Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

261 Pages·2008·2.48 MB·English

by  Ursula K Heise

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet
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Sense of Place
and Sense of Planet
The Environmental
Imagination of the Global
Ursula K. Heise
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Library of Congress Catologing-in-Publication Data
Heise, Ursula K.
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet : the environmental imagination
of the global / by Ursula K. Heise. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-533563-7; 978-0-19-533564-4 (pbk.)
1. Environmentalism—United States—History. 2. Globalization. I. Title.
GE197H.445 2008
333.720973—dc22 2007043073
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Rafael
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acknowledgments
B
ook-length works of research tend to assemble themselves
gradually, like jigsaw puzzles, pieced together out of a mul-
titude of readings, conference papers heard and presented, formal and in-
formal conversations, and the environments provided by universities and
other scholarly institutions. While footnotes and bibliographies convey
some sense of the intellectual matrix out of which an analysis has devel-
oped, they cannot convey an adequate sense of the many other debts ac-
crued during such work. Needless to say, whatever these debts may be,
remaining errors and shortfalls in this book are exclusively mine.
The Departments of English at Columbia and Stanford Universities have
provided vibrant intellectual environments in which to pursue the project of
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, and my colleagues at both institutions have
supported, encouraged and advised me in innumerable ways both large and
small. At Stanford, the Woods Institute for the Environment has been an
engagingly lively and interdisciplinary place to present and discuss parts
of my work, and the comments and criticisms of colleagues from around
the university caused me to rethink many of my arguments. Stacy Alaimo,
Hannes Bergthaller, Michael Cohen, Catherine Diamond, Greg Garrard,
Catrin Gersdorf, Christa Grewe-Volpp, Robert Kern, Sylvia Mayer, Patrick D.
Murphy, Heather Sullivan, Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai, Alexa Weik, Louise
Westling, and Chenkuei Yang, all at other universities and some on other
continents, have become trusted conversation partners and welcome crit-
ics over the years. Rafael Pardo Avellaneda deserves particular thanks
for introducing me to the intricacies of risk theory and patiently correct-
ing many of my interdisciplinary errors and misunderstandings. Lothar
Baumgarten generously granted me a conversation of several hours and
a tour of his splendid New York City studio during my work on his com-
plex nature documentary, Der Ursprung der Nacht (Amazonas-Kosmos).
Patrick Murphy, Dana Phillips, and an anonymous third referee at Oxford
University Press provided detailed feedback and criticism that caused to
me to revisit and nuance many of my initial analyses. David Damrosch,
Guillermina de Ferrari, Michael and Cherrymae Golston, Kristin Hanson,
Winston James, Franco Moretti, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Martin Puchner, Ron
Silver, and Miriam Wallace have shared not only their astonishing breadth
of knowledge and acute insights in innumerable conversations on a wide
range of issues but also the kind of personal warmth and friendship with-
out which a project such as this one would soon run dry. Perhaps most
of all, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Cheryll Glotfelty, whose unfailing
optimism and firm belief in the value of this book even at times when I my-
self despaired over its ever being completed inspired me to continue. Such
enthusiasm and generosity from a colleague, even when our perspectives
sometimes differed, are rare indeed; I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have
had her support and advice over years of research and writing.
Combined research grants from the American Council of Learned Soci-
eties and the National Humanities Center (NHC) enabled me to take a year
off from teaching and administrative tasks during 2001–2 and to complete
the analyses that later turned into chapters 5 and 6. The NHC, in addi-
tion to its generous award of a fellowship for environmental studies sup-
ported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, provided a
stimulating cohort of fellows across disciplines and plenty of opportunities
for formal and informal intellectual exchange, as well as outstanding staff
support for any and all research.
Chapter 2 was first written in a substantially different version for the
journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 8.1
(winter 2001) under the title “The Virtual Crowds: Overpopulation, Space
and Speciesism.” A part of chapter 3 appeared in Comparative Literature
Studies 41.1 (2004) under the title “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World
Ecology and the Experience of Place.” Chapter 5 was first published as an
article called “Toxins, Drugs and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in
the Contemporary Novel,” American Literature 74 (December 2002), and
chapter 6 as an essay in the collection Nature in Literary and Cultural Stud-
ies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf
and Sylvia Mayer (Rodopi, 2006). All of them are reprinted here with the
permission of the original publishers. The John Cage Trust granted per-
mission to quote from John Cage’s poem “Overpopulation and Art.” Spe-
cial thanks are also due to John Klima for his extraordinary generosity
in allowing me to reproduce an image from his multimedia work Earth in
chapter 1 and to use another one for the book cover, and to UNKL for per-
mission to include an image of their HazMaPo toy figures.
viii acknowledgments
contents
Introduction Sense of Place and Sense of Planet 3
Part I World Wide Webs: Imagining the Planet
Chapter 1. From the Blue Planet to Google Earth:
Environmentalism, Ecocriticism, and the Imagination
of the Global 17
Chapter 2. Among the Everywheres: Global Crowds and the
Networked Planet 68
Chapter 3. Adventures in the Global Amazon 91
Part II Planet at Risk
Chapter 4. Narrative in the World Risk Society 119
Chapter 5. Toxic Bodies, Corporate Poisons: Local Risks
and Global Systems 160
Chapter 6. Afterglow: Chernobyl and the Everyday 178
Conclusion Some Like It Hot: Climate Change and
Eco-Cosmopolitanism 205
Notes 211
Works Cited 225
Index 243