Edited books by Michelle Niemann
Published by the Regents of the University of California, 2019
As part of a climate education effort led by UC San Diego climate scientist V. Ramanathan, this t... more As part of a climate education effort led by UC San Diego climate scientist V. Ramanathan, this textbook explains climate change solutions in a clear and accessible way. The book shows how environmental justice and the environmental humanities are central to confronting climate change. It advocates social movements to push for implementation of the solutions we already have, from policies and market instruments to technologies and ecosystem restoration. This free digital textbook is an open educational resource (OER) published by the Regents of the University of California under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
Abstract: Climate change is an urgent problem. Because it is causing new weather extremes and fatal catastrophes, climate change is better termed climate disruption. Bending the curve to flatten the upward trajectory of pollution emissions responsible for climate disruption is essential in order to protect billions of people from this global threat. Education is a key part of the solution.
This book lays out ten solutions that together can bend the curve of climate warming below dangerous levels. These solutions fall into six categories: science, societal transformation, governance, economics, technology, and ecosystem management. Four themes emerge from the book:
* There is still time to bend the curve. The time to act was yesterday, but if proper actions are taken now, there is still time to avoid disastrous changes. We have to pull on three levers: The carbon lever to achieve zero net emissions of carbon dioxide before 2050; the short-lived climate pollutants lever to drastically reduce concentrations of other major climate pollutants; and the atmospheric carbon extraction lever to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
* Bending the curve will require interdisciplinary solutions. Climate change requires integrating approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, so this textbook—unlike most on climate change solutions—does just that, with chapters written by experts in climate science, social justice, economics, environmental policy, political science, energy technologies, ecology, and religion. Bending the curve also requires preservation and restoration of ecological systems.
* Bending the curve requires a radical shift in attitude. This shift requires change in behavior, change in our attitudes towards each other, and change in our attitude towards nature. Climate justice has to be an integral part of the solution.
* Technology, market mechanisms, and policy need to be a part of the solution. New market mechanisms and other policies are required to spur technological innovations and to scale clean technologies globally.
The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Ch... more The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, is a collection of 45 essays that reflect on and assess the environmental humanities. The volume brings together work by an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars and writers who address the Anthropocene, domestication, posthumanism, multispecies communities, narratives of decline and resilience, environmental history and memory, literature and ecocriticism, and environmental media, technologies, and art. See the table of contents for a look inside.
Journal articles by Michelle Niemann
Modernism/modernity, 2018
In this article, I argue that Lorine Niedecker’s “folk” poems of the 1930s and early 1940s develo... more In this article, I argue that Lorine Niedecker’s “folk” poems of the 1930s and early 1940s develop an “ecopoetics of food” that puns on cultural and natural specificities to critique modern systems of food production. In the midst of contentious food politics, including farmers’ strikes in the early 1930s, New Deal agricultural policies, and Wisconsin’s long history of agrarian reform movements, Niedecker’s “New Goose” poems play not only on what Louis Zukofsky called “historic and contemporary particulars,” but also on the capacities of specific plants. Approaches drawn from critical plant studies, food studies, and the environmental humanities show how Niedecker constructs multilayered linguistic and conceptual puns that depend on detailed knowledge of plants from asparagus to quack-grass and of agro-industrial practices from planting apple orchards to condensing milk.
Niedecker’s “New Goose” poems speak in folk voices not only to highlight the irony of rural hunger but also to criticize the “folk” themselves for failing to develop a coherent rural anti-capitalism. In poems looking back to Wisconsin’s nineteenth-century history, Niedecker traces that failure to U.S. colonization and the dispossession of Native Americans, which radically transformed the landscape. Niedecker’s poems not only suggest a practical food politics, but also develop a poetics in which literary forms emerge from both the self-discipline of the poet in her “condensery” and collaboration with nonhuman agencies. The resulting ecopoetics of food provides a model for environmental ethics and aesthetics.
