This Impermanent Earth: Environmental Writing from The Georgia Review
Edited by Douglas Carlson and Soham Patel
The University of Georgia Press $39.95
Reviewed by Anuradha Prasad
Thirty-three of the essays published by The Georgia Review (TGR) from 1974 to 2020 make up the collection that is This Impermanent Earth: Environmental Writing from The Georgia Review. These essays are a testimony to humans’ understanding and dynamic relationship with the environment and natural world. Throughout the collection, we can trace how the definition of nature writing has expanded and how the genre has evolved over the decades. The variegated ground that the book covers make This Impermanent Earth a remarkable collection of environmental writing.
The essays also chart the course of TGR itself, which progressed from publishing writing that was primarily focused on agrarian conservatism and regionalism to a more diverse range of essays—diverse not just in terms of the topics tackled but also in the forms and styles and points of view. Editors Douglas Carlson and Soham Patel have selected the work that comprises this collection, each provoking discussion and meriting introspection.
The collection is organized into three sections with the first part featuring essays dominated by the themes of curiosity and exploration of the natural world. It takes off with “Hopkins, the Humanities, and the Environment” in which Jerome Bump calls for a word to describe the concept of wholeness to replace man–nature dualism. A more intimate experience awaits in James Kilgo’s “Actual Field Conditions” and his encounters with birds, their glory and his desolation. In “Being at Two with Nature,” Robert Finch mulls on the purpose of nature writing, comparing it to the dirt path of a traditional Cape Cod house. Embarking on a wide-ranging exploration of landscape and ideas, Gary Paul Nabhan draws analogies between hummingbirds’ territorial warfare with that of humans and discusses the devastation on the environment by Desert Storm in “Hummingbirds and Human Aggression: A View from the High Tanks.”
The essays in the second part of the book are characterized by vision and despair, for regardless of the awareness of how nature is being destroyed, there is no going back. Literature can only be witness and not reverse the destruction. Scott Russell Sanders is inspired by Thoreau and the relevance of his ideas and truths, particularly the philosophy of simplicity in “Simplicity and Sanity.” Countering this is David Gessner’s “Against Simplicity: A Few Words for Complexity, Sloppiness, and Joy.” Gessner injects the collection with the vigor of debate, arguing whether a simple life, as advocated by Thoreau, exists, and he wonders if in its seeking we might be missing out on what is—the complexity of living.
Language and landscape collide in “Isogloss: Language and Legacy on Mount St. Helens” as Elisabeth Dodd communes with the ground beneath her feet on Mount St. Helens, attempting to meet it at its origins in the etymology of language, civilization, and bloodline. Ann Pancake’s “Creative Responses to the World Unraveling: The Artist in the 21stCentury” speaks of literature that can do more than just bear witness—it can transform. The darker currents of sexual abuse and violence and power and powerlessness surface in Julie Riddle’s “Shadow Animals” in which she summons other possibilities of being. J. D. Ho’s “Rebellions of the Body, Creations of the Mind” enters the realm of Darwin, food, and food allergies and how this could be “a result of and a preparation for climate change.”
The collection concludes with the last section, which gathers eco-writing from 2019 and 2020, illustrating the multi-genre approaches drifting into the ecopoetic space and the deconstruction of restrictive boundaries, thus reinvigorating the literary discourse. “Etymology, Ecology, and Ecopoetics” sees Tyrone Williams comparing environmental racism with ecological racism through the concepts of homology and etymology. Similar to Sanders, Williams wants to head to the origins of words and phrases as it is particularly significant in ecopoetic practices.
After a semester in Hawaii where Craig Santos Perez witnesses the effects of climate change, he decides to teach ecopoetry to help kids express their emotions about environmental change through poems. It later extends to an active engagement with the community that Perez outlines in “Teaching Ecopoetry in a Time of Climate Change.” The lyrical is brought to the fore in “Who We Are as Floral, Faunal, Mineral Beings” that is interspersed with poems and in which Brenda Iijima expands the idea of human: homosapien, transpecies, holobiont, personhood.
The standout quality of this expansive collection is its diversity of voices and ideas in America and the often surprising trails on which they take the reader, eventually tying back to how deeply interconnected everything is.
Anuradha Prasad is a writer and copyeditor living in Bangalore, India. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Literally Stories, Borderless Journal, Bangalore Review, and Muse India. She is currently exploring her interest in nature, travel, and wildlife.