Gordon Lightfoot: The Voice of Co-presence

Some voices resonate with you from the first moment you hear them. For example, I still have extremely clear and vivid memories of singing along to Gordon Lightfoot's "Ode to Big Blue" as a child.

However, to me, Lightfoot and his music represent more than simply happy memories from childhood. I think "Ode to Big Blue" touched a tuning fork that had already been developing in me, and in doing so, it left a reverberating effect that's lasted to the present day. Although the song is not one of his most well-known works, it shares with essential Lightfoot hits like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzergerald,""Ghosts of Cape Horn," and "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" themes about human respect for and co-presence with the non-human parts of our environment. 

I would even argue that Lightfoot used his music to contemplate his place in the environment. Songs like "Triangle," "River of Light," "The House You Live In," and "Too Many Clues in This Room," while expanding out to address societal and existential questions, maintain a rooting in environmental elements. It's as if, like many artists, including William Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Hardy, and Willa Cather, Lightfoot needed environmental elements to help him process and articulate his ideas. If that was the case, I can certainly relate, and it helps explain why his music spoke to me in such a powerful way.

It wasn't just that Lightfoot sang about the environment though. The way he sang about it also struck a chord with me (probably before I even fully understood why). As a child, I knew I liked "Ode to Big Blue" because it was about whales, which were among my most favorite animals. What I discovered later was that Lightfoot's music emphasized the connectedness and co-presence of humans and non-humans in the environment. In his songs, human action is inextricably tied to environmental causes and effects. If the "lifeblood" of the Canadian wilderness supplied the means for that country's economic development in "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," then the avaricious whaling depicted in "Ode to Big Blue" demonstrated the impacts that such economic development has on the environment in turn. The emphasis on these connections challenges the typical Western understanding of humans being separate from nature. 

Just as importantly, Lightfoot never sugarcoated the connection between the human and the non-human, producing a sense that while often beneficial to humans, the environment demands respect. The personification of Big Blue demonstrates Lightfoot's sense that a whale exists on equal standing with a person. Meanwhile, the power of the natural world and its ability to wipe away human life in an instant runs through "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," "Triangle," and "Ghosts of Cape Horn," leaving a jarring lesson about taking the environment for granted. In some ways, this point of emphasis might reinforce the traditional Western understanding of nature as something to fear. Yet because Lightfoot also sings about co-presence and connection with the non-human, even the scarier non-human elements garner more respect than fear in his songs. If we are part of the larger environment, we must recognize the threats it can pose, but that doesn't mean we have to wage war on it as an adversary.

As it turned out, in my adulthood, my work as a scholar of environmental communication would explore many of the same themes Lightfoot's music did. I learned that he and I shared a worldview, and I gained an even greater appreciation for what he was saying in "Ode to Big Blue." In fact, an unmistakeable line of thought runs from the first time I heard that song to how I perceive and act within our environment today. 

Gordon Lightfoot died on May 1. I am very sad the world lost him, but I expect that his music and his voice will continue to influence the way we think about and interact with the non-human environment for a long time.

Goodbye, Gordon. Thank you for singing my song!

A Radical Book

For those interested in communication about the environment, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World by Jonathan Bate is pure poetry.

When I first read William Wordsworth's poetry as an English major in college, it clicked with me. I understood what he was saying, and beyond that, I recognized a perspective on the world that meshed with mine. My mind couldn't help but attach green colors to his words and images. As a result, when I found out about Bate's biography of the poet, I bought it instantly.

Along with focusing on Wordsworth's most revolutionary work, the book revisits earlier definitions of the word radical to expand our sense of the poet's impact. In particular, the definition of "implanted by nature" contains great importance for students of environmental communication. The biography certainly gives a sense that much of Wordsworth's power as a poet sprang from his feelings of connection with the environment.

Bate makes clear that among the other radical tendencies and sentiments exhibited and expressed by Wordsworth in his early poems, the way in which the poet depicted the environment became his most revolutionary and lasting effect on the world. Wordsworth didn't just challenge dominant understandings of our relationship with the environment, questioning portrayals that granted people power over nature or separated them from it entirely; he prompted us to see connections to all aspects of the environment, no matter how small or obscure. In Bate's estimation, the poetry set the groundwork for movements that promote animal rights and conservation, including the creation of national parks.

