Environmental themes in literature and culture

Environmental Themes in Grapes of Wrath

This essay reviews environmental themes from the following five books: Dust Bowl by Donald Worster, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Killing Mr. Watson by Peter Matthiessen, and River of Lakes by Bill Belleville. This paper discusses the role that culture has played in environmental issues during the past century. Five sources used. MLA format.

Environmental Themes

Humans from the very beginning of their existence have had an impact, for better or worse, on the environment. Man has for the most part tried to control the environment to suit his needs or tastes of the era. Over-grazing, over hunting, ignoring the importance crop rotations, dam building, and toxic dumping, are but a few of the ways man tries to control. Few societies have ever considered any of the above when it comes to the environment. There are a few pockets of them in history and even today, but they are indeed few and far between. Organic farming or sustainable agriculture is the closest that most have come to being simpatico with the environment, to truly understanding the cause and effect of their actions. Money seems to be the root of this disregard, not ignorance. The fur and pelt traders of the 1800's knew that there was not some infinite supply of buffalo, that there wasn't some machine producing these animals for eternity. When the buffalo were killed to near extinction, the traders simply moved on to something else, feeling no regard or remorse. Developers are much the same when it comes to the land. Squeezing as much real estate as possible on as much land as possible, and again with no regard for the upset of ecological balance they might be causing. Man's attitude, for the last century in particular, has been one of entitlement to do whatever he chooses. Laws are amended, property and land rezoned, and restrictions overturned. The following works give an important and comprehensive view of man's relationship with the environment and the roles society and culture play in environmental issues.

Killing Mr. Watson by Peter Matthiessen describes through character narratives, life in the Florida Everglades during the mid-1800's to the early 1900's. During those early years, the Everglades were home to desperadoes, misfits, renegades, moonshiners, and a few lost souls looking to retreat from the world (Matthiessen, 1990). There was also a scattering of a few survivors of several Native American Indian tribes, mostly the Mikasuke tribe, who had escaped from being rounded-up and moved west to Oklahoma by the government. Fort Myers was the largest city in the area, filled with cattlemen and bankers. Seldom did law authorities or anyone else for that matter ever venture into the Everglades. It was an inhospitable place to live. Cut off from civilization, it was a world of its own (Matthiessen, 1990).

As one naturalist recounts in Matthiessen's novel, "The Ten Thousand Islands is a region of mystery and loneliness: gloomy, monotonous, weird, and strange, yet possessing a decided fascination. To the casual stranger each and every part of the region looks exactly like the rest; each islet and water passage seems but the counterpart of hundreds of others (Matthiessen, 1990). Even those...familiar with its tortuous channels often get lost...wandering hopeless for days among its labyrinthine ways" (Matthiessen, 1990). Less than a hundred of these islands rose more than one foot above sea level, and of these most of the high ground was too limited to build upon (Matthiessen, 1990).

Plume hunting was a common and popular trade. The area was filled with boobies, turkeys, roseate spoonbills, egrets, white pelicans, and parrots. These birds provided a decent living for most, as the plumes were greatly desired for their beauty by 'civilized' fashion (Matthiessen, 1990). Deer and alligator hides, otter and raccoon pelts, sugar and molasses and beef cattle were popular trade products for markets. There were a few citrus plantations, and others who grew orchards of pear trees, Jamaican apples, sour and sweet oranges, tomatoes, pineapples, coconuts, bananas, and some who grew sugar cane on the flats (Matthiessen, 1990).

By 1887, the railroad had reached just north of Fort Myers. Wealthy northerners were flocking to Florida for fishing big game, such as silver king, Spanish mackerel, kingfish, the snook and redfish that swam through the passes of the barrier islands (Matthiessen, 1990). Over four million acres had been contracted and dredging began that left the land open for settlement, driving the remaining Indians farther southward and leaving the white sand covered with dead mud and slime (Matthiessen, 1990). And by 1909, Fort Myers had electric lights and automobiles filled the streets (Matthiessen, 1990).

Civilization had come south and had made millionaires of many. Matthiessen gives a colorful portrayal of the outlaws, home steaders, plantation owners, cattle barrons, and railroad tycoons who had each participated in their own way to the damage of the Everglades that would leave it changed forever (Matthiessen, 1990). Species were hunted to extinction or pushed farther and farther away from its natural source for shelter and food. In Killing Mr. Watson, the readers gets a first hand feel for the life in this frontier wilderness (Matthiessen, 1990).

