Steve Mentz

Before I scatter the still-smoldering fragments of the co-created Lexicon of #CreatingNature, I want to make a stab at what I’m taking away with me. The hours since the conference community dispersed from DC have been wonderfully intense. The maelstrom of my son’s high school graduation produced overflowing cross-currents of family, friends, and worlds in the process of changing. What are the things that last, as everything changes and ripens? What do we get to keep?

So, quickly and incompletely assimilated: this weekend’s events have created in me a phrase I hope never to forget: Everybody’s infrastructure all the time. The mash-up buzzed into my mind’s ear sometime after Ian received his diploma on Sunday morning. It’s been rattling through my imagination ever since.

Conference-goers and twitteristi may recognize the terms I’m combining. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the scientist who took some time out from her project of sending a spaceship to the metal asteroid Psyche and building the Interplanetary Initiative at ASU to co-deliver our keynote, gave us the core: “Everybody is invited all the time.” To build things, and to rise to planet-sized challenges, she reasons, we need everybody together. It’s an audacious, inspiring, wonderfully plural vision.

The added word infrastructure comes from another of the conference’s distinguished guests, Michael Dove from Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. He talked about cultural infrastructure: the protocols, practices, stories, and conceptions of order through which human societies manage proximity to environmental danger. His example unspooled the cultural logic of small Javanese villages high on the slopes of the very active Merapi volcano, but the larger implications for a hotter and more violent global climate resonated powerfully, especially when we saw young climate protesters stretch out their bodies on hot concrete in front of the Supreme Court. We need new cultural infrastructure to live in the Anthropocene. Volcanos, Michael said, are “world making.” I wonder what cultural worlds are being made and destroyed today.

The last bit, all the time, also comes from Lindy. The words speak to collective action in the face of the multiply moving and disjunctive time scales of the Anthropocene. Can we imagine “all the time”? What sorts of futures and pasts and abrasive presents get collectivized in that phrase? Lindy also spoke about a 30-year project, like her mission to Psyche: what’s the thing you want to do in and for the world, especially if it takes you the rest of your professional life? I don’t yet have a good answer to that one yet. But I’m looking!

Everybody’s infrastructure all the time. I keep circling around the idea. We want infrastructure for everybody, and also everybody is and must be that infrastructure.

But first, before the fire cools, some more on/from/with #CreatingNature.

Creating

Academic symposia generate crossings and crossroads, and we pass through them to discover ideas that spring up like the Spontaneous Urban Plants Nancy Nowacek described caring for in post-industrial Brooklyn. Riding the train north on Saturday morning, sleepy and disoriented from after midnight Dark ‘n Stormies with Jeffrey, Lowell, and Erin, I felt the overflow. So many flickerings dancing through my head!

Some of the lexicon has already been e-immortalized via the twitter hashtag #creatingnature, but I also want to frame these words and thoughts in dialogue with our Shakespearean title and the Nature that’s creating us as we are creating and re-creating Nature.

The great goddess Natura and English word Nature conceal powerful tensions and fantasies, from natural philosophy to human nature to the interlocking structures of influence that gave rise to the word “ecology” in the nineteenth century. Nature is an imagined unity with which (some say) we must dispense, since Nature should not be separate from culture or Art or other human-generated phenomena. Thinking Nature points us into physical space, toward objects in spaces, spread out across and around our physical worlds. Nature produces the frictions and feelings that we worked so hard to represent last week.

But as I tried to catch in words during the Closing Roundtable, the Shakespearean modifier “creating” also hurls Nature into time. It’s the disorienting meeting of place and time, Nature and creation, that generates shared and shareable narratives. “Creating” as agentive principle asks us to recognize that the things we love will change, that they will graduate high school and leave our shared homes. Things we fear or hate or struggle against will also change. Change underlies and unsettles and makes uncertain. Creating cultivates the feeling that the ground under our feet may open up or is always opening up, so that falling into novelty is more norm than exception. “Creating” as first principle of errancy, in this sense, connects to a post-sustainability or dynamic ecology, something that I first wrestled my way into thinking about by writing almost a decade ago on this conference’s favorite literary touch stone, Lear in the storm.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

Creating Nature, says the mad old homeless king, hurts and confuses and wets us “to the skin.” He responds with a lyric howl. In response to that inhuman abrasion, we (academics and teachers and word-people more broadly) need lexical tools.

Here are some of the tools we gathered at the Folger last week, and some thoughts about how we might use them. Apologies for taking a bloggy and sloppy attitude toward citations in what follows!

Being a list of lexical tools for/from Creating Nature, including some fantasies about their future Uses

Session 1: Sustenance

Karen Raber opened us up with the proper ambivalence toward food for the body and narratives to sustain imagination. What sustains? At what cost? Who’s listening? Who’s eating what?

