It may seem that environmentalists have been with us forever, but they were a relatively new breed, or were traveling under a new name, when they enlisted the help of a rare little fish called the snail darter, which demanded free-flowing water for spawning and whose presence at Tellico stymied the mighty TVA.Īt the time, I was an avid hiker and bird-watcher and an English major with a special interest in Romantic nature poetry. The Oxford English Dictionary (1972 supplement) gives 1970 as the earliest instance of the term as used to mean "one who is concerned with the preservation of the environment (from pollution, etc.)" (Killingsworth and Palmer, Ecospeak 41). In fact, TVA had already done substantial work on the dam when the new law was invoked by wildlife biologists working with people we learned to call "environmentalists," a word whose origin dates from my college years. The law posed a problem for the plans of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to dam the Little Tennessee River at a place called Tellico. One of the first big test cases was enacted not far from the University of Tennessee where I went to school. In my junior year, 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed. I started college in 1970, the year we celebrated the first Earth Day, two years after Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act. Thank you, Jackie, for showing me the way. Palmer, who has but little interest in the interpretation of poetry but knows the value of creative living and how it depends upon the influx of earthly energies. I dedicate this work to my wife and frequent coauthor, Jacqueline S. In the notes to the text, I try to acknowledge other debts and to show every chance I get that I mean what I say in the introduction: Every scholarly work proceeds as much from a community as it does from the efforts of a solitary individual. I thank my daughter, Myrth Killingsworth, an ecocritic in her own right, for being my writing companion throughout the process. I thank Larry Mitchell, head of the English department at Texas A&M, Dean Charles Johnson and Associate Deans Larry Oliver and Ben Crouch of the College of Liberal Arts, and James Rosenheim of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for providing crucial support, both moral and monetary. I owe special appreciation to Soojin Ahn, Lynda Ely, Georgina Kennedy, Steve Marsden, Paul McCann, Amy Montz, Dave Pruett, Matt Sherwood, and Lindsay Sloan. My graduate students at Texas A&M provided readings and assistance throughout the project. Sherry Ceniza and the students in her Whitman seminar at Texas Tech also read early chapter drafts and discussed the work with me. Holly Carver of the University of Iowa Press joined Ed Folsom in encouraging me to submit my manuscript, for which I thank her. I lack the words to thank them sufficiently. As for Whitman studies, I have been very lucky in having the attentive guidance of the two leading scholars alive today-the editor of the Whitman Series at Iowa, Ed Folsom, and my dear colleague Whitman biographer Jerome Loving, both of whom read drafts at every stage of the work and gave good suggestions and strong encouragement. An anonymous reviewer at the University of Iowa Press and my own energetic students and colleagues in the study of American nature writing and environmental rhetoric have provided the impetus and good suggestions I needed to apply the new perspective and methods of ecological criticism to Whitman's poetry for the first time in a book-length work. This book seeks a double audience of ecocritics and Whitman scholars, a goal that has required me to draw upon the resources of a wide and generous community.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |