Post Nature Ecology in Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 and Nightland

Abstract

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• Post Nature Ecology in Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 and Nightland
• Todd Francis Tietchen (bio)

Over the past fifteen years, the concerns and perspectives of ecocriticism have taken a turn toward Post Nature methodologies. The work of ecocritics and environmental philosophers such as Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Clark, Timothy Morton, and Rob Nixon has been at the forefront of this evolution toward Post Nature critical methodologies in the environmental humanities. Two of the defining characteristics of those methodologies involve: 1) The representation of environmental concerns, or our precarity, through cataclysmic landscapes, those territories and spaces that have already undergone—and in many cases are still undergoing—pronounced ecological crisis and decimation, and 2) the insight that environmental crises are radically internal to the human form or physiology; the notion that such crises often manifest as epidemiological crises. Working from these two foundational suppositions, Post Nature methodologies typically eschew Transcendentalist or Romantic appeals to the beauty and sanctity of the natural world, and instead foreground the health risks, existential precarity, and cataclysmic environmental destruction attributable to industrialization, mining, anthropogenic pollution, and the aftereffects of military conflicts and toxic weaponry. Characteristically, then, Post Nature methodologies tend to decouple ecocritical engagement from depictions of purity, or of an unsullied wild, tropes that have long played an integral role in environmentalism, environmental criticism, and environmental literature.

As such, Post Nature approaches intrinsically undercut the categorical distinction between nature and culture at work in traditions such as pastoralism, or as we see in the long history of Euro-American [End Page 31] environmentalist nonfiction rooted primarily in Transcendentalist concerns. Clark has helpfully pointed out that environmental nonfiction in the Transcendentalist mode—exemplified by writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry—engages and celebrates nature as "the non-artificial" and "the uncontrived," associating "sites of minimum or only benign cultural interference, with wilderness and the wild" (78). While this rigid configuring of the nature/culture divide has obviously been able to generate significant histories of ecological critique and activism that imagines itself involved in a primary defense of what remains of unsullied nature or the wild, Clark rightfully wonders if the advance of our planetary problems in an age of general toxicity and environmental cataclysm destabilizes that divide as a workable concept or category of thought (75–76).

Environmental crisis is not just "out there" in the vanishing and wounded natural world. It envelops us in epidemiological consequences that penetrate our physiology. Post Nature methodologies foreground this fact, documenting the befouling and poisoning of the landscape and its inhabitants simultaneously. As Clark makes clear, Post Nature theories "express the fact of an incalculable connection between bodies, human and nonhuman, across and within the biosphere (food, water, nutrients but also toxins and viruses), with a sense of both holism, and increasingly, entrapment" (80–81). Alaimo refers to these connections or entrapments as "transcorporeality" (2); Morton calls the same processes "the mesh" (28). This Post Nature terminology attempts to capture the extent to which our human forms are entrapped within relationships with anthropogenic pollutants and toxic materials, which come to reside in our bodily tissues without us always being immediately cognizant of them.

In what follows, I explore the presence of Post Nature ecological perspectives in Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) and Louis Owens's Nightland (1996), while situating those outlooks within the concerns of Native American literature more generally. Of course, much Native American writing contains rich descriptions of the natural landscape or the wild not entirely out of step with the Transcendentalist writing described by Clark. Chief Seattle's Speech (1854), along with more contemporary works such as N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and Earth Keeper (2020), [End Page 32] Paula Gunn Allen's Sacred Hoop (1986), and James Welch's Fools Crow (1986) exemplify this tradition, which stresses that the natural world is sacred while placing significant value on our human responsibility as caretakers of that sanctity. Moreover, the landscape writing and environmental ethics of Momaday and other Indigenous writers have significantly pollinated the tradition of Euro-American environmental writing cited by Clark, an influence also seen quite clearly in the work of poet and...