Words in the wild

Scott Slovic missed the West.

Surrounded by cars and buildings and noise in an East Coast city, Slovic began to dream of the wild, wide-open spaces of his home in Oregon. But as a graduate student at Brown University in Providence, R.I., Slovic knew he wasn’t going to escape his cramped urban environment any time soon.

Then one day, in the Brown library, Slovic discovered the writings of John Muir.

“I had initially been interested in autobiographical literature and literary nonfiction. And then, when I found myself living in a gritty, mountain-less Northeastern city, I began to intensely miss the landscapes of the American West. Shortly after that, I was working in the Brown library, and I came across a collection of John Muir’s wilderness essays. I had heard of John Muir the political activist, but I hadn’t thought of him as a writer. It struck me that this was a form of autobiography, and it was about a landscape that I loved and I missed.”

Slovic didn’t pack up and abandon grad school to return to his hometown of Eugene or retrace Muir’s footsteps in the Sierra Nevada. He stayed in the East, but his direction as an academic had shifted: The compass now pointed to a new intellectual landscape that included what he calls “narratives of place.”

A few years later, by the time he was looking for a job, Slovic was one of the hottest names in “ecocriticism,” a newish field of literary criticism that delves into literature that explores the relationship of humankind to its environs.

Meanwhile, back in the West, Ann Ronald, who then chaired the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, was looking for two individuals to fill empty positions in the department. Ronald had long been interested in literature and the environment, and so she set her eyes on two renowned scholars in the field: Slovic and Michael Branch, a 1993 graduate of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville who was teaching at Florida International University at the time.

In 1995, Ronald managed to lure the two academics with a tempting offer—the opportunity to start a literature and environment program for graduate students in the West, the likes of which had never been seen before in the country. Or the world.

Even at stressful moments, Scott Slovic remains calm and gracious. When he and I meet in January to talk about UNR’s literature and environment program, he’s rushing out of his basement office in Frandsen Humanities, medical papers in hand. Slovic is leaving to spend a semester in Brisbane, Australia, in a matter of days with his wife and teenage son. That is, unless the passport people in Washington, D.C., don’t receive his son’s medical records on time.

Slovic and I hop into his economy-sized car and head for the Central Services building at the opposite end of campus. Driving up Virginia Street, he apologizes for the unusual circumstances, explaining that normally he would suggest a leisurely walk around the UNR campus to get our interview off on the right foot, so to speak.

“Often, when my students want to have a meeting, we’ll rendezvous somewhere and go for a hike,” he tells me. “I say, ‘If you want to talk, you’re going to have to walk.’ I just think that so much of the work we do can happen in a wonderful place.”

Bucket seats probably aren’t Slovic’s idea of a sublime environment, but if his son’s medical records aren’t FedExed that day, chances are the trip will be delayed. We hurry on.

Even while sorting through his tactical quandaries, Slovic talks about his roles as academic and environmentalist with quiet passion. This is a man who loves books and nature deeply, and who sees a powerful tie between the two. He loves the idea of personal narrative of place—one individual’s own unique account of his or her encounters with an environment, whether that setting is a South American jungle or a New York borough. People’s stories, Slovic tells me, matter.

“It’s typical in the realms of business, government and law to worry primarily about the economy: how much will things cost, how will we spend our budget, how much should culprits pay. I would argue that value should not be understood as an economic phenomenon. It’s important for us to find a dimension of the world that contributes to the richness of our lives in a way that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. The context of our experience is communicated better through stories than through numbers.”

Sitting in his sun-drenched basement office after our harried drive, Slovic is talking about nature, but he is also talking about the beauty of human narrative, of our stories of struggle and triumph.

“I was initially drawn to fields like psychology, math and philosophy, but all of those fields, I have to admit, seemed relatively dry and abstract. They lacked a kind of experiential warmth. And I found that warmth in the language of literature.”

Slovic says that the best academic writing is vibrant and engaging, not dry or abstract.

“I’ve always believed that academic writing should be good writing. Scholarly writing should be vivid and vigorous and beautiful. Just because you’re a scholar, you don’t have to use language in a bland and dully authoritative way.”

And for Slovic, one of the joys of his job is to push students to think and to write in a fresh, innovative manner.

“I want my students to think for themselves, to challenge me and to articulate their challenges in interesting and careful ways. I want my students to think about things that haven’t occurred to me. My own role is largely that of a coach—my job is to propose better alternatives in writing and thinking, but not to create absolute clones of myself.”

L&E graduate students are hardly a clan of proto-Slovics. They come from all over the globe: Japan, Wales, Italy and many American regions. Their projects are startlingly diverse. One student started two successful environmental organizations as part of his graduate work, the Great Basin Institute and the Nevada Conservation Corps. One student is concerned with the effects that toxic waste has on certain areas, particularly areas populated by low-income—and often virtually voiceless—citizens. One feminist scholar asks why women, while they are often considered more “natural” than men, have been historically precluded from wilderness adventures. The projects are varied, but the commitment to getting out into the world and making a difference—not simply sitting in the classroom and abstracting—is program-wide.

