Environmental Anxiety Globalized

Lawrence Buell writes that Toxic Discourse is defined as "expressed anxiety arising from perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency" (31). This anxiety can take many forms. Generally, it is propagated by the mass media's prediliction for fear-mongering that, in some cases, has genuine concern behind it. Richard Kirkland Jr wrote an article for Fortune magazine in 1988 that is just as relevant today as it was then. The article is entitled Environmental Anxiety Goes Global. It portends a future where all nations will be striving to quell environmental concerns, while at the same time continuing their enjoyable states-of-being. This idea of keeping intact a wall of "pastoral-uptopian innocence" (Buell 37) stands in the way of Toxic Discourse as a prevailing attempt to key the public in on the threat of environmental disasters. Kirkland writes about "Western Europeans...slow...[adoption of] catalytic convertors" to help cut down on automotive exhaust pollution. This is indicative of the stance of many white, rich consumers. Pretending to care about pollution is good (ie reading Toxic Discourse documents and nodding in agreement), but this feigning interest can only go so far. Real force must play into the equation to thwart what Kirkland cites as Britain's then prime minister Margaret Thatcher's idea of pollution as "the enemy within". Only with direction action, can "the individual or social panic [of Toxic Discourse]" (31) be assuaged. This may include reclycing, passing new legistation to clean up the environment, implementing other green-friendly energy sources (solar, wind, etc), and the list goes on.

For better or worse, Toxic Discourse often provides "totalizing images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration" (38). This is essentially what Kirkland's article relies on to paint a global picture of the threat of epic environmental disaster. Countries such as Germany, England, France and others are mentioned in regard to what steps they have taken to clean up their respective environs. This sense of common identity forged by outside forces is pivotal to the idea of Toxic Discourse. Collective action is needed to save the trees, oceans and other natural wonders, yet it can sometimes be alienating, since the charge might seem, to some, too large a task to even comprehend. Kirkland writes that, "Peugeot, a major French employer, convinced the governmental that [an anti-pollution control on small cars] would make its cars too expensive, costing sales and ultimately French jobs." This is paradoxical. Companies rule the world, yet we cannot possibly rely on them to fix the problems that they cause with their low production costs and slurry ponds and other massive industrial waste. Globalization has connected us all, totalized us onto a world scale awash with dark oil clouds and related uncertainty.

This is dark territory, something Buell refers to as "Gothificication", a tool used by purveyors of Toxic Discourse to create a sense of emotional panic. This use of haunting imagery to evoke social change is seen as an alternative to trying to get corporate involvement for the better of the planet. Keying people in on the desolation associated with environmental disasters as an empathetic plea is the first line of Kirkland's article, as he writes, "Dead seals did for Europe's environment awareness last summer what medical waste did in the U.S."- that is, let people know that something wicked was brewing under the surface. Abandon your lawn mowers and look to the coast, the storms are raging.

Neither Buell nor Kirkland provide clear-cut solutions to environmental problems. Toxic Discourse seems, to me anyway, as more of a channel of information, than a marked change of pace. Buell perhaps believes that by simply convincing consumers there are many damaging impacts associated with their gobbling up of natural resources (dead seals, burning waste, oil spills galore, etc etc etc ad naseum), they will attempt to change their ways. New legislation must be implemented however, for things to really turn around.