By tracing today's language about the environment back to Wordsworth and through the people he influenced such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir, Bate lends great support to his contentions about Wordsworth's importance to the modern environmental movement. He goes so far as to argue that national parks, which have long been called "America's best idea," were actually Wordsworth's idea, and the case Bate builds for this claim is compelling.

I would argue that Bate could have gone even further in establishing Wordsworth's impact on environmental communication. More than simply generating the language to advocate for national parks as basic conservation, Wordsworth preceded the later discussion of national parks as places of ecological importance, which has only gained momentum in recent decades. In addressing the role of every single part of the environment, including the elements we don't typically think of as grand, charismatic, or influential, Wordsworth pushed us to think on a larger scale, and his pen strokes can probably be seen in things like the studies showing wolves' impacts on stream bank erosion in Yellowstone National Park.

Bate might also have extended the discussion of Wordsworth's radical repercussions by examining the poet's influence on Emily Brontë. Scholars such as Stevie Davies and particularly Edward Chitham have shown how Brontë read heavily from Wordsworth's works and often took up his themes. In analyzing the epitaph Wordsworth wrote for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's son Berkeley, Bate looks at language that echoes in Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Describing someone in a grave, Wordsworth writes, "No motion has she now, no force / She neither hears nor sees / Roll'd round in Earth's diurnal course / With rocks, & stones, and trees!" The imagery brings to mind Brontë's depiction of Catherine Earnshaw in her grave, and the words are strikingly similar to those used by Catherine when she compares her love for Heathcliff to "the eternal rocks beneath." Given the argument I made last year about Brontë using imagination to turn the grave imagery into a transformative experience of the connection between people and their environment, I have to conclude that Wordsworth's poetry planted some seeds for such ideas from a woman who arguably surpassed him in radicalness.

Even though I wish Bate would have taken up the points about Brontë and the ecological aspects of the national parks, his biography of Wordsworth is very good, and anyone interested in the environment should check it out. To borrow some popular 1980s language, it's radical!

Emily Brontë and a Reimagining of the Human-Nature Relationship

Emily Brontë

In How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition, Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke argue that Romanticism never achieved the transformative understanding of the environment it sought. I contend that Emily Brontë, borrowing from but augmenting Romantic concepts, did generate such an understanding, establishing ideas that can help us today.

Haila and Dyke say that Romanticism “viewed nature as a benign whole offering inspiration and advice to those humans who are open-minded enough to listen.” They go on to explain that the Romantic approach was intended as a counter to the growing emphasis placed on the supremacy of science and rationalism at the time. In their view, the problem for Romanticism originated in its failure “to get liberated from” a basic belief in the “laws of nature,” which were scientific constructs that people began to apply dogmatically to anything, including social phenomena. As Haila and Dyke correctly argue, the “laws of nature” might be fine for explaining things like gravity, but they are constraining as ways of understanding things that involve social construction like our notions of the environment.

When it comes to figuring out how to throw off constraints, particularly as they relate to the environment, looking to someone like Emily Brontë makes sense. I won’t presume to say what Brontë’s personal relationship with nature was. We know she had affinities for animals and walking her moors, but she was notoriously private and independent and never suffered others speaking for her. On the other hand, she grew into a fierce challenger of orthodox thought, and based on her writings, it is possible to examine how she thought about the world and use her way of thinking to further our understanding of our connection to the environment. An underrated philosopher of brilliant intellect, she could conceptualize complex ideas like the environment, and her exceptional abilities as a storyteller and poet allowed her to communicate those concepts effectively and with great impact.

Brontë also seems to have made pushing the boundaries of Romanticism a focus. Biographers and writers like Lucasta Miller, Robert K. Wallace, Margaret Homans, and Helen Brown have demonstrated the influence Romantic artists like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Beethoven had on Brontë. What is more, both Miller and Wallace note her tendency to expand on and go beyond Romantic principles. For example, Wallace talks about how she and Beethoven apply classical equilibrium to Romantic expression, creating the transcendency of Romantic equilibrium. Miller gives added weight to the contention that Brontë was a transformer of Romanticism, writing that Emily’s “poetry constantly questions and reformulates the Romantic model by which the imagination is able to ‘lift the veil’ of the phenomenal world.”