Counter-pedagogy: Right from the start I had the sense that the things we were seeking wouldn’t move in only one direction. Julian Yates described Lear’s response to the Noah story as counter-pedagogy of dislocation and alienation, which turned the idea of narrative as sustenance toward less comforting places. “Survival is insufficient,” he quoted from Station Eleven, suggesting that we worry ourselves beyond simple preservation toward things slippery and monumental. To create an Ark entails preservation through radical isolation — just so many pairs of creatures and no more. Julian and Jeffrey’s refuge-focused re-reading of Noah pushes us into the rain, where counter-stories flourish and, at least for a time, swim.

Parasitic opportunism We were a bit nervous as nine o’clock struck and we were still one speaker short, but Dagomar Degroot successfully navigated both cross-town traffic and the volatile sleeping habits of his newborn baby to offer a brilliant tool-word via his reading of the Dutch Republic’s Frigid Golden Age, which leveraged the Little Ice Age to the small nation’s advantage. During his fantastic talk, I had the queasy sense that the geopolitical advantages of today’s climate crisis may also support Arctic nations, through increased access to fossil fuels, trade routes, and agriculture — which may somewhat explain Russia’s recent resurgence, though in fairness the community of Arctic exploiters also includes Canada and the USA. To seize the opportunities of parasitism sounds both enticing and likely corrupting.

Aquaculture Maritime environmental lawyer Robin Craig’s great overview of how fishing has created (or re-created) the modern ocean gave rich context to the “shifting baselines” problem in environmental history, in which each generation’s scarcity gets reimagined as a new normal. Thinking about her gestures toward a global history of aquaculture, I was struck by “culture” as both physical and conceptual substrate, a medium in which things and ideas grow. Might the vertical oyster cultivation that thrives on a local scale on the other side of my little Connecticut town presage aqua-cultural changes yet to come?

“To ark the ocean” Building (I think) on Jeremy Jackson’s keynote at the Oceans Conference she had co-hosted in Utah this past February, Robin performed the interdisciplinary move the conference was designed to facilitate when she spliced her thinking about fishery management into Julian’s ark-visions. I loved this moment because the great hope I had (and have) for #creatingnature is precisely this sort of crossing, in which a marine environmental lawyer jumps on board with a literary project and thinks together about (to borrow one of Lindy’s phrases) the biggest things we can do. Why shouldn’t the ocean be our Ark?

Session 2: Storms

Joe Campana offered three poetic storm-aphorisms on which I’m finding much post-storm sustenance:

Storms endure.

Storms create ( or”write”).

Storms expose (systems).

Storm Time Kellie Robertson may not have known it but the clock was ticking and the storm heading our way as she outlined a series of “geostories” regarding a fatal lightning strike on an English church in 1652. Each successive account opened up new gaps from first-hand experience and titled toward new ideological warnings and calls to action. “All things come by Nature,” wrote one post-storm recap, including perhaps the Anglo-Dutch Wars and perhaps even the English Civil War. Storm Time and narrative time represent, in Kellie’s intriguing metaphor, a setting which frames, displays, and perhaps (mis-)interprets the jewel of experience. Storms are story-makers, writers, exposers, witnesses, Joe had already reminded us.

“Shipwreck years” Valerie Trouet’s triple archive of trees rings from the Florida keys, meteorological data from the eighteenth century, and the records of shipwrecks from the Spanish flota enabled a deeply persuasive story about shipwreck years punctuating the variable climates of the Little Ice Age in the early modern North Atlantic. I’ve loved this project ever since it was described to me by my cousin-in-law Noah Diffenbaugh, a paleoclimatologist at Stanford who knew about my literary work on shipwreck and wondered how it might interface with Valerie’s analysis. It’s not a simple fit. She uses the collected records of Spanish shipwrecks as a proxy for water temperatures in the Caribbean, while I explore individual tales as narrative responses to environmental hostility. There’s a numbers problem: I explore a lot of fictional and real shipwrecks in my book, but not nearly enough to draw statistical conclusions. But in some ways even more intriguing to me were Valerie’s reading practices, not of texts but of trees. Her tree-ring lab in Arizona comprises a practice of technical close reading, an engagement with natural codes and patterns legible in the trees that she does not harm in her practice, as she was careful to remind us. Like many humanists, I sometimes feel swamped under all the books I don’t have time to read. But what about texts that aren’t obviously books? How much remains to be read in what was once called the Book of Nature? I want to open my whale’s throat to learn all the languages of all the creating creatures.

Experience Henry Turner was one of several English professors who noted his own critical identity on the margins of a rising tide of self-professed eco-profs — and then Henry, like Debapriya and Liza later, contributed some of the most potent ideas and terms of the event. Henry came to experience via John Dewey’s pragmatism, and also via a line I quoted some years ago from the early modern French mariner Samuel de Champlain: “Experience is better than knowledge.” The original French is better:

L’experience passe science.

I ventured my semi-coherent French vowels to Valerie during one of the many breaks, suggesting that the mariner’s language values the claims of experience’s practiced hands over science’s rational head. “I don’t know about that,” Valerie said, in a very reasonable defense of science.

