| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 11:50AM | | | | Green thoughts | Posted By: Luke Epplin
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On my way to the PEN World Voices festival last night, I stopped off at a Ray’s Pizzeria for a chicken roll, thinking that I had plenty of time to spare. It was a pleasant night in New York City, a bit cooler than last weekend, but warm enough for people to walk around coatless, some in shorts and tank-tops, eager for spring to finally begin after an unseasonably cold April. When I strolled across to Cooper Union, where the event Green Thoughts: Writers on the Environment was going to take place, I was shocked to find a line that snaked around the block, at least 200 people deep thirty minutes before the start. As an editor who has attended his fair share of underpopulated readings at Barnes & Noble, I was momentarily encouraged that so many people would show up to hear international writers talk about environmental concerns. Who says that literature is dead?
Salman Rushdie kick-started the event, explaining why the PEN festival continues to be important for the city. When he helped to start the festival three years ago, he felt that the United States was at a moment when it had ceased talking constructively to the rest of the world; so he conceived of the festival as a way to engage with the world culturally. For me, it’s also a great way to discover new voices; scanning the list of participants for the reading, I was embarrassed to find that I didn’t recognize two names: Geert Mak from The Netherlands and Janne Teller from Denmark. But there’s the beauty: I feel like I’ve now been introduced to them. Geert Mak, the first reader, reminded the audience that his native country, The Netherlands, lies mostly below sea level, so he fears the effects of global warming and environmental destruction more acutely than many others perhaps would. It was the warmest winter on record in The Netherlands, and he mused about the early blossoming of his garden and the bloom of the flowers in the parks. It seemed almost positive, until he paused and said, “Landscapes aren’t eternal anymore. It’s hard to grasp this.” Roxana Robinson struck an equally melancholic tone, but reminded us that writers have always been concerned about environmental change. She read a passage from a Chekhov short story that bemoaned industrialization and the deforestation that was occurring rapidly in Russia at the end of the 19th century, how the sights and sounds of the forest were being replaced by the churnings of factories. It was an important reminder that concern for the environment has been ongoing for centuries, even if it seems particularly dire, almost apocalyptic, right now. Speaking of apocalyptic, Colson Whitehead, perhaps the most energetic speaker of the night, said that he was going to read a passage from “the most overlooked novel of the year,” Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I had read The Road several months ago, while I was at my parent’s home in southern Illinois; I was attending the funeral of a family member, and the novel’s grief and deep feeling between the father and the son really spoke to me, though I had never thought of it as a particularly environmental novel. But Whitehead’s reading reminded me that it is, above all, about the destruction of the environment by humans. In the novel, all animals and plants have been destroyed, presumably from nuclear warfare, and while McCarthy doesn’t hammer home this point, the fault rests solely with humans. The scene that Whitehead read dealt with the father and the son, who are trekking across a barren America, finding an unopened bottle of Coke in an abandoned supermarket. The son has never tried a Coca-Cola, so the taste of it is foreign (and pleasing) to him. Imagine tasting a soda for the first time. But then it dawns on the reader that the son has also never known nature, has never seen a blooming flower, or petted a dog, or watched a fish swim by—and probably never will. It’s a very affecting scene, and the reading made me consider the novel in a new light. I was generally pleased with the event, though I felt that there were too many participants and not enough time for them to speak. Some participants simply read a passage and sat down, without explaining why they found it significant or relevant to the discussion. The best ones, such as Marilynne Robinson, talked about their personal connection to the environment, and how we are behaving as if we believe that our actions will have no consequences for the environment. She received a deservedly large ovation. | | | |
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