This month, the Oregon Bach Festival book club’s reading project combines two of my special interests: music and nature writing. We’ve been listening to Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Mass for the Endangered,” which the Oregon Bach Festival is going to perform on June 30, and we’ve been reading a book by Oregon author Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World.

Kathleen Dean Moore is one of my favorite nature writers. She’s an environmental philosopher, and since she lives just 40 miles or so north of me, she’s often writing about my own ecosystem. Her writing is simply beautiful.

I consider Moore’s writings to be classic examples of “earnest” environmental literature. Scott Slovic, a world expert on nature writing (and, disclaimer, now my work colleague), has written about the distinction between “earnest” writing, where the author says what they mean directly, and more “ironic” literature, where the point is often made indirectly, often with humor. And then, within “earnest” writing, he’s described two categories very commonly found in environmental literature, the “rhapsody” and the “jeremiad.” A rhapsody draws us in with awe and wonder, the beautiful and the sublime – and then a jeremiad hits us with a looming or ongoing disaster.

In one of his papers, Slovic explained that, especially in the earlier decades of environmental literature, it was important to authors not to scare away their public. They would have to be very careful about the ratio of beauty and doom. Sometimes writers would have their whole book focus on describing the amazing qualities of their topic, with only a few sentences of concern. At other times, like with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she had already created a large audience for her work with two books purely on natural wonders, and then she was able to bring that audience with her for her book on the disasters of profligate pesticide use. (I’ll note that Carson did pepper Silent Spring with moments of sarcasm, which made it all the more readable.)

Now, however, as author Nicole Seymour explains in her book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, people are reacting to decades of such writing. The earnest style has become alienating for many. It’s as if the rhapsodies and jeremiads have created a group of insiders who appreciate them, but also outsiders who don’t particularly care about nature, and to whom these styles look too much like religion.

I have to say, it can be very jarring to read Kathleen Dean Moore after reading Nicole Seymour.

However, in one of the essays we read in the book club for this past week, Moore addresses the question of, “What are we supposed to do? What is there to hope for at the end of this time? Why bother trying to patch up the world while so many others seem intent on wrecking it?”

And it’s useful to remember that in the jeremiads found in the Bible (that’s where we get the name from, the Book of Jeremiah), the prophet was railing about individual sins – worshipping false gods, ignoring the poor and vulnerable, lying, stealing, cheating, murdering – so the responses he wanted individuals to make were obvious. Just quit that! Do the right thing!

With today’s environmental issues, however, it’s not a matter of “don’t litter” and other things we can do as individuals, but rather that we need clean energy sources and products that don’t poison the Earth (and ourselves). In other words, systemic issues. That’s why people feel helpless and have questions like the student asked Moore.

Moore’s response was to think about what she had learned when visiting Mt. St. Helens, the one of our many active local volcanos that exploded big time back in 1980. Today the landscape there has again begun to thrive, in part due to pockets called “refugia,” where little plants and tiny critters were able to survive the explosion, and from which they were ready to spread once the ground was again cool.

Quoting from pages 176-177 in Earth’s Wild Music:

“If destructive forces are building under our lives, then our work in this time and place, I told them, is to create refugia of the imagination. Refugia, places where ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow.”

“Even now, I said, we can create small pockets of flourishing, and we can make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect their life, so that the full measure of possibility can spread and reseed the world. Doesn’t matter what it is, I told my students; if it’s generous to life, imagine it into existence.”

“And that is the answer to hopelessness: to do what you think is right, knowing that your actions will be the wellspring of the new world.”

We can see this in religion, too – people are increasingly alienated from “fire and brimstone” preaching and from the hypocrisy of supporting politicians with *ahem* non-Christian lifestyles. Yet others find that the quiet work of doing good – as in Jesus’s actual teachings – can appeal to people and give them a sense of purpose. I think of Jimmy Carter, building those houses with Habitat for Humanity.

I’ll have to ask Scott Slovic if there’s a name for this relatively new aspect of environmental writing – not the facile “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” but the more thoughtful, “here’s how we can do good and live with ourselves as we wait and hope for the people with more influence over our systems to get their act together, so we can understand how to move forward.” I’m glad Moore has made a start.

Links of interest:

The Oregon Bach Festival book club – it’s free! it’s online!

My previous post about the Oregon Bach Festival Book Club: Mindset and “genius” – life lessons from the Schumanns

Photo source: Cropped from here, showing the recovery of Mt. St. Helens, by “Veggies”