Of course we want and need and use both experience and science, the rational claims of thought and the instinctive feel of a skilled hand on the tiller. But I take Champlain’s point, and I think also Henry’s, to indicate a mystery at the heart of experience that hyper-rationalism, including the rationalism of all academic practices, occludes. It’s very hard to (in another of Henry’s phrases that I hope I’m not garbling) “feel what it feels like to be thinking.” Thinking about experience asks us to feel that thinking.

INTERRUPTION: TORNADO WARNING! Melville’s Ahab insists on being, in the middle of the personified impersonal, a personality. We experienced, in the middle of the session on storms and time and experience, a storm. Huddling in the basement and the room where they store theatrical costumes jerked us out of the formal conference. It suddenly re-assembled us into unplanned conversations, responses to proximity and anxiety and not-knowing what the storm was doing outside, except via the glowing proxies of our phone-radars. I always want to run out into storms, Lear-like, and encounter their vastness with my body. I’m glad I’ve learned to listen to wiser voices at such times.

Distraction In Henry’s reading of Dewey, experience struggles against distraction. Thee disjunctive side-step of the tornado was both distraction and jump-start. “Did we just experience climate change,” Henry asked as we filed back into our seats. Single events are only weather, not climate, several people noted — but what if climate change was not the tornado but the warning, not the storm but its over-writing and infiltration of our professional event? Does what we know about a post-Natural climate or “no analogue state” provide an interpretive tool with which to read the tree-ring accumulations of weather into a new human/inhuman language?

Co-Plenary: Climate / Weather / Feeling

Aspirational humanism We eco-humanists have been worrying about the human for some time, and ideas of the post-human and even post-humanities have staked out meaningful claims in our discussions. That’s all the more reason to value Lindy and Jeffrey’s co-plenary declaration of hope and aspiration for human accomplishments. I suppose if you’re leading a multi-year space mission to the asteroid Psyche it pays to thing expansively — Psyche is something like 200 million miles away — but I also appreciated the invitation inside my favorite library. What is the big thing we want? I love conferences and books and phrases and brilliant lectures in the Paster Reading Room. But maybe there are bigger things?

“Everyone is invited all the time” Lindy’s marching orders about inclusion emerge from her Interplanetary project, and I suspect also from her collaborations with Dean-Gandalf interlocutor Jeffrey Cohen. I love the audacity. Everyone! All the time! In a world of universities with scarce resources and academic cultures that value selectivity, aggressive access has the flavor of myth. What if we can build a spaceship Ark Ocean big enough to invite everyone? What do you call an Ark without an outside? Can we think insides without outsides?

Session 3: Shelter

Jen Munroe and Rebecca Laroche re-started us on day 2 with an OED-fueled exploration of shelter as military technology and, surprisingly, tool for conflict. They also pointed us toward the International Climate march that was happening that morning in front of the Supreme Court and elsewhere around the globe.

Cultural infrastructure Michael Dove, who was heroically struggling with a cold, presented his research on the cultural life of Javanese villages high up on the slope of the violent Merapi volcano. In his telling, the imagined “spirit village” that lives inside the crater and mirrors the human village on the slope represents a fictional stability, a way of living close to destructive forces. Volcanos, which are among the most consequential forcing agents in pre-industrial climate change, also generate fertile soil and, perhaps because of their danger, a partial respite from the “hydraulic state” that controlled the labor and lives of lowland Javanese peasants. To domesticate the volcano and transform it from threat to “world-making agent” and “interlocutor” represents a cultural gambit, a making-legible of a fiery violence that makes even trees and the ocean seem relatively tame.

Surrender Debapriya Sarkar’s moving evocation of shore as partial shelter in early modern literary romance balanced Michael’s reading of the volcano. Sea against mountain, water against fire: both hostile elements that lure, destroy, and stimulate the imaginations of those who live alongside them. Like many, I was especially struck by the last word of her talk, “surrender,” which upon discussion spoke to many our own memories of the experience of coastal storms, as well as to Debapriya’s personal response to the recent elections in India. Both talks in this session worked to “culturize” climate (to adapt a phrase of Michael’s) in the sense of recognizing the interstitial work that cultural forms, mythic and narrative, do whenever humans live near hostile environments they know to be violent but yet remain deeply desired.

EXCURSION: CLIMATE PROTEST

The young protesters lay on the hot sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court:

“You will die of old age / We will die of climate change.”

“The seas will rise, and so will we!”

I was glad to be there to see them.

Session 4: Spirits & Science

Anne Harris introduced our final session on “Spirits & Science” with a nod toward plurality and a celebration of the possibilities of slippery surfaces and encounters.

Slippage We all held our breath as Lowell Duckert told the tale of Balmol (sp?), a 17c Dutch explorer whose glissade launched him off the glacier into the Arctic Sea — though he seems in the end to have surfaced and returned to his ship. Nancy Nowacek elaborated the slippery path of her Citizen Bridge project, about which she wrote from Oceanic New York back in 2015. So many slippery surfaces! So many fortunate and frightening encounters!