Marjory Stoneman Douglas' The Everglades River of Grass has become a classic among nature writing. Written in 1947, when most people thought of the Everglades as a worthless swamp, Douglas brought the world's attention to the need to preserve the Everglades as the unique and magnificent place. Her crusade to save the area was a lifelong passion (Douglas, 1997).

Douglas begins her book by describing poetically the area she was so devoted to for over fifty years. "There are no other Everglades in the world, they are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known" (Douglas, 5). She speaks of the enormous horizon, the sweetness of the winds, and the miracle of the light as it pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and water. She also details the origin of its name, pointing to the oldest English origin of the word 'glade' which comes from the Anglo-Saxon word 'glaed' meaning 'shining' or 'bright' (Douglas, 1997).

Douglas chronicles the Everglades in minute detail from the first records she could trace to the present day. The last chapters of this anniversary edition, which updates the preservation and ecological progress made during the last half century, are the most important. They add significance to the history of the Everglades, which has already been discussed in the previous novel.

In the last chapter of the 1947 book titled "The Eleventh Hour" Douglas warned that time was running out for the Everglades. When Randy Lee Loftis interviewed Douglas in 1987, she warned again that the clock was still ticking in that final hour. Although some progress had been made, there was still much to be done. South Florida, she contends, is probably the worst place on earth to put millions of people (Douglas, 1997). Tainted and overtaxed water supplies, agricultural drainage and pollution, and the never-ending quest to build on the last remaining natural places will only get worse, she says. Although Florida has made progress, the degradation of the environment has become institutionalized. A lake or marsh that is force-fed tons of nutrients will choke on its own growth. "The circles of nature - of biology, of wind and water and rock - are bound up with the affairs of people" (Douglas, 392). Florida's history, even recently, when people know better, can only be characterized by a thousand attempts to deny that reality. And such attempts never succeed, they only buy time. And time is running out (Douglas, 1997).

When people describe natural places such as the mountains, deserts, swamps or forests, they refer to them as fragile. However, natural places and ecosystems are not fragile by any means (Douglas, 1997). The earth has a capacity for compensation and forgiveness, even after repeated abuses. It is what has kept this planet alive. However, it has also encouraged more abuse. The Everglades is a case in point, contends Douglas.

In September and October of 1947, two hurricanes hit within two weeks, leaving crops, pastures and urban real estate under water. These natural events would influence life in South Florida forever (Douglas, 1997). The demand for flood control created one of the most massive and complex public works projects in this nation's history. The Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project apportioned South Florida's land among its competing users (Douglas, 1997). Over 700,000 acres of the northern Everglades was given to agriculture. This area had already been partially drained by the state and private interests. The plan called for the eastern cities to be drained by a system of secondary canals. These canals would also serve to recharge the vital groundwater supplies. The cities would be protected from the Everglades waters by a 100-mile long levee, from the woody swamps of central Palm Beach County to the rocky glades of western Dade County. The Everglades would be confined to one million acres within the levees and the shallow marsh of Everglades National Park (Douglas, 1997).

This federal act called for the control of water levels though a network of pumps and roughly 1,400 miles of canals and levees. "Within the Everglades, the project created five enormous impoundments, the water conservation areas, running through western sections of Palm Beach, Broward and Dad counties, and ending at the northern edge of Everglades National Park" (Douglas, 422). Water would be stored to carry to the cities during winter months, then dumped to make room for the summer hurricane rains. The cost would run well over half a billion dollars. The Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District was created to buy the needed land and operate and maintain the project (Douglas, 1997).

This project represented a fundamental change in the attitude of South Florida towards itself. An era of failure had ended. It was now a time of technological advancement, and the Army engineers with their better knowledge of control and movement of water, would succeed in a massive alteration of the landscape (Douglas, 1997). Now with the flip of a switch, farmers could have flood waters removed or have irrigation water sent to them during dry spells. Even though conservation of natural resources was one of the official aims of the project, these were engineers not biologists, as Douglas points out. They were skilled at moving water, not raising wood storks. One estimate in 1870 gave South Florida 2.5 million wading birds. By 1974, the population had been reduced by 90% (Douglas, 1997).

When the vast colonies of wading birds vanished, exotic plants invaded parched wetlands throughout the ecosystem. Cattails replaced the native sawgrass in marshes now polluted by fertilizers in the northern Everglades. Dangerously high levels of mercury have been discovered in the tissues and eggs of wildlife. Salty water has been pushed inland, contaminating aquifers and killing fresh water wetland plants (Douglas, 1997). Everglades National Park has been fighting for its life, as urban development and diversions of water endangered it and the ten other national parks and refuges throughout the Everglades ecosystem (Douglas, 1997).