Cheryll Glotfelty, another professor who teaches literature and environment at UNR, agrees that the task of an L&E professor is to urge students to be innovative and self-motivated. Actually, “inspire” is probably a better word than “urge,” since Glotfelty’s open and enthusiastic attitude is undoubtedly an infectious one. Glotfelty came to UNR’s English department in 1990 after receiving her doctorate in English from Cornell University. Her tanned skin, loose, casual clothing and mile-wide grin give her the air of a wilderness backpacker.

"[The program] attracts the kind of people who are willing to take risks,” says Glotfelty, who looks like she’s the adventuresome sort herself. “People who are attracted to this field want to change the world—that’s all there is to it.”

Slovic’s name may commonly be evoked in the same breath as “L&E” when folks around campus are discussing the program, yet he’s one of a dozen faculty members who teach literature and environment courses. Michael Branch—a professor known for his long hair and youthful exuberance in the classroom—was recruited at the same time as Slovic. For Branch, one of the great things about the program is the diversity of its faculty.

“People bring a lot of passions and backgrounds [to the program],” Branch says. “It’s really neat that this kind of program at this school exists to break down the bottleneck between the arts and sciences. … It’s not just writing poetry.”

Hardly. UNR’s L&E students take biannual retreats, do internships, take impromptu wilderness hikes and, in one student’s case, start new organizations based on social and environmental activism. And upon graduating with a master’s or doctoral degree, Slovic says that students have a wealth of professional options to choose from. While some may seek a university professorship, others choose to teach at community colleges or in environmental education programs, journey into the fields of editing and publishing, or even become full-time nature writers.

For Glotfelty, making UNR a center for the study of literature and environment, one of literary criticism’s most quickly developing fields, made sense. In the ever-tightening market of literary academics, graduate students would surely benefit from having studied in the explosive field of ecocriticism when it came time to look for jobs. Also, UNR would distinguish itself as an academic hot spot.

As Glotfelty, Slovic, Branch and Ronald worked together to make the L&E program happen, UNR didn’t become simply the home of a new emphasis within the English Department, but also a bustling center for many things environmental. UNR faculty who had strong ties to fields related to the humanities and the environment quickly formed the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities, which hosts forums for the discussion of environmental topics and brings prominent speakers to UNR like nature writer Terry Tempest Williams, author of Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert and Leap.

By acquiring Slovic, UNR also inherited ISLE, a journal that publishes many of ecocriticism’s premiere writers. The journal sprang from ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, an organization that began in 1993 with 54 founding members, including Glotfelty, Branch and Slovic himself, who was its founding president. After Ronald helped to secure funding from the university for the journal, ISLE found a publishing home at UNR under the editorship of Slovic.

“The three of us were all very young and energetic,” Glotfelty says. “We had a vision.”

So a world-class literary and environmental program ended up in Nevada. This is not an absurd phenomenon, but literary scholarship and environmental activism are not exactly central characters in Nevada lore. It seems fitting that similar programs have settled in Eugene, Ore., and Davis, Calif., places rich in greenery and environmental activism.

But Reno?

“Like many travelers, Nevada was that brown patch that I flew over just before landing in San Francisco,” Slovic says. “But now that I’ve landed in Nevada, I think it’s an extremely beautiful place. It’s also a place with fascinating environmental predicaments such as urban sprawl, rapid population growth and the equitable practices of mining and ranching. [There are] questions of roadless areas and designated and non-designated wilderness areas, and the whole idea of toxic-waste disposal and proper management of water resources, from Pyramid Lake to Lake Tahoe.”

For Glotfelty, who grew up in California and then attended graduate schools in Colorado and New York, Nevada simply fit.

“I instantly became a Nevada-lover,” she says. “And I believe literature can play a heavy role in people loving their place.”

One of Glotfelty’s current projects is an anthology of Nevada literature—a task that, to her knowledge, has never been undertaken.

“It’s a huge project,” she says.

And what about those L&E students who want to change the world? Shin Yamashiro, a soft-spoken, bespectacled guy who grew up in Okinawa and came to UNR to study in the L&E program about five years ago, says that he’s concerned with projects like the proposed Oil-Dri clay mine north of Reno.

“There are obviously social justice-related problems,” he says. “The place is close to an elementary school and an American Indian reservation. Toxins and environmentally hazardous products tend to be placed in areas where few people live. It’s problematic. … It’s reasonable to put it where few people live, but some people do live there.”

And the few who do live there are usually on the poorer and not-so-influential side, he adds.

Yamashiro also talks about the lack of sound science in considering Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump. Yucca Mountain, he says, is only one example of something that has been happening worldwide for decades.