Habitat compensation Nancy’s depiction of Habitat Compensation Island, built outside the industrial port of Dubai, got us thinking about what “compensation” means in cultural terms. Robin reminded us that compensation describes a legal remedy, and also that marine environments tend to repair themselves more efficiently than terrestrial ones.

“Nature has no end” Liza Blake’s reading of dramatic stoicism in George Chapman’s plays sounded out a bass note of inhuman affinity: what if the ecologically just thing to want is to become soil, to feed the grasses that feed the cows? Much of the two-day event strained us beyond the literary context that brings many of us to the Folger Shakespeare Library. Liza’s wonderfully suggestive reading of Chapman’s stoic poetics and physics suggested ways that the literary speaks to the sciences, social sciences, and more public and political discourses.

Slimy Agitation Chris Pastore’s bottom-up history of the ocean and its “thousand thousand slimy things” provided the perfect ending to our gathering because its vision of a material, foamy, slimy experience-filled ocean allowed us to see, or perhaps better to feel, the world into which we were heading. I’ve been thinking about jellyfish for a long time, and what it will be like as an ocean swimmer to learn to live with their slimy sting. Chris didn’t make that prospect seem more comfortable — but he did suggest that slime is less the exception than the rule in ocean history.

Closing Roundtable: Interlopers and invitations

I had probably too much to say at the closing roundtable, as perhaps this too-long blog post shows that I still have too much to say. But the thing I want to remember now was about interlopers and invitations.

Several people, mostly humanists who don’t identify as ecocritics, but I think also the scientists and non-Folger natives, spoke about the challenge of feeling like an interloper among Shakespeareans. I understand that feeling, and I often feel it too. But since I was the one who issued the #creatingnature invitations, I want to re-emphasize Lindy’s wisdom: “Everybody is invited all the time.” If you think about that phrase, it’s a challenge both to the invited and the hosts. All the time!

We feel like interlopers. We can, in fact, interlope, moving into conversations in which we’re not expected.

But to build a new infrastructure adequate to the Nature our culture has created needs all of us. Everybody’s infrastructure all the time. That’s what we need, and we need it now.

Looking forward to the next gatherings, wherever they will be!

The final event at “Creating Nature” on Fri 5/24 will be a roundtable featuring the chairs of all four sessions, the two co-plenarists, and me. We’ll be trying to put everything together and generate something like a rough lexicon of shared terms, competing ideas, and avenues for future thinking.

The session chairs, who in an eco-terminological twist we are calling “conversation stewards,” will help us bring into dialogue the central insights of each panel. Karen Raber will discuss “Sustenance,” Joe Campana “Storms,” Rebecca Laroche and Jen Munroe “Shelter,” and Anne Harris “Spirits & Science.” Co-plenarists Jeffrey Cohen and Lindy Elkins-Tanton will return to and extend their thinking about Weather / Climate / Feeling.

My own role at the end of what I’m sure will be an exhausting and intense two days will be to weave some of our shared words together.

How do the threats posed by Storms challenge our need for Shelter? (In a fantasy world we might finish this conversation by all taking the train to New York to see Glenda Jackson rage against the weather in King Lear.)

How can the ornate systems of meaning we label Spirits & Science provide conceptual and material Sustenance for human bodies in threatening weather?

What new terms do we need in a lexicon to bring together the premodern humanities with the sciences, the social sciences, and the creative arts?

We’re also looking forward to the questions and insights provided by a fully booked house of 60-odd audience members.

Hoping to see you in DC soon! Please also follow along on the #creatingnature hashtag!

The fourth panel session of the conference will complete a circle by looking at how early modern and medieval ideas of science and nonhuman causation can speak to discourses of the environmental humanities as well as to ideas from modern scientists we will have been introduced to the day before. In premodern cultures, boundaries we assume to be clear between the spiritual and the scientific blurred. This panel explores those blurry in-between spaces and ideas.

The chair of this session is Art Historian (and soon-to-be Dean) Anne Harris, who explores ecomateriality in medieval art and is the person in the world in whose response to the Notre Dame fire I’m most interested. (Her amazing essay on the ecologies of fire, “Pyromena, Fire’s Doing” appears in Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s Elemental Ecocriticism. And I remember when those ideas started as a dazzling talk in Tuscaloosa!) I wonder if she’ll splice in a few quite comments on fire, stained glass, and historical memory into her presiding over this panel.

One special feature of the last of these four sessions will be a collaborative paper jointly presented by the artist Nancy Nowacek, inventor of New York harbor’s amazing “Citizen Bridge” project, and literary ecocritic Lowell Duckert. These two have collaborated in the past, in my open-source collection Oceanic New York, and I look forward to hearing them think together about environmental questions and forms of knowledge.