In the 1990's something clicked and South Floridians began to heed the warnings that environmentalists had been sounding for decades. They finally began to see that the destruction of the natural resources was affecting their own water supplies, their economy and the lifestyle that drew them to Florida in the first place (Douglas, 1997). Florida Bay was on the verge of death. And this crisis helped push the Everglades' problems to the top of national environmental concerns. It also became a key issue for politicians in campaigns. Although there has been acts of legislation and much progress in the last few years towards saving the Everglades, Douglas maintains it hasn't been enough, and many fear it may simply too little too late (Douglas, 1997).

The wading bird populations have plummeted to less than a fifth of their numbers in the 1930's. There are fewer than fifty Florida panthers in the wild today. There has been serious damage to the estuaries. Fish with abnormal dorsal fins and misaligned scales have been found in several area waters including North Biscayne Bay. Coral reefs are suffering from bleaching, diseases, and a decline in coral cover (Douglas, 1997).

In 1994, the Everglades Forever Act became a state law. It laid out more than fifty restoration projects aimed at cleaning up the water flowing into the Everglades. The first phase calls for the state to buy roughly 44,000 acres of farmland and create six large wetlands to soak up phosphorus before water flows off farms into the Everglades (Douglas, 1997). Moreover, the project would improve the flow of water into the marshes of the conservation areas. The environmentalists quickly took issue with the sugar farmers and formed the Save Our Everglades Committee. After years of battling and debating, there seems to be real progress being made in South Florida, although there is a long road ahead. But there is a cooperation now between federal, state, and environmentalists that hasn't exited before (Douglas, 1997). Marjory Stoneman Douglas is known as the Mother of the Everglades. She died in 1998 at the age of 98. South Florida will forever be indebted to her unwavering defense of these marshes and swamps and her book will remain the bible of the ecosystem of the Everglades (Douglas, 1997).

Another Florida waterway that has gained the attention of environmentalists in the past few years is the St. Johns River, which begins almost unnoticeable in the swamps and savannahs and then flows northward to the Atlantic Ocean, running almost parallel to the coastline (Belleville, 2001). River of Lakes gives an accurate record of Bill Belleville's journey along the St. Johns River. Belleville, an environmental journalist and filmmaker, documented man's impact over thousands of years in artifacts and environmental conditions. He writes with awe and reverence, much in the same way as Douglas wrote about her Everglades (Belleville, 2001).

The St. Johns River has endured much the same destruction by the white man as the Everglades. In the 1800's, the lumber companies cut so much cypress that they put themselves out of business (Belleville, 2001). Habitats were literally erased when developers drained the marshes. This also reduced the volume of sea-bound water. Shell was trucked away to become fill for roadbeds, leaving the shell middens virtually destroyed (Belleville, 2001).

Belleville travels by kayak, houseboat and airboat to explore the life of the St. Johns. His empathy and respect for the area is much akin to that of the Native Americans of that region, And moreover, his poetic descriptions are akin to the Mother of the Everglades. When he observes tiger swallowtails in late spring as they are beginning to emerge from their chrysalis, he writes, "their great lacy yellow wings edged with black, looking like some Rorschach test, colorized and come to life. I sit on the stern, watching one doing its little butterfly dance, gliding from above the ever-closed yellow bud of the spadderdock lily, up into the leaves of the willow and hickory. Later, I will see the muted blue spring azure and then the black swallowtail, pure ebony spotted with white and blue, a distinctive frilly tail dabbling at the bottom of each ink-blotted wing. By fall, monarchs will move down across Florida in their long migration, stopping to rest on twigs and leaf edges, pumping their little wings like arabesque fans from a Victorian parlor" (Belleville, 146).

Belleville gives the reader a first hand view of the wild life he encounters along the way. A few of these include the white egret, which was almost hunted to extinction for its plummage, alligators, white heron and blue cranes, turkeys, bobcats, gray foxes, white tailed deer, fox squirrels, indigo snakes and burrowing owls (Belleville, 2001). When he encounters a small flock of wood storks, he is struck by the primeval appearance of the birds, "atop their snow-white bodies are black, crinkled necks and heads that taper into a beak as pronounced as the peak of a witch's cap" (Belleville, 28). The natives called these birds 'iron heads'. Due to decades of drainage that have disrupted their historic habitat of the Everglades, they have been forced to flee northward into the valley. However, a recent study by the National Audubon Society shows that ongoing marsh restoration in the upper basin seems to be recreating foraging habitat for the wood stork as well as other wading birds (Belleville, 2001).

