Environment: Ambivalence and Multiplicity

In “Tales From a Black Girl on Fire, Or Why I Hate to Walk Outside and See Things Burning” by Camille T Dungy we see a writer discuss nature in an unusual way, where instead of a nostalgic, idealized portrait of nature, we get a view of nature heavily mediated by fear. Dungy makes it clear that experiencing the outdoors has always been a cherished part of her life, but that at certain times she cannot be in nature without a profound sense of anxiety permeating the experience. The key seems to be geography and history: “During my years I lived in Virginia, I occupied several historical planes at once. I lived my personal experience of a community that was legally desegregated and essentially welcoming; but I also lived my mother’s and grandparents’ pre-civil rights era experience” (Dungy 29).  She has made an unignorable association, a conflation between fire and violence/terror, between a geographical landscape and the evil events that have taken place there. So to Dungy, environment is in fundamental ways not separable from the human life that has gone on there, and nature takes on an imprint—emotional, psychic, energetic—of these events that she can feel and which are as real as the immediate plane of physical existence.

Another layer of her fear is directly tied to environment: having grown up in Southern California, “Where the spark from a campfire, a stray cigarette, or an insect burned under a magnifying glass could ignite a firestorm that burned a hundred homes, scorched innocent animals and demolished thousands of acres of habitat,” Dungy is conditioned to the idea of fire as destroyer (Dungy 31). This destruction of landscape translates from the West Coast to the East as tool of destruction of people who are powerless in the face of racial hatred. Environment, then, both as external habitat, and the denizens of it, shapes us, our perceptions of the world, our fears, our interests. And we shape each other, as history makes an imprint on the landscape that becomes the legacy passed on to future generations who live on the same ground.

“Touching on Skin” by Kimiko Hahn I felt was very interesting to read after the Dungy piece because it provided a different nonfiction form; it’s short, spaced apart paragraphs and use of parentheses and dashes make it feel more like poetry than an essay. Hahn tell us: “I depend on my skin. On this wall. This pigeonhole. This frontier” (Hahn 158). Skin, biologically, is protection; it is also our way of interfacing physically with the outside world and gives us much information about environment. It also gives people much information about us (whether truths or assumptions made erroneously) and can open doors or shut them in some situations. It can be a site for pain, or pleasure. And it can be a place where we feel at home and we can carry that sense of home with us where ever we go.

“At the End of Ridge Road” by Joseph Bruchac presents a more common depiction of nature than Dungy’s piece, but that does not make it inferior or any less heart felt. I really enjoyed the section about the turtles because they are fascinating creatures that are common enough to be well known, but uncommon enough to be a treat when you actually see one. I very much enjoyed Bruchac’s blend of Native American storytelling—the painted turtle got its stripes by getting ready to go to war, turtles have thirteen large plates on their backs to reflect the lunar cycles, turtles enables the formation of North America—and his scientific knowledge about plants and animals (and most of all, his assertion that they are not mutually exclusive). Bruchac is a preservationist: of the environment, of the animals who live there and are threatened by modern civilization, of the Native American stories and culture that are part (but only part) of his racial heritage and his writing serves to further preserve these things he sees and experiences for which he cares deeply.