They will be joined on the panel by maritime environmental historian Christopher Pastore, who does fantastic work on marine science and knowledge practices, and by Liza Blake, a literary scholar who works across the discourses of poetics and physics, with special interest in the wonderfully elaborate poetic physics of seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, of some of whose poems she’s produced a great online edition that I’ve used in the classroom.

As we wind our way toward the final sessions of “Creating Nature,” we will be combining our shared lexicons, thinking about how we can best speak to each other and to our shared concerns with the nonhuman environment. How might the discourses of spiritualism and religion speak to and with the sciences, both in historical research and in today’s world of skepticism and denialism? What shared projects of meaning-making seem possible, both in the past and today?

Spending an afternoon with my eco-theory grad students at Dead Horse Bay was the ideal way to pregame the ambitious, wayward, and sometimes overwhelming production of King Lear that’s currently at the Cort Theatre on 48th St. Dead Horse Bay’s particular flavor of #trashpastoral shows off fragments of ruined nature, the leeched detritus of more than a century’s urban waste. But it’s also — as I’ve shared with students before in relation to King Lear — a place of strange posthuman beauty.

On Tuesday afternoon the tide was high enough to keep us pinned to the upper half of the beach, where we poked around amid the collection of nineteenth-century glass and leather as well as plastic of more recent vintage. A breeze from off the Rockaways kept the air fresh, and a fisherman’s arrival showed how even old landfills remain part of living ecologies. King Lear gives us Shakespeare’s greatest vision of apocalypse and inhospitable nature, which is the reason I’ve long been convinced that this play is essential art for the Anthropocene. Dead Horse Bay hits us with the same alien pressure, and reminds us that living persists amid decay. I love this ugly place, and it provided the best answer ever to Julio Cortazar’s perfectly-phrased question about the role of iconic literary art in modern lives:

If I get so carried away by a spider-web covered with dew, what will I do in the evening when we are going to see King Lear?

(Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

Sam Gold’s inventive staging of Lear mostly eschewed local references, though the Fool did show off American flag socks when chanting Merlin’s prophecy of misrule after the storm. The glittery-golden set located almost all the action indoors, with the storm and hovel scenes of act 3 somewhat oddly placed on the liminal space in front of the lowered curtain. (It worked for me, since I was in the front row and about five feet from the mad king raging at thunder — but I wondered about confining this outward-facing moment.) Many of Gold’s more radical stage gambits did not hit their marks, and not all the performances were strong — but at the center of the production a trio of brilliant actors shouldered the play’s massive weight.

I was especially looking forward to John Douglas Thompson’s Kent, having seen his stunning star turns as Tamburlaine and as Louis Armstrong in “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Kent is the play’s conscience, and Thompson’s easy charisma and perfect clarity were a good fit for the role. He was especially winning when disguised as Caius, wooing and serving the increasingly mad old king. I wasn’t absolutely sure I bought his final despair — he seemed more like someone who would pick the kingdom up and put it back together — but it was a great performance by one of our greatest actors. I look forward to him in the title role!

The surprise break-out for me was Elizabeth Marvel as a bossy, gleeful, sexy, and thoroughly-in-charge Goneril. Very much her father’s daughter, Marvel’s Goneril nudged her youngest sister forward when she spoke “nothing” in act 1, enthusiastically consummated her relationship with Edmund amid the rubble of a shattering kingdom, scoffed at Dion Johnstone as her husband Albany, and nearly stole every scene she was in. Matched against her father and his curse of sterility in 2.1, she was the only figure on stage who could almost face the big man down. I’ve seen some compelling performances of Goneril, and I think a case can be made for this character’s practicality and willingness to speak political untruths, as opposed to Cordelia’s sullen idealism. No figure on this production’s stage seemed better suited to rule competently than Marvel’s Goneril.

But really — as all the reviews have noted — this was a one-woman show. Glenda Jackson’s Lear was gorgeously realized and thoroughly captivating, She radiated power. Like Kent, I saw “authority” in her diminutive bearing. Perhaps she was not as physically regal and superhero lithe as Ian McKellan’s King, and maybe not quite as searing in his need as Adrian Lester in his final turn as Ira Aldrige playing Lear in Red Velvet, but Jackson’s King was incessantly fascinating. Her capacity for varied facial expression is unmatched; I don’t remember any performance, not even other stars at the center of this star vehicle play, in which I’ve spent such a large amount of my attention focused on and captivated by a single actor.

The pinnacle of Jackson’s performance came during the storm, when she balanced on the lip of the stage, staring up at the lights and into imaginary rain. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” she roared with painful joyous release. I’ve written about this scene repeatedly, and I’m convinced it’s one of the essential scenes in Shakespeare to help us understand living in an increasingly hostile environment. I’ve never seen a better performance than Jackson’s, human in her desperation and regal in her poetic authority. Makes me want to write about it all over again! She had other good stage moments too, including defending her hundred knights against Goneril’s slander and engaging with Ruth Wilson as the Fool. (Wilson, double-cast as Cordelia in a way that recalled Gold’s similar double casting of Claudius and Old Hamlet at the Public in 2017, also performed powerfully, though perhaps not quite with the stage presence of Thompson, Marvel, and Jackson.)