Victorian Poetry, Sep 2014
Journal of Modern Literature, Sep 2011
This essay analyzes the relationship between organic form in poetry and organicism in ecology thr... more This essay analyzes the relationship between organic form in poetry and organicism in ecology through a reading of Oni Buchanan’s “The Mandrake Vehicles” (2008). Buchanan revises organic form by replacing Romanticism’s single plant with rhizomatic root structures, with implications for the metaphors that drive much ecocritical thought. While traditional nature poetry’s “closed-circle” organicism sees both literature and ecology as ways of recuperating waste, Buchanan’s poems insist that organic growth and poetic composition both thrive through bursts of superfluous energy. Buchanan’s poems suggest that network metaphors and a poetics of excess might redirect the persistent drive toward organicist holism in ecocritical discourse.
Essays and book chapters by Michelle Niemann
Edge Effects, 2020
In this online essay for the digital magazine Edge Effects, I analyze the surprisingly varied pol... more In this online essay for the digital magazine Edge Effects, I analyze the surprisingly varied politics of organic farming, which has been linked with the left in the US since the 1960s.
Drawing on recent histories of the early organic farming movement, I sketch out its associations with right-wing and even fascist groups in the UK in the 1930s and 40s. The politics of organic farming are historically contingent, however; I do not argue that it is “really” right though it "seems" left. Instead, invoking Caroline Levine’s work on the affordances of form, I analyze the formal qualities that have long been central to conceptions of the organic farm—namely, its small scale, holism, aspirations toward self-sufficiency, and provisional closure. These qualities give organic farming a flexibility that has made it amenable to a wide variety of political aims, from nationalist reassertions of tradition to countercultural attempts to remake social and economic forms. The political form of organic farming has also shaped advocates' theories of social change and contributed to turning the movement into a victim of its own success at market-based proliferation.
Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, ed. Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne, University of Iowa Press, 2018
Robert Duncan’s poems and essays are essential to the projectivist ecopoetics developed by Black ... more Robert Duncan’s poems and essays are essential to the projectivist ecopoetics developed by Black Mountain and other New American poets in the 1950s and 60s. Projectivist ecopoetics focus on re-positioning the human in complex, planetary systems and thus put the accent on participation and possibility rather than decline and apocalypse. In their commitment to embodiment and the “felt world” as much as in their linguistic experimentation, projectivist ecopoetics guide today’s ongoing ecopoetic efforts. To the projectivist focus on participation, Duncan contributed playfulness and fictionality, vulnerability, and a syncretic myth-making that embraces science while rejecting rationalism and fatalist despair.
In The Opening of the Field and his essays, Duncan revises Olson’s ecological “objectism” by showing that the poet must be willing to be vulnerable and receptive—qualities Duncan figures as queer, feminized, and Romantic—to enter the “field” of composition as just another object among objects. Duncan theorized vulnerability through his reading of H.D.; in The H.D. Book, Duncan picks up on a H.D.’s image of the shell-fish to imagine how the dialectic of limit and emergence that fosters this “vital weakness” connects matter, life, and poetry. In the essay “Towards an Open Universe,” Duncan writes a syncretic myth of ecopoetic origins that fuses science and religion to imagine poems and embodied human life as part of these planetary—earthly and cosmic—rhythms. As in the poem “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan counters narratives of doom—Freud’s death drive and the thermodynamic concept of entropy in Frost’s “West-Running Brook”—with a vision of poetic participation that is at once cosmic and playful.
The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 2017
In this essay, I examine the rhetorical dynamics of the hubris-humility dyad that has structured ... more In this essay, I examine the rhetorical dynamics of the hubris-humility dyad that has structured much environmentalist thought from Stewart Brand and Wendell Berry's debates about space colonies in the CoEvolution Quarterly in the 1970s to current arguments about conservation in the Anthropocene, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' polemics, the "Ecomodernism Manifesto," and the Dark Mountain Project. I argue that scholars in the environmental humanities should pay attention to the urgency of concepts of hubris and humility, and narratives and practices that reclaim or revise them, despite their inadequacies.