“Yucca Mountain is a typical problem you can see everywhere in the world,” he says. “That type of thing happened in Japan.”

Yamashiro says that environmental problems began to arise due to population problems and “cultural developments” in Japan in the middle of the last century. He explains that Japan’s first large-scale environmental disaster occurred after a chemical manufacturing plant dumped mercury into the Minamata Bay. Many residents of a fishing village on the bay were stricken with what has become known as Minamata disease, but, because of the villagers’ poverty and obscurity, fighting back was virtually futile.

Yamashiro says that he’s interested in what sort of rhetoric politicians—and indeed, researchers, the media and everyone else—use amid all the hoopla of a Yucca-type environmental controversy.

“I’m against Yucca Mountain and the kitty litter plant; that is my personal standpoint. But I’m more interested in how people try to solve these problems so that I can look at things more objectively and more broad-mindedly. [I want to] not just push an environmental agenda, but to find a meeting ground.”

Jimmy and Lilace Guignard are native Southerners who came out West together to study literature and the environment. Jimmy is working on his Ph.D., studying 19th-century British literature from an environmental standpoint. Lilace is working on her second master’s degree—her first is in poetry from the University of California at Irvine—and studying women’s relations to the outdoors.

At first glance, they seem poles apart. Jimmy is tall and soft-spoken with a gentle Southern drawl. Lilace, with her short hair and slender frame, is energetic and engaging. Jimmy once worked in construction; Lilace worked as a raft guide and in outdoor education.

Yet their passions for literature and the environment correspond beautifully. They both brim with ideas on urban sprawl, labor, feminism and where to draw that tricky metaphorical line dividing the “wilderness” from urbanized areas.

Lilace has a problem with the ways that society has historically linked women to nature. She says that women have often been treated in the same way as nature, in terms of subjugation and ownership, yet also limited in their access to the wilderness.

“Women were conflated with nature and then they were told they could never be in nature,” she says. “Let’s look at that.”

Lilace says that she entered the L&E program because of its well-roundedness. She wants to use her studies here to bolster her career as a writer.

“I signed up for the degree because it’s not specifically academic, so you become versed in other things. I’m using this as a writer. I want to be smart and on the edge, and it’s much easier to do that in classes than just reading books.”

Jimmy and Lilace tell me that ecocritics aren’t a bunch of eco-fascist folk who write about living in trees. They are concerned with cities as well as wilderness areas. They’re concerned about people, not just owls and whales.

“I’m interested in how writing in the 19th century treated different kinds of environment,” Jimmy says. “Not just what you would call a natural environment, but in terms of cities also. I think there are a lot of people who believe there’s this division between culture and nature. I think it’s at best an unfair dichotomy and at worst a deadly dichotomy. I’ve pushed down trees with bulldozers. I have a good understanding of [the culture side of things].”

Jimmy points to the hardwood table we are sitting at. No matter how staunchly environmentalist you are, he says, wooden tables are still part of our lives. Nature and culture are not in opposition to each other; the city is not in opposition to the wilderness. We need to learn how to better integrate the two into our daily lives, he says.

“When I went back [to school] to get my bachelor’s degree in English, I would go to work in the morning, driving nails, framing, then I would go to school in the afternoon. It occurred to me when going between those two very different environments that each was necessary to the other. For instance, academia would be nowhere if it weren’t for the people who came and built the building.”

“And installed the plumbing,” Lilace interjects.

“Right. But it’s also necessary to have heavy thinkers to contextualize us as a species,” Jimmy continues. “And someone who’s pouring concrete won’t necessarily have the time to do that. [Academics and laborers] don’t necessarily appreciate each other. But our sewage has to go somewhere.”

Never underestimate the power of words. Every L&E faculty member and student I talked to told me of the power that language has to change human fate—and the fate of the planet. When academics, laborers, politicians, writers and corporations can all become part of the same conversation, who knows what might happen.

In the meantime, Branch says, stories of people and of places are continuing to change people’s hearts.

"[A narrative] may not change the way we carve wood or get wool, but it will get stories heard,” Branch says. “It can change peoples’ lives in a way data might not. People tend to protect places they love, and they tend to love places they hear stories about.”

For Slovic, nature and narrative have the power to heal.

“Nature has been viewed as an emblem of beauty, permanence, the deeper truth of experience,” Slovic says. “We often associate with artificial spaces and forms of experience a sense of decay, unhealthiness and frustration. Even small encounters with the more-than-human world operate as a healing agent.”

Slovic says that healing may not come swiftly to our society; the political impacts of environmental studies are “subtle and gradual.” But change does come, spreading slowly through classrooms and student-teacher relationships.

"[I want] to inspire my students and my readers to ask questions and to think critically about our society and about language … to refine their sensitivity to the implications of language," he says. "Language is powerful, and we must constantly refine the language we use."