Crumb and Dick VS the Great Erasures

There is a Modest Mouse lyric I love. The song is Novocain Stain on the seminal album "This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About." The lyric goes, "More housing developments go up/named after the things they replace/so welcome to Minnow Brook/and welcome to Shady Space/it all seems a little abrupt/No I don't like this change of pace." There is a lot of truth to that. As we try to make the world ours, we destroy what beauty there is in the land of the Native Americas, regions wild and true, not carved up by our many housing tracts. Artist R. Crumb renders the dismal progression of communities in his cartoon A Short History of America with a kind of cunning precision that a writer could take upwards of a dozen pages laboring over. Crumb's city is birthed from trees that gradually disappear from the frames, replaced by buildings, telephone lines, general clutter. As we construct our social infrastructures, what are we destroying? Philip K. Dick, in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," presents a future where animals will be so scarce that the existence of a sleepy, wizened woodland owl would be an amazing find, worthy of massive corporate costs. I believe Dick and Crumb to be kindred spirits with Isaac Brock. Their shared lamentation is one of fear and disbelief. Our attempts to create our own national consciousness from what we perceive as ripe for our picking (Huckleberry picking, if you will) is an egotistic and ultimately destructive notion. Dick's protagonist feels a "need for a real animal" (453). More than that, what humans require is a real world, a world containing not merely restaurants, bars, sporting goods stores, suburban sprawl, but trees, deer, grassy fields to rest our heads on. The natural world is inextricable from our own. So we have brains capable of building steel obelisks and internationally-spreading forms of communication. Bully for us. Do we have enough oxygen-producers? Are we supporting other forms of sentient life? As the title of another Modest Mouse album suggests (I'm a fan, so sue me) all that most of us care about is the greedy endeavor of unceremoniously "Building Nothing out of Something."

Thoreau through Cronin's Eyes: A Conquerer

William Cronin's ideas posited in The Trouble with Wilderness, stand largely in opposition to the Romantic wanderlust of good ol' Henry David Thoreau. Cronin argues that the Frontier Myth (or the Garden of Eden vs. harsh "hairy" forest tall tale) reinforces a cruel paradox, stating that the very idea of Wilderness "embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside of nature" (80). The reality is, according to Cronin, and I happen to believe him, that man and nature exist concurrently with one another, unless, of course, we seek to destroy it, or hide it away in our sidewalks and behind our titanous, aching dormitories. By thinking of nature as separate entity, a place where men like Thoreau can "shed the trappings of civilization...and thereby [reunify] themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity," (76) we are, in fact, perpetuating a cycle of racism and ugly hubris.

According to Cronin, this fascination with sheltering ourselves in the bosom of the woefully engendered "mother nature" emerges from the fact that we exist in cities which we destroy as well. Industry and capitalism, and Thoreau might agree, are greedy, monstrous enterprises. Yet to seek escape into "untamed" lands and subsequently create the illusion of isolation, while at the same time overlooking the fact that the American Indians who once lived there were eradicated chiefly by God-fearing English folk like Henry T, is equally as misguided as destroying the countryside with smoke-stacks and snaking causeways.

Truly our misconceptions of penetrating for our own leisure and reflection what is perceived as "wild", or, perhaps worse, "virginal" about the woodland sphere that surrounds us (indeed the very notion that Thoreau can somehow be made better, purer, by the time he outside of Concord) overlooks the fact that our ability to evoke that freedom is unquestionably the result of large, large scale genocide. Though Thoreau does touch on the positive social constructs of Native Americans in Huckleberries, stating "the earth and all its productions were common and free to all the tribe" (30) and therefore better than his fellow Concordians and their pillaging ancestors, he does not address the "the removal of the Indian to create an "uninhabited wilderness" (Cronin 79) for us build our respective $28 houses in.

Furthermore, Thoreau's idea that nature "exists for no other end [other than to] make us well" (36) is an incredibly selfish assertion, creating a sense that Thoreau's forest romp/fledgling homesteading venture is really just a masturbatory exercise. Cronin suggests, indelibly, that we should "never [imagine] that we can flee into a mythical wilderness to escape history and the obligation to take responsibility for our own actions" (90). There is a good chance the rest of Thoreau's city-bound career makes a better argument than urging the reader to "suck the marrow out of [nature]" with a "Spartan-like" intensity (19). Hopefully, anyway. Otherwise, I'd say he is a little full of a hot air.

About me

Hi My name is Kevin T. I am a Senior Creative Writing major. I enjoy writing short stories, poetry, the odd non-fiction essay. I have self-published one novel on LuLu.com. Don't buy it, as it is riddled with typography errors and nonsense. Other than writing, I spent a lot of time careening madly about campus on my bike. I took an environmental geography class last year in which we learned quite a bit about man's wanton destruction of the natural world. I DO believe in global warming.