On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture, ed. Hackler, M. B. and Adipurwawidjana, Ari J. , 2009
Etopia, Oct 4, 2008
What does the posthuman have to do with contemporary revisions of organic form in poetry? Do thes... more What does the posthuman have to do with contemporary revisions of organic form in poetry? Do these revisions of organic form have anything to offer to posthumanist theory? Given that literary organicism, in its most familiar Romantic and New Critical forms, evokes holism, aesthetic closure, and the humanizing function of poetry, this pairing seems an unlikely one. Donna Haraway, in the well-known "Cyborg Manifesto" that launched one strand of posthumanism, sees political promise in the cyborg precisely because it escapes the naturalizing logic of organic tropes: "The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature . . . The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust" (Haraway 1991, 51). But can decay figure otherwise than as a reactionary reinscription of origins? I argue that Jed Rasula and Frank Bidart, from two disparate poetic lineages, both use figures of decay-even posthumous decay-to revise literary organicism. Since posthumanism seeks to de-naturalize the category of the human, it can perhaps help us explore to what extent Rasula and Bidart, even though they do not reject organic tropes entirely, call into question humanist claims about the poet as natural genius and poetry as a moral force. Jed Rasula's This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (2002) and Frank Bidart's long poem "The Third Hour of the Night," which appeared in Star Dust (2005), both use the organic processes of composting,
Teaching Documents by Michelle Niemann
Syllabus for a class I taught at UCLA in the fall of 2015. It was a general education course cros... more Syllabus for a class I taught at UCLA in the fall of 2015. It was a general education course cross-listed in English and Environmental Studies.
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Edited books by Michelle Niemann
Abstract: Climate change is an urgent problem. Because it is causing new weather extremes and fatal catastrophes, climate change is better termed climate disruption. Bending the curve to flatten the upward trajectory of pollution emissions responsible for climate disruption is essential in order to protect billions of people from this global threat. Education is a key part of the solution.
This book lays out ten solutions that together can bend the curve of climate warming below dangerous levels. These solutions fall into six categories: science, societal transformation, governance, economics, technology, and ecosystem management. Four themes emerge from the book:
* There is still time to bend the curve. The time to act was yesterday, but if proper actions are taken now, there is still time to avoid disastrous changes. We have to pull on three levers: The carbon lever to achieve zero net emissions of carbon dioxide before 2050; the short-lived climate pollutants lever to drastically reduce concentrations of other major climate pollutants; and the atmospheric carbon extraction lever to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
* Bending the curve will require interdisciplinary solutions. Climate change requires integrating approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, so this textbook—unlike most on climate change solutions—does just that, with chapters written by experts in climate science, social justice, economics, environmental policy, political science, energy technologies, ecology, and religion. Bending the curve also requires preservation and restoration of ecological systems.
* Bending the curve requires a radical shift in attitude. This shift requires change in behavior, change in our attitudes towards each other, and change in our attitude towards nature. Climate justice has to be an integral part of the solution.
* Technology, market mechanisms, and policy need to be a part of the solution. New market mechanisms and other policies are required to spur technological innovations and to scale clean technologies globally.
Journal articles by Michelle Niemann
Niedecker’s “New Goose” poems speak in folk voices not only to highlight the irony of rural hunger but also to criticize the “folk” themselves for failing to develop a coherent rural anti-capitalism. In poems looking back to Wisconsin’s nineteenth-century history, Niedecker traces that failure to U.S. colonization and the dispossession of Native Americans, which radically transformed the landscape. Niedecker’s poems not only suggest a practical food politics, but also develop a poetics in which literary forms emerge from both the self-discipline of the poet in her “condensery” and collaboration with nonhuman agencies. The resulting ecopoetics of food provides a model for environmental ethics and aesthetics.
Essays and book chapters by Michelle Niemann
Drawing on recent histories of the early organic farming movement, I sketch out its associations with right-wing and even fascist groups in the UK in the 1930s and 40s. The politics of organic farming are historically contingent, however; I do not argue that it is “really” right though it "seems" left. Instead, invoking Caroline Levine’s work on the affordances of form, I analyze the formal qualities that have long been central to conceptions of the organic farm—namely, its small scale, holism, aspirations toward self-sufficiency, and provisional closure. These qualities give organic farming a flexibility that has made it amenable to a wide variety of political aims, from nationalist reassertions of tradition to countercultural attempts to remake social and economic forms. The political form of organic farming has also shaped advocates' theories of social change and contributed to turning the movement into a victim of its own success at market-based proliferation.
