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American Writers/American Places:
Toward a Poetics and a Practice of Sustainability

The primary task of American citizenship and of American writing, Henry David Thoreau suggested, was to continue to discover America — “to discover the discovery” — not as an affair of conquest, colonization and exploitation of nature but as a humanistic exploration of new possibilities of selfhood and community deeply informed by the profound lessons nature has to teach.

In Walden and other writings, Thoreau identified the principal problem of modernity before modernity had begun — the problem of achieving what we would now call a sustainable balance between the aspirations of culture and the limits of natural resources and the environment. The first and longest chapter of Walden is entitled “Economy.” It is about living within one’s means. Thoreau knew that “sustainability” was not purely a practical matter, that living within one’s means was a figurative as well as a literal challenge, a challenge to the individual as well as to the community, a challenge to the imagination as well as to reason, a challenge to art as well as to science. And, finally, Thoreau knew — like Emerson and Whitman — that understanding the past and understanding the future were the same venture. In fact, the past sustains the future — or the future fails, just as nature sustains culture — or culture fails.

Distinguished American writers
This year’s Humanities Institute program brings to campus three distinguished American writers, each of whom has written eloquently and wisely about American places rooted deeply in American history and nature, and each of whom has a good deal to say about what might make our lives and our culture “sustainable” in the future: Jane Brox, Franklin Burroughs, and Mike Tidwell.

Jane Brox is most closely associated with the disappearing family farms and working-class, mill-town heritage of Massachusett’s Merrimack Valley, country Thoreau knew well. Among our most eloquent memoirists, Brox writes with passion and precision about her family’s entanglement with the land, about the overlapping histories of generations, and about a landscape she loves being besieged by change.

Franklin Burroughs is a native of the South Carolina low country, a descendent of settlers of the Waccamaw River, who became a thoughtful and observant citizen of Bowdoinham, Maine near Merrymeeting Bay, where the Kennebec and the Androscoggin rivers flow richly together. Among other things, Burroughs is interested in “the complicated connections between locations and vocation — the connections between where you come from and what you do.”

Mike Tidwell adopted Louisiana’s Cajun coast and the lower Mississippi delta region, including New Orleans, as a landscape to explore and understand. That quiet, backwater region he came to love for the intricate ways in which the Cajun world was willfully and joyfully “lost” in the past is now — post-Katrina — ground zero for concerns about storm surges and global sea-level rise as well as the sociological and engineering challenges of living with — or against — the forces of nature in coastal regions.

Culture and nature
Each of the Institute’s visiting writers is steeped equally in the American landscape and in American literature and the American future — humanists whose deep alliance with American places and whose love of and understanding of nature has liberated and liberalized their ideas about how we might live — as individuals, families, communities, and as a nation — within our means. From family farms to drowned cities, close reading of poems to close-reading of landscapes, these writers understand the inextricable relationship of culture and nature — the great subject of Walden — and explore the poetics and the practice of sustain-ability in original, exciting and revealing ways.

This year’s Institute hopes to contribute to exciting ongoing work at Bucknell, led in large part by the Bucknell Environmental Center, that is dedicated to creating an interdisciplinary “sustainability curriculum.” Bucknell faculty from many departments are committed to taking innovative looks at how the manifold challenge of “sustainability” can become a classroom resource for faculty and students alike. In turn, Bucknell hopes to graduate students in all fields — from Art History to Engineering, English to Environmental Studies, Accounting to Political Science — who will be uniquely prepared to grapple with sustainability issues in a world of geopolitical turmoil, climate change, and stressed natural resources.

Please join us for these pivotal talks.

Directed by Christopher Camuto, author and assistant professor of English/Creative Writing