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I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most canonical environmental texts either rhapsodize or elegize ‘wild nature’— they celebrate wild environments as a pristine last frontier or mourn them as a polluted lost frontier. As climate change and other global human interventions render untenable the notion of a pristine or separate natural world, however, writers are turning from rhapsody to elegy, allowing them to still speak of ‘wild nature’ in a contemporary world. Here’s the problem with that. First, eco-elegy declares its object already dead, without futurity; seducing us toward death and its total respite from responsibility or exertion, eco-elegy is hardly conducive to the concrete, sustained action demanded by issues like oil dependency and climate change. Second, objects of elegy must be enframed— as in identified and valued —to be mourned; eco-elegy is thus a problematic mode for addressing issues that cannot be assimilated by anthropocentric, specifically capitalist, valuative or representational systems. Third, eco-elegy is narcissistic; it casts elegists as detached and privileged witnesses to a simplistic and spectacular narrative of apocalypse, rather than emphasizing our entangled position deep within ecosystems whose workings we have not fully understood and within environmental processes unfolding across spatial and temporal scales we have not fully grasped. In that sense, eco-elegy may be a kind of last-ditch cognitive mapping, offering elegists solid historical and spatial footing at the point where all stories merge in a mutual endpoint. But in that sense, eco-elegy is also sadistic; it transfers from the self to the environmental other that masochistic impulse to cut, to see the Real.

So what instead? I think irony, spectacle, comedy deployed at self-parodic intensity. More on this next time.