Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Louise Chawla, 1994. In the First Country of Places: Nature, Poetry, and Childhood Memory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. |
Reviewed by Christopher Cokinos
Drawing on psychology, literature, phenomenology, philosophy, and feminism, environmental psychologist Louise Chawla argues for a "recollective psychology" that moves away from sterile empiricism to a "new paradigm of productive collaboration between mind and nature," one that "attend[s] to qualities of human experience" (p. 193).
The qualities of adult interaction with childhood memories of place are at the core of Chawla's investigation, which analyzes five contemporary American poets in order to better understand our present alienation from nonhuman nature and how we may move beyond paralyzing mechanistic attitudes.
Increasing academic specialization makes books like Chawla's somewhat rare, though it is clear that multidisciplinary work is critical if we are to grasp the enormous complexities and complicities of our self-induced environmental crisis.
Chawla's book is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the vital task of breaking down false boundaries among fields, as we attempt to renew a more organic relationship with the nonhuman world. Further, this book is a model of what such work should be: accessible, sophisticated, and humane.
Nonetheless, any work that ranges across numerous endeavors and disciplines, will disappoint, at times, one who is perhaps more expert in a certain area. As a poet and critic, I was thrilled, on the one hand, that Chawla uses contemporary poetry as a source for wisdom. On the other hand, I found several of Chawla's close readings of poems somewhat too insistent in their emphasis on ideas about place and memory. The relationship of content to craft--sound, rhythm, and so forth--is rarely an issue.
I also think Chawla may have overrelied on the advice of one writer, Allen Mandelbaum, who directed her to the poetry of several of his friends. This explains the absence of other important poets who would have been fascinating to consider, such as Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, and Philip Booth. Had Chawla's work moved further into the past, she could have fruitfully explored the nature poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a complex figure deeply rooted in place who did not explore his childhood and past in poems until late in his life.
That said, I was often impressed by Chawla's lucid discussions of British Romanticism and William Wordsworth and by her treatments of David Ignatow and Audre Lorde, the most important poets in her study. Her treatments of Marie Ponsot and William Bronk are sometimes fascinating as well.
Chawla's analysis reveals that the women writers have a far greater (and more positive) attachment to childhood memory and nature than do the men. Indeed, psychologists have wondered over "a long-standing puzzle of memory research: in study after study, women have reported more childhood memories than men...they also rated the quality of childhood memories significantly higher than men" (p. 155). Women show no "pattern of disengagement," as men often do, from childhood memory (p. 156).
Chawla's explanation for women's greater sensitivity to memory and place is that women tend to feel stronger bonds to their own childhood because they carry their children--and, often, are most responsible for raising children. Women with role models interested in nature, as both Lorde and Ponsot had, also feel a greater connection to place, environment, and earth. Time and rhythm are also crucial factors.
Despite these assertions (and they are well-reasoned), Chawla does not lapse into an essentialism that excludes men from the possibilities of connection. She is describing contemporary conditions, as she charts paths for understanding a deeper, non-gendered foundation from which we can better understand ourselves and our memories, men and women alike. That foundation is the biosphere.
Here is where the work of Swiss phenomenologist Jean Gebser looms importantly in Chawla's study. Gebser's structures of consciousness, his notion of "a renewal of relationship with nature as process," and his tenet that individuals, at the most fundamental level, live either in "trust" or "anxiety" concerning "our embeddedness in nature" (p. 178), play critical roles in Chawla's project not only to describe a "recollective psychology," but also to link disparate fields into a new "practical wisdom" (p. 192) that can help heal our psyches and the damage done to nonhuman nature. I had not known of Gebser's work prior to reading In the First Country of Places; Chawla's discussion indicates that his The Ever-Present Origin is of singular importance to our crisis in nature.
Chawla's opening two and concluding two chapters are the most challenging and exciting. It is in these chapters that she charts the displacement of an organic relationship to the nonhuman by a hyper-rationalist, mechanistic construct. Her analysis of phenomenology's relevance to the human crisis in nature is powerful.
Specialists in psychology and philosophy may have their own quibbles here, but In the First Country of Places is so humanely argued and so intensely wide-ranging that I would not want the wider importance of this book to be missed: that empiricism should be imbued with a sense of non-doctrinaire spirituality in order to reclaim environmental relevance for a human endeavor (psychology) and that we should renew attention to healthful childhood relationships to place and to nonhuman nature. To do so could invigorate our species' relationship to the earth with sanity, respect, and humility.
This vision may never be realized, of course, given the rapaciousness of our economic activity and the intensity of our (mostly unacknowledged) spiritual disconnection with a wider, transhuman context. Still, for the time we are here, it is crucial and worthwhile to begin the hard work of trying. This valuable and insightful book will help us do so.
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