Weaker performances in other roles, especially Sean Carvajal as a tepid Edgar and Aisling O’Sullivan a shrill Regan, marred the production. Gold’s imagination sometimes ran away with him. But really everyone was there for Jackson’s King. The standing ovation has become a bit de rigeur on Broadway — are we standing in deference to the prices we paid for our seats, or simply because after three and a half hours we can’t bear to sit any longer? — but I was happy to give Glenda her due. It’s tempting to pay to sit near that fire one more time before the production closes in early July.

Kicking off the second day of “Creating Nature” will be a session on “Shelter” co-chaired by distinguished ecofeminists and Shakespeareans Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe. After having recently shared a stage with them on an Ecofeminism panel at the Shakespeare Association of America, I’m especially keen to have their guiding voices and insights to move our conversation into its second and final day.

One of many reasons that I choose Rebecca and Jen to co-chair a session at “Creating Nature” is the model for collaboration and exchange that they provide. They co-wrote their recent book Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory in part through a mutual pedagogical exchange, in which students in Colorado and North Carolina worked together (virtually) alongside their professors. Their model of mutuality, dialogue, and keen analysis will help all of us at “Creating Nature” begin our second morning.

The “Shelter” panel also features Michael Dove, an anthropologist from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He’ll be sharing the results of his field work on volcano-vulnerable communities on the Indonesian island of Java. Alongside Michael will be Debapriya Sarkar, a professor of English and Maritime Studies who works up the shoreline from me at UConn’s gorgeous Avery Point campus, and Phillip Usher, who teaches in the French department at NYU.

I’m looking forward to seeing how these three different scholarly modes, Anthropology, English, and French, will respond to cultural and physical desires for shelter in hostile environments. I’m also looking forward to the challenge that Michael’s Asian-based work will bring to our often Eurocentric discourses in the premodern humanities.

Does the human need for shelter require that we treat our environment instrumentally? Might human attempts to imagine cultures of shelter also embrace the more-than-human? These and other questions may come up as we continue on our second day of “Creating Nature.”

The rousing conclusion of the first day of “Creating Nature” on May 23 will be a two-headed public lecture in the Paster Reading Room featuring Lindy-Elkins Tanton and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

The ongoing collaboration between these two brilliant scholars is one of the inspirations for this event and its hopes for building a lexicon to think together about the environment through different fields and discourses. Lindy directs the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and Jeffrey, an ecocritic and scholar of medieval literature, is Dean of the Humanities at ASU. I first saw them speak collaboratively in the Boston BABEL conference in 2012.

Among their many projects, from founding and running a ground-breaking Humanities Institute in Washington DC to being Principal Investigator on NASA’s planned mission to the metal asteroid Pysche, these two co-wrote the brilliant little book Earth (2017), as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. I’m not sure that I know of a better example of imaginative collaboration between the sciences and the humanities. I blog-gushed in some detail about their (and our) shared Earth in June 2017. The book’s gnomic opening phrase remains one of my favorites —

Earth is a home, a limit, and a recurring challenge.

Their collaborative plenary lecture, titled “Climate/Weather/Feeling,” promises to show us new things about that home, press up against that limit, and provide shared tools to respond to that challenge.

I can’t wait to hear it!

Someone clever on the internet quipped that this weekend is “peak geek culture,” with the convergence of Avengers: Endgame, which I saw with the family Friday night, and The Battle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones coming tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking about how these twin mega-blockbusters embody our culture’s growing awareness of climate change. Are we beginning, as a global mass culture, to replace familiar conflicts against human evildoers with a too-big-to-comprehend struggle against impersonal forces? Or at least, highly personalized, magical, and bejeweled figures that represent impersonal forces?

Thanos, the purple God-Malthus of the Marvell Comic Universe literalizes a fairly common criticism of what environmentalists want, namely that in order to preserve ecosystems they will murder humans. (A smart essay in Yale Climate Connections elaborated the ways that Thanos caricatures environmentalism when Infinity War came out last year.) In Endgame, the Big Mean Purple guy isn’t quite as threatening, and in fact he manages to get himself killed twice, but his tag line — “I am inevitable” — follows Malthusan logic. (The quip-riposte — “I am Iron Man” — combines superhero ego-individualism with our culture’s deep love for technology.) In order to preserve the universe, Thanos must cull all populations. The grim first hour-plus of the latest movie suggests that following the Malthusan path of reducing populations to match finite resources creates, at best, a world in which Captain America facilitates a twelve-step program.

