This essay is based on a talk given at the 2005 Watermark Literary Muster. Towards the end of the week a number of writers were invited to discuss whether there were any differences between writing about nature and ecological writing. The full text of Martin Harrison’s poem ‘Breakfast’ can be read right here on the Island website www.islandmag.com. The poem appears in his chapbook Music, published by Vagabond Press in 2005.


INTRODUCTION TO ‘BREAKFAST’

The poem is about waking up, somewhere out west, and looking at an expanse of water: this sheet of water is, in a historical sense, not a ‘natural’ piece of water. When I was finishing the first drafts of ‘Breakfast’, particularly when I was trying to give a sense of the damming up of a valley – for instance, the immense curve of concrete wall – I realised how influenced my thinking in the poem was by issues to do with technology:

Sections of the poem break off in mid-sentence like this opening sentence does. Overall, these interrupted fragments become a sort of ‘poem-essay’ to do with the impact of damming up river systems, to do with irrigation and drought, too. Despite the sense of waking up at dawn in an environment which slowly reveals itself to me, I am also looking at a complex technological construction. Am I looking at a natural thing? How is the sense of connection between human presence and environment modified by this dawning sense of a built, interventive structure?

It is this question which, for me, momentarily separates out the difference between nature writing and ecological writing. Nature writing will take things for granted, will celebrate natural things, eulogise them, lament and praise them: it will follow the imaginary pathways which things have about them in a direct and relatively unhesitating way. We move and hunt and fish as the otter, we follow the pathways of the snow geese. If we are children, we enter literalistically the miniaturised worlds of talking animals, of wild things, or funny little creatures which live on eucalypts and bottlebrushes – in other words, we talk back to all those many versions of gumnut children and animal communities which live in the child’s eye. A sense of direct relationship between human feeling and natural event, whether it is part of a child’s sense of miniaturisation or a more adult sense of immersion and empathy, is what nature writing often evokes. Mark Tredinnick has recently talked about such writing as work where, taking part in an act of ecological imagining, the writer witnesses ‘a world larger than the merely human’. Witnessing, being there in the flesh, looking and responding: these acts become a sufficient motivation for the writing. In this sense, Keats’s famous comment about the sparrow seen through the window – ‘If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince (sic) and pick about the Gravel’ – is a prototype of the mix of responsiveness, identification and deep evocation which is often at the heart of writing with and about nature.

So my working definition of the difference between nature writing and ecological writing is that ecological writing is writing which, no less responsive and evocative than any other sort of writing, brings into question how dealing with things as things and dealing with them as commodities play off with each other. In other words, the questionof nature is in balance. In another poem, one of the ‘Letters from America’ in my collection Summer, I put this issue slightly differently, saying that my work is not so much about nature in the straightforward sense of landscape and country but about the whole bundle of issues which are caught up in a phrase like ‘what we mean by nature’: this thought about meaning is, the poem goes on to say, a way of getting to a sense of the world which speaks beyond the self. If, then, I was asked to define what is at the heart of an ecological imagining in a philosophical way, I would probably reach for some definition which includes language and perception as much as anything to do with the environment. I would reach back, too, to some earlier sources. Heideggerian talk about the way that contemporary technological systems encourage, at an intimately psychological level, a reductive view of things, might be relevant here: against creative senses of things which treat them as whole structures which are inseparable from human language and perception, such reductiveness leads to the deeply ingrained, deeply alienated mode of being in which things are not ‘viewed’ unless they are conceived as matŽriel, as a resource, or as matter for exploitation. Things become, as Heidegger phrased the issue in some of his later essays, a resource in waiting, a material seemingly placed there by ‘nature’ as if of purely instrumental value to human being, so that they can be turned into something else. The land is seen as valuable because of its value as a resource in terms of real estate development. The river becomes an energy source for a hydroelectric scheme, and increasingly that is what identifies its value and meaning. I had forgotten this last example when I wrote ‘Breakfast’. It interests me that the sheet of water which I am looking at, trapped in its westward facing valleys, is planned in exactly the epoch when such intimate, back-of-the-mind arguments against nihilism and commodification first emerge.