In The Opening of the Field and his essays, Duncan revises Olson’s ecological “objectism” by showing that the poet must be willing to be vulnerable and receptive—qualities Duncan figures as queer, feminized, and Romantic—to enter the “field” of composition as just another object among objects. Duncan theorized vulnerability through his reading of H.D.; in The H.D. Book, Duncan picks up on a H.D.’s image of the shell-fish to imagine how the dialectic of limit and emergence that fosters this “vital weakness” connects matter, life, and poetry. In the essay “Towards an Open Universe,” Duncan writes a syncretic myth of ecopoetic origins that fuses science and religion to imagine poems and embodied human life as part of these planetary—earthly and cosmic—rhythms. As in the poem “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan counters narratives of doom—Freud’s death drive and the thermodynamic concept of entropy in Frost’s “West-Running Brook”—with a vision of poetic participation that is at once cosmic and playful.
Teaching Documents by Michelle Niemann
Abstract: Climate change is an urgent problem. Because it is causing new weather extremes and fatal catastrophes, climate change is better termed climate disruption. Bending the curve to flatten the upward trajectory of pollution emissions responsible for climate disruption is essential in order to protect billions of people from this global threat. Education is a key part of the solution.
This book lays out ten solutions that together can bend the curve of climate warming below dangerous levels. These solutions fall into six categories: science, societal transformation, governance, economics, technology, and ecosystem management. Four themes emerge from the book:
* There is still time to bend the curve. The time to act was yesterday, but if proper actions are taken now, there is still time to avoid disastrous changes. We have to pull on three levers: The carbon lever to achieve zero net emissions of carbon dioxide before 2050; the short-lived climate pollutants lever to drastically reduce concentrations of other major climate pollutants; and the atmospheric carbon extraction lever to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
* Bending the curve will require interdisciplinary solutions. Climate change requires integrating approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, so this textbook—unlike most on climate change solutions—does just that, with chapters written by experts in climate science, social justice, economics, environmental policy, political science, energy technologies, ecology, and religion. Bending the curve also requires preservation and restoration of ecological systems.
* Bending the curve requires a radical shift in attitude. This shift requires change in behavior, change in our attitudes towards each other, and change in our attitude towards nature. Climate justice has to be an integral part of the solution.
* Technology, market mechanisms, and policy need to be a part of the solution. New market mechanisms and other policies are required to spur technological innovations and to scale clean technologies globally.
Niedecker’s “New Goose” poems speak in folk voices not only to highlight the irony of rural hunger but also to criticize the “folk” themselves for failing to develop a coherent rural anti-capitalism. In poems looking back to Wisconsin’s nineteenth-century history, Niedecker traces that failure to U.S. colonization and the dispossession of Native Americans, which radically transformed the landscape. Niedecker’s poems not only suggest a practical food politics, but also develop a poetics in which literary forms emerge from both the self-discipline of the poet in her “condensery” and collaboration with nonhuman agencies. The resulting ecopoetics of food provides a model for environmental ethics and aesthetics.
Drawing on recent histories of the early organic farming movement, I sketch out its associations with right-wing and even fascist groups in the UK in the 1930s and 40s. The politics of organic farming are historically contingent, however; I do not argue that it is “really” right though it "seems" left. Instead, invoking Caroline Levine’s work on the affordances of form, I analyze the formal qualities that have long been central to conceptions of the organic farm—namely, its small scale, holism, aspirations toward self-sufficiency, and provisional closure. These qualities give organic farming a flexibility that has made it amenable to a wide variety of political aims, from nationalist reassertions of tradition to countercultural attempts to remake social and economic forms. The political form of organic farming has also shaped advocates' theories of social change and contributed to turning the movement into a victim of its own success at market-based proliferation.
In The Opening of the Field and his essays, Duncan revises Olson’s ecological “objectism” by showing that the poet must be willing to be vulnerable and receptive—qualities Duncan figures as queer, feminized, and Romantic—to enter the “field” of composition as just another object among objects. Duncan theorized vulnerability through his reading of H.D.; in The H.D. Book, Duncan picks up on a H.D.’s image of the shell-fish to imagine how the dialectic of limit and emergence that fosters this “vital weakness” connects matter, life, and poetry. In the essay “Towards an Open Universe,” Duncan writes a syncretic myth of ecopoetic origins that fuses science and religion to imagine poems and embodied human life as part of these planetary—earthly and cosmic—rhythms. As in the poem “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan counters narratives of doom—Freud’s death drive and the thermodynamic concept of entropy in Frost’s “West-Running Brook”—with a vision of poetic participation that is at once cosmic and playful.