That Brontë expanded the possibilities of Romanticism does not necessarily mean she spoke to the human ecological condition Haila and Dyke talk about, but as it turns out, she anticipated them by more than 150 years. A central theme in How Nature Speaks insists that the environment is everything, including humans and whatever they produce. What humans think and do represent chosen responses to the possibilities and limitations imposed by environmental factors. Therefore, humans don’t really create anything; they might collaborate with the environment to transform their surrounds, but there is nothing that is purely human and separate from that environment.

Just as Haila and Dyke and the contributing writers in How Nature Speaks seek to obliterate the distinction between the human and the environment, Brontë explored the erasure of boundaries between individuals. The key to this, as Miller points out, was her use of imagination. Imagination was an important idea for many Romantic artists, but Brontë’s approach to it contains special relevance to Haila and Dyke’s human ecological condition. As Miller writes, “For her, the imagination and the self are altogether more protean and disruptive of the order of things than they are for” Emily’s sister and fellow author Charlotte Brontë, who also had links to Romanticism. To illustrate this, Miller tells of how Emily reported playing with Anne Brontë, the third famous Brontë sister. Emily and Anne had created stories of the imaginary land of Gondal, and on a train ride, the sisters played as though they were in that world. When she recorded it in her diary, Emily explicitly said, “we were” the characters, not that the sisters had pretended to be them. Miller argues that this anecdote shows that for Emily, “the imagination represented freedom from the confines of individual subjectivity as much as it represented liberty from external constraint.” Such a form of imagination strongly resembles the phenomenological notion of “experiencing the other.” In fact, Miller also says that Emily’s imagination seems to have been derived not from a sense of self but from a “sense of not-self.” Described like this, Emily Brontë’s imagination involves not just experiencing life as something else but being something else.

Importantly for Haila and Dyke’s understanding of the environment, Brontë’s use of imagination erased boundaries between people and surroundings as readily as it blurred the distinctions between individuals, and her Wuthering Heights, demonstrates this. In their critique of Romanticism, Haila and Dyke highlight the Romantic belief that nature provides “inspiration and advice” to people. This view of nature has drawbacks for anyone looking to transform the human-nature relationship. First, even though it promises a connection with the environment, it maintains a distinction between what is human and what is nature. Second, as Haila and Dyke point out, the offerings of inspiration and advice serve the same kind of function as science’s “laws of nature” just in a repackaged, more “benign” form. The inspiration is a product given to humans by nature. No co-creation takes places. However, Brontë’s version of imagination provides an important counterpart to inspiration. If, for her, imagination allows someone to be someone else or something else, no clear distinction exists between the ideas of one entity and those of another entity. Consequently, the act of creation (or more accurately, reforming) that comes with Brontë’s approach to imagination is a mutual effort. Our experience of our surroundings can inspire us, but our imagining of them makes the ownership of the inspiration (and anything produced or reformed by it) unknowable and irrelevant.

In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff embodies the power of imagination. His vision for what he wants to happen is a driving force behind the narrative, and its aim is the merging of his body and self with those of Catherine Earnshaw, who also expresses Brontë’s sense of “not-self” when she says, “I am Heathcliff.” Heathcliff’s single-minded determination to achieve his goal is his inspiration, a response to his surroundings that guides all his actions. His imagining of it is so powerful at times that he completely loses track of himself and his surroundings, staring off and melting into otherness, and eventually, it ends him, causing him to stop eating and die. It is necessary to emphasize that Heathcliff’s plan for his reunion with Catherine ultimately plays out in the earthy setting of the grave. He is buried next to Catherine, who has preceded him in death, and as he has planned, the adjacent sides of their respective coffins are removed. Both individuals will decompose into the soil as they fade into each other, erasing all distinctions of self, human, and environment; it’s all one. In Brontë’s brand of Romanticism then, we find a dynamic representation of human-nature existence.

The environmental consequences of human activity will increasingly demand our attention and reshape our relationship with our surroundings. However, the difficulty in making sense of those consequences comes with the struggle of finding working conceptualizations of the human ecological condition. Perhaps science and typical Romanticism fall short in providing those conceptualizations, but Emily Brontë’s use of imagination to know the “not-self” provides a valuable tool for improving our understanding of human-nature existence. It yields clues for reimagining our current approach to arranging our surroundings, pointing us toward alternatives that are more mutually beneficial to us and the rest of the environment.