This ecological distinction between things as things and things as commodities, or resources, also carries through into a distinction which postmodernist thinking is unlikely to want to agree to – namely, that how I think about the white goods (the fridge, for instance, or the cute little toaster by the kitchen sink) is different from how I think about the naturally formed river, the mountainside, even the hibiscus flower which is visible the other side of the kitchen window. My examples are chosen deliberately: I want to bring back what could become a very large idea to the private, intimate, domestic scale of things. Here, too, the difference between seeing things as utilities and seeing them independently for themselves – that is, as biological and historical systems which explore and unfold their own life as living systems – is a very profound one. It is a difference of response and engagement which reaches across the whole shape of living. This difference operates very close-up. It could even be said that we never really need to go into the wilderness to understand it: the difference between an integrative sense of the living thing and the non-empathic sense of things as resource is everywhere. It greets you walking down the suburban street just as much as when tramping up at Barrington Tops or thinking about drought or salination on the dry country farm.

It’s clear, too, that the question of nature and ecology is never disconnected from an issue more deeply implanted in creative practice itself: namely the role of relationship and empathic imagining in composition, in the writing. Here, however, a further difference I want to suggest between depiction-based and ecologically based poetry is the difference between engaged and disengaged looking. Again, these are just rough ‘working’ distinctions, useful because they might help distinguish between a looking which distances, frames and makes picturesque and an involvement in the environing world of a sort which carries with it an awareness of one’s position and indeed a sense of intervention and responsibility for that intervention. To be immersed, to be conscious of being a part of the living dynamic of the overlapping ecosystems which form our own particular ‘entanglement’ is to take on a level of connectedness with nature, to care for the natural world, to live with maximum sensitivity in it. Entanglement is the word the poet Jorie Graham employs at the end of her recently published poem, ‘Europe Omaha Beach 2003’: ‘the superimposition of states. Entanglement. Immediacy.’ This is how she describes the paradoxical vector of her own looking, walking and thinking when watching children innocently playing in a tidal pool on the D-Day beach (once briefly known as Omaha) in northern France in 2003. The poem is as much about memory and war as it is about the complex entanglement of life form and consciousness in a place which retains, despite its archaeology and the impact of violence, a level of elemental naturalness. To maintain a conscious awareness of this sort of entanglement is an ethically ideal condition, possibly indeed a quite momentary sort of perception and self-perception. To live with maximum ecological sensitivity is a very difficult aim to realise and translate into the everyday pragmatics of today’s hi-tech urban life – though at the same time it seems to be a dilemma produced by that very same hi-tech urban life.

In another of the ‘Letters from America’ in the book Summer, I had arrived at my own sense of this kind of hi-tech, self-aware form of entanglement, calling it in that poem green, rich complexity. There is no single, one-off resolution to the complexity, it seems to me. Like many people today, the current ecological crisis leads me intellectually and ethically in the direction of a so-called ‘deep ecology’ approach; at the same time, like most people, while I despair of the colossal political failure of our times to deal with the destructiveness of commodity capitalism, I lead the life of an embarrassingly shallow ecologist, at best sharing manageably ‘green’ discomfort with managed comfort.
In ‘Breakfast’ waking up is a process ultimately to do with separating out all the human purposes involved in the deeply interventive technologies at work in building a huge, inland water system. The poem is to do with evaluating these purposes differently from each other, not dismissing them all out of hand. I started writing the poem at daybreak looking down and across at the back of the great dam wall of Lake Burrendong in central New South Wales: there the lake waters back up at the meeting of the Cudgegong and Macquarie rivers. In later drafts as the poem evolved, it came clear that it is also about recognising the insuperable, never reclaimable sense of the unspoken operating in human decisions. Waking up (in the poem) has to do with understanding what is not available to human purpose and design. Because these motives and consequences are hidden, because they are situated in the liminal areas of mind and body, they are all the more controlling and ethically challenging. They are another kind of ‘reality factor’ built into language itself: