environmentalism

Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

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Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty.

In today’s world, where so many people value opinions and beliefs over fact, it is a huge relief to communicate with someone who actually believes in science. Both of her parents were scientists–an entomologist and a nutritionist–and she spent much of her youth in the woods of Northern Ontario. She talks about the family pulling over when an infestation was spotted so that they could collect the invading critters. “Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations.”

That early influence shows in her concern with the threats to our environment, both in her fiction and her nonfiction, including a number of pieces in this collection. She writes of how this concern fueled her Oryx & Crake trilogy and her MaddAddam trilogy, as well as a moving tribute to Rachel Carson, calling her “a pivotal figure of the twentieth century” and “Saint Rachel.”

Another theme that threads through this collection is the way autocracies try to silence writers and control women. She has been a force in founding Pen Canada and acted as its president in the 1980s. In “If We Don’t Defend Free Speech, We Live in Tyranny” she writes about the attack on Salman Rushdie and the murder of translator Hotoshi Igarashi. In another piece she states that “There is nothing that repressive governments desire more than imposed silence . . . secrecy is an important tool not only of power but of atrocity.”

She generously continues to write about The Handmaid’s Tale, noting that “absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women.” She adds that writing a dystopia from a woman’s point of view “does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things.”

These pieces are not all darkness with a glimmer of wit. In “Literature and the Environment” she writes that “as long as we have hope—and we still do have hope—we will be telling stories, and—if we have the time and the materials—we’ll be setting them down; because the telling of stories, and the wish to listen to them, transmit them, and derive meaning from them, is built into us as human beings.”

Indeed, the pieces I most appreciated were about how essential the arts are to our well-being and about writing in particular. Parsing out her approach to these short pieces taught me so much about her methodology. Often she starts with a clear statement of purpose: “I’ll divide my talk into three parts, and I’ll even tell you what they are, just so you know what’s coming.” That’s from a speech honoring the Department of Forestry’s centennial. I’m touched by how, despite her blockbuster status, she’s willing to turn up and speak at so many events.

After the statement of purpose, she wanders here and there in the best tradition of essay-writing. She includes asides, rhetorical questions, digressions, allusions. She explores the question without answering it, instead opening our minds—gently and respectfully. I also especially appreciated the pieces about other authors and about her late husband, author Graeme Gibson: both joyful moments and mor trying times as he drifted deeper into dementia.

While some readers may be unnerved by this collection’s length, diversity, and chronological structure (rather than thematic), I found it a joy to read. Most of the pieces are quite short, making it a perfect bedtime book: you can read a few pieces and chuckle at her quips before you turn out the light.

I’m grateful to Atwood for collecting these pieces—no small task—and putting them out for us to absorb. In fact, for a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

What have you read by Margaret Atwood? Her novels, poems, and/or essays?

Walking, by Henry David Thoreau

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Thoreau first gave this talk in 1851 at the Concord Lyceum and continued to work on it afterwards. It was published in the Atlantic Monthly after he died in 1862.

My second book of poetry Terrarium is about the influence of place on our lives and personality—the place we grew up, our place in the family, perhaps the place we’ve always wanted to visit. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the categories of physical places in my life, a three-legged stool: home, society and the wild. With the pandemic, society is reduced almost completely to faces on the computer, leaving me pondering home and the wild and how we do or do not move among them.

First, let me be clear: wild is a relative term. There is no virgin wilderness here in North America, and never was except perhaps when the first people tramped across the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia. There is untended land, here in New England some of it was once farmland, laboriously carved out of the forest, abandoned when the economy collapsed leaving remnants of stone walls in the woods. There are lightly managed forests, with walking trails and sometimes efforts to remove invasive species. These suffice for my experience of the wild.

Now we have learned through new research that there is more going on in the woods than we realised, that trees communicate with each other and form their own society. Richard Powers’s bestseller The Overstory explores these ideas further through several sets of characters.

The fairy tales we hear as children are often about venturing into the wild—Into the Woods, as Stephen Sondheim put it—and discovering our own talents and values as we encounter its dangers. The journey becomes a metaphorical basis for nearly all of our stories, the hero’s journey described by Joseph Campbell.

And then there’s coming home. For many people, the immediate shock of the pandemic’s stay-home orders was to actually be at home all the time, not spending most daylight hours at work or school or the myriad activities that fill some children’s schedules, not going out in the evenings to a restaurant or concert or pub.

For all the decades I was working a day job, the thought of being at home all day seemed like nirvana. I had worked hard to make my home a place where I wanted to be, that fostered my favorite activities and soothed my soul, yet spent most of my days in offices and laboratories. When I retired a few years ago from that job to write, I feared that being home all the time would not be the paradise I’d expected. Reader, it was. And is. Though I recognise that my personality is particularly well-suited to this life.

I also walk. A lot. Aside from the obvious health benefits of exercise, recent studies have shown the positive effects—mental, physical and emotional—of spending time in nature.

So, belatedly, we come to Thoreau. Most famous for his two years in the woods by Walden Pond, he was fascinated by natural history, anticipating what we now call ecology and environmentalism.

He begins this essay:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Where he wins my heart comes a little later when he says:

I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together . . . I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street . . .

He’s not just extolling the opportunity for exercise, but having the time to “walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” Also, as a Transcendentalist, he considers what we can learn from nature, extolling even swamps and bogs as jewels.

I will leave you to enjoy the rest of this delightful and thought-provoking essay for yourselves. It’s readily available online. It’s time for me to take a walk.

Where are your favorite places to walk?