The Night King doesn’t speak about his own inevitability, but

his tag line also emphasizes the impersonal: “Winter is coming.” He may simply represent death, as hunky but not very clever Gendry tells Arya. But in environmental terms the Night King might be better understood as Thanos without the snap: he blankets the landscape as absolute privation, the exhaustion of all resources, including life and even memory. To endure in winter, as Stark family maxims recall, requires social solidarity, being loyal to the pack rather than the lone wolf. Much has been written about Game of Thrones as a semi-allegory of climate change. As it grows each week less likely that the Night King will grow a personality (unless he’s Bran Stark?), the allegorical meaning becomes almost inescapable. George R.R. Martin has apparently given the climate change interpretation authorial approval, though I’m not sure that binds the writers for HBO.

It’s not surprising that mass culture’s two most iconic villains of 2019 might assume climate change-inflected shapes, given our collective growing awareness of eco-anxiety. And too much can be made of the how much these figures have to depart from traditional models to allegorize a changing climate. Thanos first appeared in Marvell Comics back in 1973. Nonhuman super-evil bad guys have been core elements of the machinery of modern fantasy at least since Tolkien’s Sauron started Dark Lord-ing across Middle Earth. These villains work as strange attractors, inciting maximum fear and requiring maximum sacrifice to vanquish. Tolkien’s fantasy laments the loss of the pastoral Shire to proto-industrialization from Barad-Dur to Isengard, and that criticism of modernity seems compatible with today’s fear of climate change as industry’s destructive progeny.

But the now-emerging truths of climate change as global experience won’t really wear the clarifying colors of Purple Thanos or the White King. Neither the instantaneous snap of mass murder nor the visible advance of Walkers across the landscape will overwrite our world. Instead, climate change strains all levels of all systems, motivating climate refugees and authoritarian regimes, drought and civil war, wildfires and the desire of the wealthy to build futile walls. As our awareness of climactic change deepens, we are responding multiply, in our popular entertainments and our academic conferences. Climate change touches everything and can’t be separated from many other causes.

It’s no wonder we’d rather imagine that our problems are homicidal Titans or zombie hordes.

Happy watching everyone!

In the afternoon of the first day of “Creating Nature” (May 23) we’ll dig into probably the knottiest communication problem of the conference: how do environmental humanists speak with the paleoclimatologists whose work has been so crucial in understanding global climate change past, present, and future? What shared language spans ice cores and poetry, tree rings and Shakespeare? I’m looking forward to hearing some possible answers from our second panel.

When I first had the idea to try to bring a climate scientist to our party, I reached out to Noah Diffenbaugh, who teaches at Stanford and whose work appears everywhere from the IPCC report to the New York Times. I’ve known Noah for a long time because he’s married to my wife’s cousin. Based on decades of family vacations, I suspected that long discussions with humanists might not be his sort of thing, but he suggested I contact Valerie Trouet, a climatologist from the University of Arizona who works with historical shipwreck data in the Little Ice Age. To my great pleasure, she’ll be joining us in May — which leaves open the question that Noah, who knows a little bit about my work, was setting up: how might my own work with early modern shipwrecks as semi-allegories of ecological disaster connect to her use of shipwrecks as climatological markers in the Little Ice Age? I’m not sure I have a clear answer yet, which was one reason to recruit the rest of this fantastic panel.

The chair will be Joe Campana, poet and eco-Shakespearean whose work always arrives at just the right phrasing. He’ll be joined, in addition to Valerie Trouet, by medievalist Kellie Robertson, whose work has been dazzling me since we were grad students together in the former millennium, and by Shakespearean Henry Turner, who to my mind is one of our most acute and deft scholarly analysts of the terrain between early modern science and poetics.

This panel will work to bridge numbers and ideas and seek connections between computer models of climate and literary depictions of storm-threatened bodies. I often think about these questions through modes of orientation and disorientation, and also through the capacities of systems to accommodate error, in measurement and in calculation. I look forward to hearing what these four brilliant scholars will say to each other, and to us!

Four weeks from today eco-voices will fill the Folger’s Foulke Conference Room as Creating Nature begins. I’m looking forward to hearing from the many brilliant people who will be joining us in May. (Click the link for more!) Over the next several weeks, I’ll do some long-distance introductions of the four sessions and the plenary lecture with special attention to something very specific that I hope will emerge from our conversations: a practical interdisciplinary lexicon for environmental thinking.

In asking for a lexicon, I’m emphasizing that we come to this conference with different critical and professional vocabularies, but I hope we’ll leave it with some new terms, new ideas, and new ways of thinking. The title, “Creating Nature,” is a line from Shakespeare (Winter’s Tale 4.4), but also a provocation to think about how we create the nature that creates us. That’s why the conference will bring together not only active researchers in the premodern environmental humanities but also scientists, anthropologists, artists, and environmental lawyers. Knowing that it’s not fair for each of these figures to represent fully their rich and complex disciplines, and recognizing that many of us, especially the Shakespeare scholars, may tend to revert to type in our beloved Folger’s halls, I want to introduce the conversational challenge faced by each of the four panels and the interdisciplinary plenary. How can we best talk to and with each other? What words do we need, and how can we use them?