Belleville explains that the entire lower part of the river is included in the National Estuary program. With, 2,777 square miles, the lower St. Johns is Florida's largest estuary (Belleville, 2001). Saltwater fish and shellfish have historically used this as a nursery for their larvae. It was a place to feed and hide while growing strong. Throughout the book he gives detailed accounts of the ecosystem such as, there are fifty-six species of fireflies in the state of Florida. Home to manatees and alligators, the St. Johns is tidal for 110 miles as it flows to the mouth of Lake George (Belleville, 2001).

Between 1900 and 1972, the historic marshland around the headwaters shrank from thirty miles to barely one mile in width, and the quality of the water suffered tragically. Belleville explains that without the cleansing function of the wetlands to filter the impurities, the entire river began loaded with sediment and agricultural chemicals (Belleville, 2001). Most of the forty-six tributaries that had once seeped over the marshes and wooded swamps were, by the early 1970's, surging ditch-like into the upper river channel from the western ridge (Belleville, 2001). In the early 1980's, the water managers in the St. Johns Basin decided to attempt to balance ecology with farming needs. This included such means as the use of natural reservoirs to filter pollutants and store water. This would also provide habitat for wildlife. "These are precisely the type of benefits a deep natural marsh, if left intact, would have generously given of itself" declares Belleville (Belleville, 26).

To reverse the damage done over the last hundred years, farmland had to be bought and then re-flooded. Yet, some levees were maintained to segregate the newer artificial water management areas next to the groves and row crops from the more natural marsh conservation zones that actually hold the headwaters (Belleville, 2001). "The result is a drainage basin that is a hybrid of nature and human efforts maintains Belleville. "We are at heart, manipulators, gardeners, controllers,... Now, we're trying to ask the question: What's the least we can do" admits Dr. Ed Lowe, chief scientist for the agency in charge of managing the water quality and flow of every vein of the St. Johns River (Belleville, 31).

According to Lowe, some 235 square miles of land has been reclaimed in the upper river. This more than triples the size of the functional drainage basin from what it was in 1972 (Belleville, 2001). "Government canals that once functioned as gutters to empty the marsh water into the adjacent Indian River lagoon on the other side of the terrace are being plugged. By 1976 they had reduced the outflow by 70% of what it once was" (Belleville, 131). Today however, the only fresh water that flows into the Indian River from these canals does so only to ease flooding from severe storms that occur roughly once every twenty-five years. The result is a more actualized marsh and a healthier coastal estuary that is not nearly as diluted by fresh water as it once was (Belleville, 2001).

The Army Corps of Engineers has helped to make this happen by undoing work their predecessors did years ago. This has become one of the largest wetland restoration projects of its kind (Belleville, 2001).

The St. Johns River certainly bears scars of human exploitation, but Belleville proves that much of the St. Johns' beauty and mystery remains. "We seem to care most deeply about rivers when we have invested time and effort actually on them -- "canoeing, fishing, exploring, observing. We have to put in to get back out" contends Belleville (Belleville, 185). In 1998, the St. Johns river joined a select national list of other waterways to become a prestigious 'American Heritage River' (Belleville, 2001).

Dust Bowl by Donald Worster gives a chronicled look of the devastating ten years from 1929 to 1939 when top soil blew like blizzards across the heartland of United States. He also shows how the same society that brought about the Great Depression were responsible for the Dust Bowl and what an ecological perspective can reveal about a society's history and future (Worster, 1979).

The years known as the Dust Bowl were the darkest times of the twentieth century for those in the southern plains, which includes Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas (Worster, 1979). George Borgstrom, a respected authority on world food problems, ranked the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological errors in history. The other two are the deforestation of China's uplands during the years of 3000 B.C. that caused centuries of flooding and erosion, and the destruction of the fertile lands of the Mediterranean by over-grazing livestock (Worster, 1979). However, unlike China and the Mediterranean, the Dust Bowl took only fifty years to create. Worster points out that it cannot be blamed on illiteracy, overpopulation, or social disorder. America simply blazed through this rich continent in a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere (Worster, 1979). Where some environmental catastrophes come from nature or the slow accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty, the Dust Bowl was the outcome of a culture that deliberately set about dominating and exploiting the land for all that it was worth (Worster, 1979).

