Patrick D. Murphy Department of English University of Central Florida

1. Practicing Ecocriticism in Literary and Cultural Studies Patrick D. Murphy Department of English University of Central Florida

2. Nature ≠ Wilderness

3. Robert Frost

4. Mending Wall

5. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there.

6. Interpretive Points • Low walls delineating property lines, not to achieve privacy, but to claim property rights. • This wall exists not only as a referential object for the poem but also as a symbol of several artificial human systems of organization and acquisition. • Nature is an activity rather than a setting, and, potentially, as much an agent as the famers.

7. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

8. Additional Points • To “walk the line” means to follow rules. But this ideological obedeicne results in inequality. • Even as they act together, they act individualistically.

9. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

10. Individualism and Property Rights • Ideology of Individualism • Wall serves no useful function • The Wall serves only as a symbol of values and beliefs

11. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.

12. Something there is that doesn't love a wall,That wants it down.

13. I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to meNot of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

14. Conclusions Reached • The binary opposition between nature and culture has actually been dissolved • The neighbor’s view of property may be inherited in a long, historical sense • The poet’s perception of nature as an activity ceaselessly changing calls for a rethinking of human cultural practices.

15. A Brook in the City

16. The firm house lingers, though averse to squareWith the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

17. I ask as one who knew the brook, its strengthAnd impulse, having dipped a finger length And made it leap my knuckle, having tossedA flower to try its currents where they crossed. The meadow grass could be cemented downFrom growing under pavements of a town;The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame. Is water wood to serve a brook the same?How else dispose of an immortal force No longer needed? Staunch it at its source With cinder loads dumped down?

18. The brook was thrown Deep in a sewer dungeon under stoneIn fetid darkness still to live and run -And all for nothing it had ever done Except forget to go in fear perhaps.No one would know except for ancient mapsThat such a brook ran water

19. But I wonderIf from its being kept forever underThe thoughts may not have risen that so keepThis new-built city from both work and sleep.

20. Ecopsychology James Hillman Jungian Theorist Ecospcyhology defines human psychological health as being based on a physically health interaction with and treatment of the rest of nature.

21. Gary Snyder

22. Los Angeles Basin

23. Los Angeles Basin at Night

24. Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin Owl calls, pollen dust blows Swirl of light strokes writhing knot-tying light paths, calligraphy of cars.

25. Los Angeles basin and hill slopes Checkered with streetways. Floral loops Of the freeway express and exchange. Dragons of light in the dark sweep going both ways in the night city belly. The passage of light end to end and rebound, –ride drivers all heading somewhere– etch in their traces to night's eye-mind calligraphy of cars.

26. Vole paths. Mouse trails worn in On meadow grass; Winding pocket-gopher tunnels, Marmot lookout rocks. Houses with green watered gardens Slip under the ghost of the dry chaparral,

27. Ghost shrine to the L.A. River. The jinja that never was there is there. Where the river debouches the place of the moment of trembling and gathering and giving so that lizards clap hands there –just lizards come pray, saying "Please give us health and long life."

28. A hawk, a mouse Slash of calligraphy of cars

29. Into the pools of the channelized river the Goddess in tall rain dress tosses a handful of meal. Gold bellies roil mouth-bubbles, frenzy of feeding, the common ones, the bright-colored rare ones show up, they tangle and tumble, (continue)

30. godlings ride by in Rolls Royce wide-eyed in brokers' halls lifted in hotels being presented to, platters of tidbit and wine, snatch of fame, churn and roil, Meal gone the water subsides.

31. The calligraphy of lights on the night freeways of Los Angeles will long be remembered. Owl calls; late-rising moon.

32. ASLE Association for the Study of Literature and Environment began with a small publication called The American Nature Writing Newsletter

33. Literary Nonfiction British Romantic Poetry Fiction

34. Robinson Jeffers Wendell Berry Gary Snyder Edward Abbey The Monkeywrench Gang Walden

35. Reread the literary canon for representations of nature and themes of environmental justice Modernists: Hemingway and Faulkner "The Big Two-Hearted River" and The Sun Also Rises The Sound and the Fury

36. Barbara Kingsolver Toni Morrison Linda Hogan Leslie Silko Karen Tei Yamashita

37. Kim Stanley Robinson Norman Spinrad T. C. Boyle Paolo Bacigalupi Karen Traviss

38. Hurricane Katrina

39. Christopher Hallowell, Holding Back the Sea Bob Sheets and Jack Williams, Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth Judith Howard and Ernest Zebrowski, Category 5: The Story of Camille R. A. Scotti, Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

40. Hurricane Damage

41. John D. MacDonald, Condominium Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, The Coming Global Superstorm The Day After Tomorrow

42. Thank You!