The first morning’s session on “Sustenance” will be chaired by eco-Shakespearean Karen Raber and feature talks by maritime environmental law scholar Robin Kundis Craig, environmental historian Dagomar Degroot, and Shakespearean Julian Yates. Their challenge will be to weave together Robin’s analysis of “Saltwater Sustenance” with Dagomar’s excavation of the “Frigid Golden Age” of the Dutch Republic during the Little Ice Age with Julian’s analysis of food, cooking, and other cultural activities in and beyond Shakespeare, perhaps all the way to Noah’s Ark(ive).

I won’t step on what I anticipate will be a stimulating and imaginative session, but I’ll speculate a bit about sustenance and food in terms of a critical lexicon. There’s lots of great scholarship on food today, from the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective co-run by Creating Nature-ers Rebecca Laroche and Jen Munroe, among others, to my St. John’s colleague Steven Alvarez’s amazing “taco literacy” scholarship and teaching that ranges from Mexico to Kentucky to Queens. In advance of our symposium, I’m thinking about food as comprised of material, cultural, and spiritual objects and processes. I’m thinking also about a moment in New Jersey many years ago, when after attending the funeral of my ninety-four year old grandmother, I ranged through the back of the fridge to extract and wolf down the week-old leftovers of a lifetime’s worth of her special potato pancakes. The pancake I ate was stale, cold, slightly rancid, and painfully delicious. I can taste it still, and not just when I get up early on a holiday morning to struggle through my approximation of her recipe for my own children.

More soon, about “Storms,” history, and paleoclimatology!

Finally, in the final week of its run, I got to see Theatre for a New Audience’s “Julius Caesar,” directed by Shana Cooper, who has reprised a production that debuted at Ashland in 2017. I’ve had to shift dates two or three times because of mid-winter mania — I think the first ticket I held for the show was in late February — and I was worried that I’d not make it in the end. Nothing like a not-too-crowded theater on a Tuesday night!

In the wake of the big Trump/Caesar production in the Park in 2017, which stirred up the Breitbart hornets so much that Delta Airlines — to which mega-corp I’m bound by chains of flyer miles — pulled its support from the Public Theater, this production was impressively stripped down. The crowd scenes, from Lupercal to the assassination at the Forum to the battle at Philippi, were the highlights, as Cooper directed a powerfully ritualized riot-as-dance that was part faux-Haka and part heavy metal mosh-pit. Having the closing battle between Roman legions physically echo the rioting plebs in the opening scene was a compelling choice. Are soldiers organized rioters? Do men in groups tend toward communal violence? Among the dancers and the smaller parts, Stephen Michael Spencer’s Caska stood out as perhaps the most memorable figure in the cast. At the play’s close, he stood at the phalanx’s apex, grunting and chanting a war-dance that distinctly upstaged the final spoken lines of Benjamin Bonefant’s Octavius Caesar. A case of the physical warrior crowding out the oily politician? And also a production that loves movement more than words?

The sweep of the crowd scenes formed a backbone around which the individual performances entwined themselves. The big players were an odd mix. Brandon Dirden’s Brutus was thoughtful and melancholy in his crucial soliloquies, especially “It must be by his death…” (2.1), in which he opened a chilling window into the so-reasonable heart of a killer. He re-activated that intimacy with the audience in his first scene with Caesar’s ghost (4.3), but when facing other characters in scenes of animated conflict — the spat with Cassius in 4.3, the pre-conspiracy conversations in act 1, and especially when confronted by Merritt Janson as his wife Portia in 2.1 — Brutus diminished. It was odd, in a production so dominated by a trio of crowd scenes, to have the lead actor flourish only in his solitary moments.

Politics happens both among crowds and in smaller encounters, and the places that this production limped were mostly interpersonal. Brutus could not match either Portia or Matthew Amendt’s sinewy Cassius. Rocco Sisto played a wonderfully expansive, stage-commanding Caesar, and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart showed a humanizing devotion to him as his wife Calpurnia. I’ve never before seen Calpurnia appear onstage during Mark Antony’s funeral oration (3.2). In literally waving Caesar’s bloody shirt, Calpurnia provided emotional ballast for Jordan Barbour’s Mark Antony to bound about the stage.

During the furor about this play in 2017, I remember thinking that every production of Caesar must necessarily be about murdering the President, and of course it didn’t take long to find the analogous Obama/Caesar production from 2012, directed by the always-awesome Rob Melrose. Unlike those two ripped from the newsfeed productions, Cooper’s staging seemed deliberately opaque rather than topical. The relative weakness of Brutus in the public scenes also tamped down the central ethical dilemma. Might it be necessary to murder your “best lover” for “the good of Rome” (3.2)? I enjoyed this production, especially for its crowd scenes including the boot-stomping murder of Cinna the Poet, but I’m not sure it quite faced up to the horror and violence of that question.