Abstract
This chapter concludes the book by bringing together central insights on text models and transcultural ecology and the wider theoretical context of cultural ecology as a way of thinking complexity. Providing links between ecology and environmental literary criticism as well as aesthetics conceived more broadly, it suggests that scaling can and should also be understood in the sense of balancing, thus providing another argument for the role and necessity of reading and interpreting fiction in times of climate change.
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Notes
- 1.
Retinity means an understanding of the complex enmeshment of natures and cultures, as well as the physico-material and the ethical. It demands thinking in relations, cognitive and affective reflexion, and anticipatory and participatory thought—elements that in my view are not sufficiently addressed by ever more differentiated grids of competencies, for instance, but, indeed, through the experience of reading fiction.
- 2.
I think that this is true in more than just a figurative sense. It should not escape our attention that sustainability discourses not only revolve around the idea of balance but that they are situated within another, larger discourse of balance: earth climate, Gaia—you name it. In James Lovelock’s formulation, the biosphere acts ‘as a single entity to regulate chemical composition, surface pH and possibly also climate’ (qtd. in Clarke 2017, 70). As to the vertical dimension of the metaphor: we have balance as a central objective of individual eudamonium (captured in modern expressions such as ‘work-life balance’ and so forth) and could possibly describe notions of selfhood as imaginaries of balance (think psychoanalysis, premodern humour theory etc.); we have political checks and balances as well as the cold war logic of balanced ammunition as a guarantee for peaceful equilibrium between nation states; and we certainly have the cybernetic or Gaian notion of planetary agency in terms of ‘a living organism able to regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state’ (Lovelock qtd. in Clarke 2017, 69). For a thorough engagement with balancing and conflict as a central literary trope to describe the human condition, see Gurr 2003 and note that education, too, relies on the same ideal, for example in the demand for ‘balanced teaching’ (Thaler 2010).
- 3.
By stressing the perspectival nature of scaling techniques, I try to emphasise that in no way am I arguing that the individual or the body or, for that matter, global ecological practice are not thoroughly political. This idea is indeed belied by Anthropocene discourse itself as well as, for example, recent material feminist or ecofeminist work. Keeping this in mind, distinguishing between scales still seem indispensable to me as a tool for understanding both narrative and societal frictions because it points to ways of thinking and narrating as well as interpretive restrictions and closures that the Anthropocene calls into question.
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Bartosch, R. (2019). Scaling Transcultural Ecology: Balance on the Edge of Extinction. In: Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33300-3_7
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