In 1931, fulvous dirt began blowing from the plains to the East Coast and beyond. This was also the Great Depression, and Worster claims that both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America. In ecological and economic terms, both offered a reason and an opportunity for substantial cultural reform (Worster, 1979). Capitalism, says Worster, has been the decisive factor in this nation's use of nature. Capitalism is a complex economic culture and its mode of production is constantly evolving in particulars that vary from country to country and decade to decade. Worster contends that the ecological values taught by the capitalist ethos are: 1) nature must be seen as capital: tress, wildlife, minerals, water, and the soil are all commodities that can be either be developed or carried as they are to the marketplace; 2) man has a right, even an obligation, to use this capital for constant self-advancement: the highest economic rewards go to those who have done the most to extract from nature all it can yield; 3)the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth: individuals and corporations should be free from the encumbrances on their aggressive use of nature, the self as an economic being is not only all-important but autonomous and irresponsible (Worster, 1979).

The spring and summer of 1930 saw little rainfall over most of the eastern United States, from Maryland and Virginia to Missouri and Arkansas. Crops wilted and ground water supplies shrank, with the rainfall shortage falling to 700 tons a day (Worster, 1979). Seventeen million people were effected, with twelve states setting record lows in precipitation. By 1931 the drought had moved to the Great Plains. Only Vermont and Miane escaped a drought from 1920 to 1936. Over the country as a whole, the 1930's were, according to one Weather Bureau scientist "the worst in the climatological history of the country" (Worster, 13). (With the drought came intense heat. During the summer of 1934, Nebraska reached 118 degrees, Iowa hit 115 degrees, and in Illinois the temperature stayed over 100 degrees for so long that 370 people died. Two years later, Newsweek magazine reported that 4500 people had died of excessive heat Worster, 1979). Water was shipped West by tank-cars and pipelines. And to add to this dismal scene, a grasshopper plague ate what little remained of many farmers' wheat and corn, along with their fence-posts and even the washing on their clotheslines. 1934 alone cost the United States one half the money put into World War 1 and by 1936, farm losses had reached $25 million a day (Worster, 1979).

The dust storms, or black blizzards, blew day after day, year after year for the better part of a decade, rattling against windows and caking one's lips. April 1933 alone saw 179 dust storms (Worster, 1979). The worst of the storms however, began on May 9, 1934, when the brown earth from Montana and Wyoming was sucked up from the ground and was captured by extremely high-level winds. Then it was blown eastward toward the Dakotas, where more dirt was sucked up until by evening 12 million tons of dust fell like snow in Chicago, roughly four pounds for every person. The dust storm moved along at about 100 miles per hour, and by the morning of May 11th, dust had settled from Boston and New York to Atlanta and Savannah (Worster, 1979).

Worster explains that the plains of the United States had always had long cycles of drought and then rainfall. And that against these forces, organic nature had struggled over millions of years, determining by trial and error what would flourish best in this area. Therefore, man did not come to a perfectly stable or finished world when he came to the plains, nothing was fixed or permanent. To withstand the harsh climate, all living things depended on one another for survival. The earliest humans to settle here understood this interdependency and the unpredictability of the region, but the white man did not (Worster, 1979). Even today, so little moisture falls on the southern plains that it is classified as semiarid. Moreover, "the land is not one of steady deficiency that men can count on, as is the true desert, but one of sharp extremes - heat and cold, flood and droughts, cyclones and blizzards" (Worster, 234).

Before white men came, the North American grassland extended from Ohio to the Rockies and beyond in isolated pockets, with the most impressive being the area we now call the Great Plains. On the eastern edge of this region, tall grasses grew such as, big blue-stem, switch grass, and Indian grass, some reaching heights of eight feet or more and roots that extended six feet in the ground (Worster, 1979). Westward of this area grew short grasses such as grama-buffalo grass, wire grass, blue-stem-bunch grass, and sand grass-sand sage (Worster, 1979). Also, there were various other grasses and plant life, such as, the yellow sunflower, butterweed, bee balm and poppymallow to name a few. One estimation is that as many as twenty million bison roamed the plains and at least that many pronghorn antelopes. Other animals living in the plains included camels, kangaroo rats, pocket gophers, mice, prairie dogs, coyotes, wolves, ferrets, skunks, hawks, eagles, white cranes, and the black-tailed jackrabbit capable of jumping in 20-foot leaps (Worster, 1979). Each of these living things depended on the others for survival, whether plant or animal life.