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Writ in Water: Far Tortuga and the Crisis of the Marine Environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Dan Brayton
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Extract

ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAUNTS THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR MENTAL MAPS OF SHRINKING RAINFORESTS MATCHED BY images of melting icecaps and dying polar bear cubs. As the thawing tundra releases an amplifying store of methane, the goal of Bill McKibben's 350.org, to reduce carbon in the earth's atmosphere to 350 parts per million, seems wildly optimistic.1 So, too, does much of the discourse of sustainability. How can humans depend on the biosphere's capacity to regenerate, having already destroyed entire ecosystems and caused countless extinctions and continuing to do so at an accelerating rate? Isn't it already too late? What tends to get lost in the linked discourses of climate change and sustainability is the rising seawater—salt water, the stuff that covers seventy percent of the planet's surface. If the ocean, as Christopher Connery claims, “has long functioned as Western capitalism's primary myth element” (686), then literary scholarship engaged with the discourse of sustainability should reexamine narratives of oceanic catastrophe.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 565 - 571
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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