the sustainability circuit, or looking toward real change in how we as one species give respect to the other millions of species tied into what James Lovelock called the Gaia Theory, we sometimes fail to embrace the arts as a conduit to both reflection and change. Gaia is all about the living planet – terrestrial-based hydrologic cycles, shallow marine, coral system, dense oceans, jungles, boreal forests, crags, volcanic vents, ice and the hues of stones, carbon-eating lichen and oxygen-giving phytoplankton, all playing a role in one gigantic living system. Somehow the Donald Trumps, Warren Buffets and Sam Waltons of the world have co-evolved with viruses and are viral in their killing of the planet and decimation of humanity’s key role in life – building bridges toward their own reflection from the world they came from and understanding the orchestration of life on earth. If we are the ultimate species, holding dominion over all, then we have to cinch up our propensity toward greed, superstition, religious xenophobia, and subjugation on a planet so out of tune with the human strictures for changing land forms and now weather. In many ways, environmental action fails to embrace the folly of species, the faults of our evolutionary designs, the cacophony of interdependence, symbiosis, competition, and downright evolutionary path of the war of the genes. There has always been a gap in eco-literature: while plenty of non-fiction, “Sand Country Almanac,” “Silent Spring,” “End of Nature,” and” Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” has filled aisles, there are few great explorations of the environmental world and impending climatic and biological changes from a poet’s or fiction crafter’s point of view. It seems those universal literary conflicts – man against man, man against god, man against society, man against machine, man against technology, man against self, man against nature – have not been fully explored because this current epoch, the Age of the Anthropocene, is not only starving the planet of life but starving our creative soul. It’s time Earth Day and the Gulf Coast Oil Spill and mountaintop removal become literary fields, where a new canon can be both literary and driven from the struggle of the planet at its core. There are larger windmills: where do we take fiction and poetry through the unraveling world of tea baggers and acquisition nuts guillotining the humanities, greenwashing corporations, and climate change deniers and delayers who end up in Congress? Where do poets guide this delusional public beaten down by years of intellectual self-flagellation, and megalomaniacal media tycoons and celebrity retrogrades? Where are aspiring Margaret Atwoods ? The new inventive Derrick Jensens? Can we embrace eco-literature when it seems each day we have a convolution of eco-porn bombarding us? How can General Electric profess ‘green’ when its corporate structure is about building war machines, toppling ecosystems and defrauding the society it depends on by paying zero taxes? Are we trapped in the folly of believing our own reality show, “The Decay of Democracy and Intelligence”? Luckily, the siren’s song is the written word, though many can fault the end of nature to our stagnation, domination of nature, the very essence of our role as invasive species with a larger brain and cognitive frame that pushes and pulls memory. The Earth Day 2011 Writing Contest organized by Down to Earth NW is just a small ripple in the sea of sanity which fiction and poetry can bring to us in a time when moments seem as fragile as the water we squander and pollute. The dialectical science of the new age is one that positions writers toward a dialectical narrative – The Nature of Reality is as follows, taken from Carolyn Merchant’s “Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World.” The whole is a relation among parts, rather than a sum of basic elements. These parts do not exist apart from the whole, but only in relation to it. The properties take their meaning from the whole. They exist only in interaction with it. A person acquires the property of flying only in relation to a social-technological system of aluminum extraction and construction, petroleum, and pilots. Parts and wholes interpenetrate. Causes become effects, subjects become objects and vice versa. The environment shapes the individual and the individual shapes the environment. Both nature and people are actors in the making of history. Change is primary. It is the fundamental constant. Stability is only a momentary balance. In every object there are oppositions and contradictions that bring about change.